Important information tables on Iranian OIL (why mess with nuclear energy?)

Oil
Iran is OPEC’s second-largest oil producer and the fourth-largest crude oil exporter in the world.	According to Oil and Gas Journal, Iran has 136 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, or roughly 10 percent of the world's total proven petroleum reserves as of January 1, 2007. Iran has 40 producing fields, 27 onshore and 13 offshore, with the majority of crude oil reserves located in the southwestern Khuzestan region near the Iraqi border. Iran's crude oil is generally medium in sulfur content and in the 28°-35° API range. Iran is OPEC’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia. In 2006, Iran produced an estimated 4.2 million barrels per day (bbl/d) of total liquids, of which 3.8 million bbl/d was crude oil, equal to 5 percent of global production. Iran’s oil consumption totaled 1.6 million bbl/d in 2006. The Iranian government heavily subsidizes the price of refined oil products which has contributed to increased domestic demand. Iran has limited refinery capacity to produce light fuels, and imports much of its gasoline supply. Iranian domestic oil demand is mainly for gasoline and automotive gasoils, but domestic demand for other oil products are declining due to the substitution of natural gas. However, it is an overall net petroleum products exporter due to large exports of residual fuel oil. Oil export revenues represent the majority of Iran’s total exports earnings, but the country suffers from budget deficits due to a growing population and large government subsidies on gasoline and food products. In 2005, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated that energy subsidies accounted for 12 percent of Iran’s GDP, the highest rate in the world according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) study. Iran produced 6 million bbl/d of crude oil in 1974, but has been unable to produce at that level since the 1979 revolution due to a combination of war, limited investment, sanctions, and a high rate of natural decline in Iran’s mature oil fields. Iran’s oil fields need structural upgrades including enhanced oil recovery (EOR) efforts such as natural gas injection. Iran’s fields have a natural annual decline rate estimated at 8 percent onshore and 10 percent offshore, while current Iranian recovery rates are 24-27 percent, 10 percent less than the world average. It is estimated that 400,000-500,000 bbl/d of crude production is lost annually due to reservoir damage and decreases in existing oil deposits. Upstream Projects The Azadegan project phases I and II represent the greatest potential increase in Iranian crude oil production. Azadegan contains 26 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves, but is geologically complex and difficult to extract. Iran and Venezuela have agreed on a $4 billion investment in the Ayacucho 7 block, where there are an estimated 31 billion barrels of oil. Iran’s Northern Drilling Company (NDC) has also worked with Russia’s Lukoil on oil field development in the Caspian Sea. (See Caspian Sea Analysis Brief) Iran plans to increase oil production to over 5 million bbl/d by 2010, but it will need foreign help. According to Global Insight, an estimated $25-35 billion is required to meet the government’s 5.8 million bbl/d target by 2015. Investment in Iran’s energy sector has been tempered due to the election of the conservative government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, the international controversy surrounding the Iranian uranium enrichment and nuclear program, and economic sanctions. According to the IEA 2007 Medium-Term Oil Market Report, Iran will not be able to increase its net expansion capacity through 2012. U.S. Sanctions U.S. sanctions against Iran due to Iran’s historic support for international terrorism and its actions against non-belligerent shipping in the Persian Gulf impact the development of its petroleum sector. According to the Iran Transactions Regulations, administered by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), U.S. persons may not directly or indirectly trade, finance, or facilitate any goods, services or technology going to or from Iran, including goods, services or technology that would benefit the Iranian oil industry. U.S. persons are also prohibited from entering into or approving any contract that includes the supervision, management or financing of the development of petroleum resources located in Iran. Sector Organization The state-owned National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) is responsible for oil and gas production and exploration. The National Iranian South Oil Company (NISOC), a subsidiary of NIOC, accounts for 80 percent of local oil production covering the provinces of Khuzestan, Bushehr, Fars, and Kohkiluyeh va Boyer Ahamd. Though private ownership of upstream functions is prohibited under the Iranian constitution, the government has allowed for buyback contracts which allow international oil companies (IOCs) to enter exploration and development through an Iranian affiliate. The contractor receives a remuneration fee, usually an entitlement to oil or gas from the developed operation. In August 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed NIOC executive Gholamhossein Nozari to serve as Acting Oil Minister, replacing Vaziri Hamaneh and creating controversy over President Ahmadinejad’s role in the energy sector. Exports According to International Energy Agency’s Monthly Oil Data Service and Global Trade Atlas, Iran’s net crude and product exports in 2006 averaged 2.5 million bbl/d, primarily to Japan, China, India, South Korea, Italy, and