The Scary Outlook for 2014

Did the recent terrorist bombings in Volgograd (former Stalingrad) result in a Russian threat to strike at Saudi Arabia if the Winter Olympics in Sochi are attacked?

Consider the following sequence:

1. Last summer, Saudi Security chief Bandar bin Sultan meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek Moscow’s support in Syria and offers, in return, to guarantee the Sochi Winter Olympics against terrorist attacks from “Islamists” in Dagestan. “We control them,” Bandar is reported to have told Putin. The threat only infuriates the Russian President, who proceeds after the meeting to make a deal with Washington that focuses on ridding Syria of chemical weapons. The Sunni-majority country’s Sh’iah president stays in place, foiling Saudi plans.
2. On 29 and 30 December 2013, there are terrorist bombings in Volgograd (former Stalingrad), some 700 kms from Sochi, where the Winter Olympics are set to begin on 7 February. The attacks are widely seen as an indication that the Games will be targeted.
3. On 5 January, US Secretary of State John Kerry travels to Riyadh for a three-hour meeting at “very short notice” with King Abdullah.
4. The next day, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal arrives in Pakistan on what Islamabad is at pains to emphasize is a visit long in the planning to discuss the entire range of bilateral and international issues. However, these protestations underline the opposite, that the visit, the first of any high-level Saudi since the election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in June 2012, is in response to sudden, urgent developments.

If we connect the dots, it is hard to avoid the probability – perhaps even the certainty – that Moscow has put Washington on notice it will strike at Saudi Arabia if the Sochi Games are attacked. With Kerry’s trip to Riyadh and Saud’s visit to Islamabad, we can take it the message has been transmitted to the entire terror network.

Whether this will have the desired effect is a matter that should give us all sleepless nights, for war in Asia is just what is needed to pull Europe out of its continuing economic crisis and rescue Britain from its flood of high-rolling black market “investors.”

If the Sochi Games do come under attack and Russia proceeds to take apart the Saudi regime, the entire Middle East will be on the skids, with global repercussions.

We might see Turkey reassert control of the holy places of Islam, which it lost when Britain outflanked and destroyed the Ottoman Empire in the series of manipulations that culminated in World War I.

We might see Saudi Arabia reduced to “an oil company with a flag” status of other sheikdoms of the Gulf.

Depending on how the Sunni-Sh’iah war plays out in the Gulf, we might see a collapse of authority in several countries, affecting a key regional market that has buoyed Chinese exports in a season of faltering growth. 

If the Chinese economy deflates – as it is on the verge of doing anyway – it would send shock-waves radiating to the South-East Asian and Indian economies.

There might be wrenching changes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan equation as both countries are destabilized and Britain seeks a replacement for the ISI to manage terrorist groups running the $60 billion opium-heroin trade.

India, in an election season that seems likely to result in a hung parliament, will seem ripe for the plucking to Brit-Pak adventurers.

Overall, this scary scenario of multiple interlinked instabilities is a 21st Century version of the one that precipitated World War I exactly a hundred years ago.

Kerry Mocks Churchill, Marking New Reality

As artful speeches go, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks at the unveiling of Winston Churchill’s bust in the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall was not as eloquent as “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!”

Where Shakespeare’s Mark Antony turned his audience into an angry mob that drove the Conspirators from Rome, Kerry merely signaled to his international audience the effective end of a British conspiracy that had hobbled Washington for over six decades.

Anyone unfamiliar with that history could easily mistake the speech for one of familial transatlantic bonhomie; but to the finely tuned political antenna of the audience present, Kerry’s message was as clear as if he had whipped out his schlong and peed all over Churchill’s newly installed bust.

“This man was an original in every respect,” Kerry said of Churchill. “When he was invited to the White House to stay for a week, he stayed for months. He felt free to use President Roosevelt’s bathtub, but no need to wear his bathrobe or any bathrobe when he was done. He really wrote the book on marching to the tune of your own beat, your own drummer.” (This probably happened during Harry Truman's term in office, when Churchill was not in power in Britain. This is the first reference I have seen to such an extended stay by Churchill in Washington, and its implications are stunning. If he did indeed usurp the functions of the presidency after the outbreak of the Cold War, that would explain why he is the only foreigner ever to be made an "honorary citizen.")

“Leadership in times of crisis – that was Winston Churchill, a call to a great cause – among all things, above all things, parochial.” (Wait, did that mean Churchill was above all things parochial? Indeed, he was parochial, in a High Noon of Empire "God must be an Englishman" kind of way.)

His “defining characteristic was, of course, the courage to lead so many through so much.”(That unfinished construct can be completed by victims of British imperialism in any number of uncomplimentary ways. Through so much ... racist savagery/unnecessary conflict/misogyny/etc.)

From his subterranean war office, Churchill “presided over Great Britain’s finest hour … a man who understood the nightly bombing raids and summoned in fresh words … repeated and remembered by so many – to never, never, never give up.”  (He "understood" the bombing! Kerry is honing in on Churchill's bloated reputation for political perspicacity; the next sentence underlines what a mess Churchill actually made of almost everything he touched.)

He “didn’t just commend those words to others; he lived them himself. … When demoted for his role in Gallipoli in World War I, he picked himself up, taking a new leadership role on the Western Front. … when he was defeated as Prime Minister, knocked down with his party in a crushing political defeat … he managed to dust himself off and wait for history to call again.” (Churchill was a loser, man. If the US hadn't intervened he would have lost WW II as well. )

It was “fitting that in the shadows of World War II, and in the dawn of the Cold War, when some at home hoped the United States would turn inward, Churchill … spoke of America’s awe-inspiring accountability to the future. With so many challenges … struggles to be won, pandemics to be defeated, history yet to be defined, Churchill can be heard once again, with this bust, asking all of us to define our time here not in shutdowns or showdowns but in a manner befitting of a country that still stands, as he said then, at the pinnacle of power.” (Yeah, we’re still #1, and no thanks to the Brit-Tea Party effort to force a default and destroy the US$ as the world's reserve currency!)

“Cynics” might consider it an improbable aspiration for America to help “meet the world’s challenges,” Kerry said. But “what could have seemed more improbable” than that in “Statuary Hall, a building British troops tried to burn down,” there would be the bust of a one-time “Secretary of State for the Colonies … alongside the statue of Samuel Adams, the founder of the Sons of Liberty?”

If that isn’t a battle-cry for the 2014 Congressional elections, I don’t know what is.