other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, making it the fourth-largest exporter of crude oil in the world. In 2006, Iran’s oil export revenues amounted to $54 billion. Export Terminals Iran has the largest oil tanker fleet in the Middle East, the National Iranian Tanker Company, which holds 29 ships including Very Large Crude Carriers. Kharg Island is the country’s largest terminal with a holding capacity of 16 million barrels of oil and a loading capacity of 5 million bbl/d, followed by Lavan Island with capacity to store 5 million barrels and loading capacity of 200,000 bbl/d. Other important terminals include Kish Island, Abadan and Bandar Mahshar, and Neka, which helps facilitate imports from the Caspian region. The Strait of Hormuz, on the southeastern coast of Iran, is an important route for oil exports from Iran and other Persian Gulf countries. (See Persian Gulf Analysis Brief) At its narrowest point the Strait of Hormuz is 34 miles wide, yet an estimated 17 million barrels, or roughly two-fifths of all seaborne traded oil, flows through the Strait daily. Iranian Heavy Crude Oil is Iran’s largest crude export at 1.6 million bbl/d followed by Iranian Light at 1 million bbl/d. Refining Iran’s total refinery capacity is 1.5 million bbl/d from nine refineries operated by the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company (NIORDC), a NIOC subsidiary. Iranian refineries are unable to keep pace with domestic demand, and face major infrastructure problems. The country plans to add around 985,000 bbl/d of refining capacity by 2012, mostly through expansions and upgrades for gasoline yields at the Bandar Abbas, Bushehr, and the 90-year-old Abadan refineries. Large expansion projects at Bandar Abbas, including new catalytic reformers, distillation units, and condensate splitters will help supply the domestic demand, but it will probably not eliminate all gasoline imports. Iran has also discussed joint ventures in Asia, including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore to expand refining activity. Pipelines Iran has an expansive domestic oil network including 5 pipelines, and multiple international pipeline projects under consideration. Recently, an expansion of the 150 mile pipeline from the port of Neka on the Caspian coast to Rey, Tabriz, and Tehran refineries has reached a capacity of 300,000 bbl/d according to Global Insight. Iran has invested in its import capacity at the Caspian port to handle increased product shipments from Russia and Azerbaijan, and enable crude swaps with Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. In the case of crude swaps, the oil from the Caspian is consumed domestically in Iran, and an equivalent amount of oil is produced for export through the Persian Gulf with a Swiss-trading arm of NIOC for a swap fee.
In 2006, Iran imported over 192,000 bbl/d of gasoline and relied upon imports to meet almost half of its fuel needs costing $5 billion.	Gasoline Iran is the second biggest gasoline importer in the world after the United States, consuming over 400,000 bbl/d. According to FACTS Global Energy, Iran imported over 192,000 bbl/d of gasoline in 2006 costing $5 billion. The gasoline consumption growth rate has averaged ten percent annually over the past six years, and the cost of imports is expected to reach $6 billion in 2007, up from $2.8 billion in 2005. Gasoline prices are heavily subsidized, and sold below the market price at around 42 cents per gallon, which has encouraged increased consumption. An increase in vehicle sales in recent years has also contributed to the problem. According to PFC Energy, car ownership in Iran grew 250 percent between 1990 and 2006, and a majority of these vehicles are older models. Gasoline powered vehicles in Iran are expected to reach 14.9 million by the end of 2007. Iran does not have sufficient refining capacity to meets its domestic gasoline and other light fuel needs. Therefore Iran imports gasoline from India, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, the Netherlands, France, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran also imports from large, multinational wholesalers such as BP, Shell, Total, Vitol, LUKoil, and several Chinese companies. New Gasoline Rationing System In June 2007, the Iranian government instituted a gasoline rationing system. The decision followed a 25 percent price increase to 42 cents per gallon in May. NIORDC is responsible for the program which allows private cars to purchase 26 gallons per month and taxis to buy 211 gallons per month. The rations and increased costs are politically unpopular in Iran. Customers are allowed to purchase their ration six months in advance. Part-time taxis, commercial vehicles, and government vehicles also have special allowances. Records are maintained on smart cards, and later this year the government is expected to announce the price for gasoline bought beyond quota levels. Iran’s gasoline consumption dropped 30 percent immediately after the rationing scheme was adopted. NIOC executive, Hojjatollah Ghanimifard, stated that Iranian gasoline imports for August 2007 dropped 14 percent, although an additional $1.5 billion was requested by the Iranian Oil Ministry to increase gasoline imports through March 2008. The International Energy Agency reported in its August 2007 Oil Market Update that gasoline consumption will likely increase again due to the fact that Iran allows advance purchase of gasoline at a subsidized rate. The combination of rationing, price hikes, increased refining capacity, as well as compressed natural gas (CNG) production, will reduce Iranian gasoline import demand by an estimated 30,000 bbl/d in the next three years according to FACTS Global Energy.

Dr. Michael Hudson: How should the Middle East invest its Rising Trade Surplus?

How Should the Middle East invest its Rising Trade Surplus?

Michael Hudson

The following article is appearing in the June 2008 issue of The Gulf, a weekly business news magazine published in Bahrain. -- MH

Every week Mid Eastern countries acquire more dollars in payment for their oil and other exports, and also for rising U.S. investment in their stock markets and other property. This confronts them with a problem: What can they do with these dollars?
Traditionally, exporters have saved their export earnings by building up their assets. But is it still realistic for them to acquire more dollarized assets?
Central banks throughout the world presently hold some $2.5 trillion of U.S. Treasury bonds, and another trillion dollars in private-sector U.S. dollar debt. As the dollar’s exchange rate falls, these banks suffer losses when their holdings are denominated in their own currencies. Even more serious, the principal itself is now in question. There is no foreseeable way in which the United States can redeem its foreign debt. Its trade surplus continues to deteriorate, while its foreign military spending adds to the overall balance-of-payments deficit.
This means that the United States is pumping more and more dollars into the rest of the world without any means of repaying them – or any intention to do so. That is why foreign countries are beginning to treat these dollars as “hot potatoes,” trying to get rid of them as fast as they can.
But how can they all do this? China is using its new dollar inflows to try and buy up foreign raw materials assets, land and other assets needed for its long-term growth. And some Middle Eastern countries are buying long-term supply agreements for food and raw materials produced abroad. But fewer countries are eager to accept these dollars. And the U.S. Government is blocking foreign investment in the most desirable and remunerative domestic U.S. sectors as its politicians become more nationalistic. This threatens to limit foreign investment in the United States to the junk-mortgage market, to real estate that is falling in price, and loans to bail out U.S. banks and financial institutions as they fight off insolvency and their stock-market prices plunge. Middle East purchases of Citibank shares last year are the most notorious example.
This means that Middle Eastern oil exporters – and indeed, European industrial exporters – are in effect giving their oil and other products away to U.S. consumers in exchange for paper IOUs that are in danger of becoming unspendable and hence worthless.
Fortunately there is a better alternative. That is for Middle Eastern governments to invest their export earnings in building up their own economies rather than that of the United States and those of other dollar-area countries. Two thousand years ago, even during the high tide of Greece and the Roman Empire, the Middle East had long been the world’s most entrepreneurial and prosperous region. What is stopping it from reclaiming this historic position?
A major problem is its arid desertification. This problem can be largely overcome by a combination of domestic infrastructure spending and long term international barter deals. Such deals are the indicated way to go when major currency markets become unstable – and it looks like exchange rates are going to keep on zigzagging and spiking over the coming decade or so.
There is a striking parallel with the last time the Middle East began to receive sharply higher export earnings, after 1973. Back then, it arranged oil-for-infrastructure deals with Korean, Japanese and other Asian firms to build roads, hospitals and other construction needed to raise productivity and living standards. Today, China has entered the mix. And there is still a long way to go for investment in the array of public and private services that are needed to make the region one of the world’s most prosperous.
The emergence of India, China and Pakistan as economic and even military powers (at least for defensive purposes), as well as Russia and Central Asia, already has led to creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which Iran already has joined. The world is becoming multi-polar, if only as a defensive response to U.S. attempts to give NATO a post-Cold-War role by extending it into the Middle East, Indian and Pacific regions.
Inasmuch as Asia and India promise to emerge as the world’s major industrial centers – perhaps joined by South America’s leading nations – this economic realignment is inherently political in character. To speak bluntly, the United States opposes it as threatening its desire for unilateral hegemony. And bluntly is just how British Brigadier-General James Ellery CBE spoke on April 22 at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London. He described the U.S.-British Iraq War as having been fought to stop “the tide of Easternisation” – a shift in global political and economic power toward China and India, which together import some “two thirds of the Middle East’s oil.”
General Ellery is in a position to know. He was the Foreign Office's Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad after 2003. In his talk he explained that U.S. global strategists were concerned that in response to the U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq, it – like Iran – might turn its economic focus eastward.
This is the U.S. nightmare, because it has used the Middle East as a piggy bank to bail out the weakening American financial economy. After the first grain-and-oil shock in 1972-73 – when the United States quadrupled grain export prices, and OPEC responded by quadrupling oil prices – U.S. Treasury officials told Middle Eastern rulers that they could charge as much as they wanted for oil (thus providing domestic U.S. oil majors with a price umbrella that enriched their coffers), but that if they did not recycle their export earnings to the United States, this would be viewed as an act of war.
This means that for the Middle East to use its export earnings to develop its own economies may require breaking with the U.S. diplomatic sphere. At the very least it gives the region an interest in getting the United States to end its occupation of Iraq – including the military bases it is now in the process of constructing.
So I have a modest proposal for how to negotiate this quantum change in Middle Eastern-U.S. geopolitics: Offer to buy out the U.S. bases under construction, perhaps including the Green Zone buildup, at fair market value (certainly not at the exorbitant prices that Republican campaign contributors have been paid, with contracts that both the United Nations and the U.S. Congressional Budget office have found to have been corrupt and handled with improper oversight). This can best be done by making clear to the United States that the free lunch it obtained after going off gold in 1971 is over.
This may sound like giving the United States its way in what looks like a protection racket. But protection may be well worth buying under today’s conditions.
Two centuries ago the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine: Europe should leave the Western Hemisphere to U.S. as a sphere of influence. Is it not time for the world to act symmetrically and ask that the United States for its part leave the Eastern Hemisphere to that region’s nations, to develop as they wish in peace?
The more publicly the Middle Eastern countries can make this kind of trade-off, the more chance it has of being adopted as a policy plank in this year’ U.S. presidential campaign.

My message to the Jews

Khalid Amayreh

Settler Graffiti in Hebron

The Palestinian Information Center

By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

I realize very well that you are not carbon copies of each other. And I also know that there are many Jews around the world who truly despise what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in your name. I earnestly commend these conscientious Jews for their morality and human decency. It is these honest people who enable us to retain the hope that counting on Judaic morality is not a lost cause.

Non the less, there are huge numbers of Jews who have found themselves transformed into soldiers of darkness and advocates of evil. There are Jews who shamelessly advocate the total annihilation of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, these psychopaths are not isolated or marginal figures. On the contrary, they are highly respected by their hundreds of thousands of followers.

It is these misguided and misguiding multitudes of Jews I am addressing in this brief article. And, in truth, my ultimate goal is not to vilify and demonize, but rather to warn and admonish them to wake up from worshiping this modern Golden Calf, otherwise known as the State of Israel.

To begin with, I would like to remind you of a Talmudic story, which I believe is familiar to many of you. The story is told that a heathen came to Shammai with the request to be accepted as a convert on condition that he was taught the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. The Rabbi drove him away with the yard-stick which he was holding. He then went to Hillel with the same request; and he said to him: “What is hateful to you yourself, do not do to your fellow-man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go, learn it.”

Yes, yes, what is hateful to yourself, don’t do to your fellow-man. What beautiful words of light and wisdom!

Now are you mentally prepared to accept this universal law, which nearly every Jew on earth would agree encapsulates Judaic (and supposedly Jewish) morality?

If you are, then you should thoroughly examine your attitudes toward Israel, a state that has more in common with the ideas of Hitler than it doses with the teachings of Moses.

Israel is deceiving you, lying to you and betraying your moral legacy, the legacy bequeathed by the Israelite prophets, and their (our) forefather Ibrahim, who taught mankind “thou shall not murder, thou shall not lie, and thou shall not steal…..and be just.”

I am sorry to speak in such a harsh tone, but, in truth, Israel and Zionism succeeded through the years in transforming you from a people who believe in justice and value morality into murderers and justifiers of murder, into thieves and justifiers of theft, and into liars who have to change the black into white and the white into black in order to cover up their shame, and then call the lies strange names such as hasbara and public relations and political correctness.

In your name, Israel, knowingly and deliberately, is slaughtering innocent people, including children.

This is not done by mistake as Israeli leaders and spokespeople would falsely claim. When “mistakes “ happen every day and every hour and every minute, they are no longer mistakes. They are policy. Besides the images are too graphic to be ignored and too obscenely brazen to be dismissed as “Arab propaganda.” They transcend reality.

In your name, Israel has been carrying out ethnic cleansing, in its ugliest forms, all under the pretext of “maintaining Israel’s Jewish identity!!” you see the pornographic oppression, coming from a people who claim to adhere to the Ten Commandments.

In your name, Israel in the summer of 2006 dropped millions of cluster bombs or bomblets all over South Lebanon. Is this the light upon the nations that you claim to be? Shame on you!

It is because of your crimes against man and God that we, the Palestinians, have effectively become “the Jews of our time,” while you have effectively become the “anti-Semites of our time.” You, the Jews, the victims of the holocaust, and the numerous pogroms and inquisitions, have turned out to be like all underdogs, when you get on the top, you become as murderous and as brutal to your victims as your former oppressors were to you when you were underneath.

The Nazis looked down on Jews and others as untermensch, and you are looking down on us as “Arabs”.!! The Nazis sought expansion at their neighbors’ expense and called it “lebensraum.” And you are doing the same, under the pretext of building “housing units for Jews.” The Nazis carried out “pacifications” in which innocent people were mercilessly killed; and you carry out “defensive operations” during which you wreak death and havoc on innocent people. At least the Nazis didn’t lie about their criminality as much as you do about yours. You are not only evil murderers and great child killers. You are also nefarious liars.

The Nazis believed in an Aryan “master race” and you, Zionists, are trying to make a “race” out of Jews. Your methods are similar and your goals are nearly identical.

You can’t deny this; we are not naïve North Americans or Europeans whom you think you can bamboozle very easily. We have been through it all, from creation to destruction.

I am saying this because in the final analysis when people, any people, including Jews, behave and act as the Nazis did, they themselves become Nazis. Evil, whether done by a “master race” or a “chosen people” is evil. Evil can’t be kosher. True, there are no gas chambers in Gaza and Hebron. But you are killing us with F-16 fighters and tanks and artillery and apache helicopters. So, the outcome is the same. Besides, the writing is literally on the wall. Come to Hebron and see for yourselves.

Too harsh?

No, it is not, because if what is happening today in Palestine at the hands of holocaust children and grand children and great grandchildren is having no effects on your individual and collective conscience, it is immensely naïve to think that you will experience a moral awakening when the pharaohs of Israel, people like Matan Vilnai, choose to carry out their threatened “greater holocaust” against our people.

Many of you may be forgiven for being ignorant of Israel’s reality of evil. But you are not a people of ignorance. Which means you are doing and supporting evil knowingly and consciously. If so, you are no better than your past tormentors.

Don’t be so excited about America’s unlimited and unrestricted support and backing. America is not helping you to uphold your moral principles, America is “helping” you to destroy these principles, which you are doing anyway.

Needles to say, when an evil power “helps” you corrode your moral system, this should not be a cause for joy and satisfaction. I am sure that wise men and women amongst you understand the meaning of my words.

Finally, I call on you to wake up from this toxic arrogance of power, this collective megalomania and false sense of triumph. You are actually experiencing a collective psychosis, a virtual moral meltdown. Hence, you are really in a big trouble.

And, now, a few words to Jews in Israel-Palestine. Soon you will be celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary, which is for us is a profoundly inauspicious occasion commemorating evil and genocide. Because you destroyed our homes, obliterated our towns and villages, perpetrated untold massacres, and expelled the bulk of our people, at gun point, to the four corners of the globe. And you had the audacity to call all of this evil “war of independence” and to claim that “they just fled away…”!!!

Notwithstanding , you are still as blind as you are brutal despite the passage of 60 years.

If you had invested a fraction of the means at your disposal; if you had used your energies and industriousness and creativity for peace with your neighbors, peace would have been realized a long time ago.

But you were not interested in peace then as you are not interested in peace now. Instead you were busy then and as you are busy now stealing our land and building thereon Jewish-only settlements inhabited by fanatical settlers who are taught that the only way to expedite the appearance of the “redeemer” is by shedding non-Jewish blood and doing evil.

Well, since when murder and evil can produce good?

Non the less, it is perhaps not too late to try to rectify your evil ways and morbid thinking.

Try to reach out to the Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims. Remember, this is a predominantly Muslim region, and in a few decades, there will be 700 or 800 million Muslims in your vicinity. Think about your future generations. Maybe, just maybe, America’s military and economic power will have gone with the wind by then.

More over, try to show respect to Islam, because without respecting Islam, you don’t really respect Judaism. This is instead of vilifying the religion that describes the Torah as “a book of light.”

And stop this dishonorable alliance with those pseudo-Christian maniacs who advocate and actively push for a worldwide Armageddon in which hundreds of millions of people, including 99% of Jews, would perish, all in order to induce the second advent of Jesus.

But above all, stop killing and tormenting the helpless Palestinians for you had been helpless yourselves. Stop killing their children. Stop destroying their homes. Stop confiscating their land. Stop imprisoning their sons unjustly. Stop narrowing their horizons. Stop your mass murder, mass terror and mass oppression. Stop making a hell out of our daily life. Yes, stop it, if not for justice and human decency, then for your own safety. Oppression boomerangs as we saw recently in Jerusalem.

And don’t get emboldened by American officials who tell you …Kill, kill, kill and we will stand by you! because America and its immoral politicians are thousands of miles away…but we are destined to be neighbors, or even citizens of the same state.

And remember, it is not an act of heroism to murder unprotected innocent civilians, using the state-of-the-art of America’s technology of death. History won’t be kind to you.

What heroism is there in having an F-16 fighter rain death on sleeping children and women at a refugee camp?

Shame on you.

WATER WATCH: Commodotization of water

The Water Report is a Warning That We Must Change Our Attitude to This Vital Resource

DUBLIN, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c83155) has announced the addition of “The Water Report” to their offering.

We can do without oil - as we did until the latter years of the Nineteenth Century - but we cannot do without water; without it we die. Whilst debates on fossil fuel reserves rage and tensions over oil fields and supplies continue, this new groundbreaking book urges the focus to change - WATER is the next big idea.

In the summer of 2007, Britain was battered with torrential rain and the Environment Agency had to issue 42 flood warnings in one day. In America, continuing drought led to bans and an increase in rates to cope with the water shortage. Comments on the weather are our national pastime - this peerless study will be the book to turn that habit into a life-saving agenda on the desks of governments and corporations worldwide.

The book starts its analysis by discussing the science behind where rain falls and the factor of ocean oscillations, which have only recently been discovered, which has led to the surprising weather patterns we have had. The areas that were expecting rain will find their water supplies low and their arable land parched. Areas prepared for drought will find their land saturated. The book is a warning that we must change our attitude to this vital resource.

The in-depth analysis continues with a look at how much precious water is allowed to run to waste - particularly in hot countries where evaporation is the highest. The authors consider how the twenty percent of arable land that is irrigated could save water. Whilst the climatic shifts described earlier will affect our ability to grow food. The reality that we will soon have to face has already begun as the wheat-growing area of the Yellow River Delta is becoming unfit for use through pollution and up-stream abstraction, and the climatic shifts are reducing previously productive areas in the US and Australia. This is a situation that calls for urgent action otherwise it will cause distress to thousands.

The book contains updated key studies that have been in progress for many years, and from this the highly regarded authors predict that refugees will be forced to seek shelter in other countries due to the lack of arable land, putting more pressure on depleting water reserves in these foster countries. Another facet of this full-scale debate is the rise of industrialisation and the price we will have to pay. While most eyes are looking for a potential conflict over Taiwan it will probably be over water that China, Pakistan and North Korea will be forced to address their own deficits.

However, if we redefine what is important to the survival of the human race and apply our scientific and technological advancements to our relationship with water, humanity may have a chance of survival.

Topics Covered:

1. The Cycles of Climate and Water

2. Water Circulation and use: Wisdom and Madness

3. The Coming Food Deficit

4. People and Climatic Shifts

5. The Coming Wave Of Refugees

6. Prospects for Conflicts and Peace in the Middle East

7. Potential For Conflict In The East

8. Water And Technology

9. Investment

For more information, visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c83155

Train Wreck of the Week by Bob Chapman. Dig THIS!!

The one thing often overlooked by commentators (and Bob is getting very close these days) is how the right wing has a False God - and that is substituting Military Might as the False God. Believe me, they play with a false deck of occult cards at Bohemian Grove - leaving some things up to "chance" but the major arcana cards are all stacked to mayhem, torture, catastrophic events, pandemics, synthetic terror ...

I could easily, and I mean easily highlight every single sentence in this article; they are all important and meaningful to the current situation. I just wish he were viewing CANADA as part of the New Problem - he would see how The Harper intends to bail out this mess for them all.

The one thing I discern though is that we are all being put on The Rack; it's time to stretch ourselves on the inside, get HONEST, work at forgiving people and act as ONE, in league with Our Creator. Only then can our planet be SAVED. And a beautiful planet it is too. I refuse to accept the right wing (and that includes the Clinton/Rockefeller/Rothschild views of this planet as something to manipulate to one's own advantage.

Veeger

The International Forecaster

The resident morons and village idiots in Congress
October 24 2007
International Forecaster Weekly

Summary: Congress grows a backbone too late for Armenian Holocaust, tax slavery since 1913, Ron Paul's candidature, religious Right endorses Jackass and Dumbo candidates, and fails to understand religion.

The resident morons and village idiots in Congress have chosen a rather strange moment in time to grow some moral backbone, especially considering that they have been spineless wonders for as long as we can remember. They would not know what a moral is if it bit them in the nose. If one of our past Congresses had declared the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 to be a genocide 90 years ago when they should have, they would have been acting with some justifiable moral rectitude and the whole matter would now be concluded, over with and in the past.
This is what they get for waiting 90 freaking years to label an obvious Turkish pogrom against Armenians as a genocide. And now big oil is reviving this long-neglected issue to generate uncertainty in the Middle East to propel oil to $90 per barrel even as Turkey threatens to cut off hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and contractors from their supply lines and air cover through Turkish land and air space. But let's not let the lives of hundreds of thousands of our brave military people get in the way of fun and profits! We could not have that! Are these imbecilic idiots in Congress the best we can come up with to lead our country? What does that say about us as a nation?
They say you get the leadership you deserve. If that thought does not curl your toes, raise bumps on your skin, send chills up your spine and make your hair stand on end, nothing will.

It is impossible to trace exactly how that bet against mortgages was made. We believe the possibility exists that Goldman and others deliberately precipitated the credit crunch in order to put markets out of kilter and at the same time make giant profits. We believe these earnings are phony and we believe the stock should be shorted.
GMAC’s mortgage arm GMAC Financial, will fire 25% of its workforce.
Manufacturing activity in NY State rose to 28.7 in October from 14.7 in September. New orders rose to 24.97 in October from 13.56 in Sept
A good part of the grains are the result of the falling US dollar. New York is a major exporter. Inventories rose to 3.49 in October from 3.19 in September. The prices paid rose to 36.05 in October from 35.11 in September. The employees index rose to 36.05 in October from 35.11 in September.
The US and England want transparency in sovereign funds and they want to establish a code of practice to avert a protectionist backlash in western countries to free trade and globalization. It is predicted that the greatest controversy will be created by the most secretive funds, which includes those from the Gulf and China.
The seven largest sovereign wealth funds have almost $2 trillion to invest and they are taking bigger stakes in sensitive sectors of developed countries, such as defense, energy, telecommunications and financial services. The top funds are China, Singapore, ABU Dhabi, Kuwait, Norway and Russia.
Increasingly aggressive investments made by such funds have alarmed policymakers in the US and Europe.
US building permits decreased 7.3% to 1.226 million in September.
The statement the inflation is under control is laughable. All we get are core prices that are worthless and no statistics on real official inflation. We refuse to quote such lies.
Housing starts plunged to a 14-yar low in September, a 10.2% decrease. They would have us believe inflation is up 2.8%. Quite frankly a 10.2% decrease in housing starts is stupid. They should have fallen 50% to relieve the glut of existing inventory for sale. Builders just don’t get it. Many of them will go bankrupt.
The Northeast showed construction gains in September with activity rising by 45.4%. Starts fell 10.1% in the West, 11.7% in the South and 28.4% in the Midwest. Housing starts are down 31% yoy. Builders continue to build. There were 180,000 completed new homes for sale at the end of August, just barely below the record of 182,000 in May. That is not a slowdown.
Society Security benefits will rise 2.3% in an inflation world of 11.1%. This is the smallest increase in four years. Yes, it is ‘let’s screw the aged’ so we can have wars for profit. This is an average of $24.00 a month in the average check. The average payout will move from $1,055 to $1,079 next year. The average retired couple received $1,761. Workers will pay a payroll tax on the first $102,000 in income for these benefits.
Mortgage application volume increased 0.7% for the week ended 10/12. The MBA’s index peaked at 1,856.7 on 5/30/03 and last week was 656.3. Refinance volume declined 1.1%, while purchase volume jumped 2.1%. Refis accounted for 45.3% of total volume, down from 46.2%. The interest rate for the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was unchanged at 6.4%. This year ARMs rose to 6.17% from 6.15%. It is estimated by the MBA that 2008 originations will fall to 2000 levels, or an 18% decline with existing homes falling 10%. This is pure wishful thinking. It will be much worse.
Home sales in Southern California fell in September to a 20-year low and the worst is yet to come. Home sales in the six county areas fell 48.5%, the lowest since 1988, yet in LA County they rose 1.2%. Apartment building sales fell 70% and two years of falling prices are expected - finally some realism.


Our Congresses for the past 94 years, starting with their passage of the Federal Reserve Act and the Income Tax in 1913, have been nothing less than an absolute, total disgrace. They have sold us into tax slavery, they have allowed the Fed to devalue our currency through inflation and to blatantly and incessantly cause panics, recessions and depressions as they rip off the US public over and over again, ad nauseam, they have shredded our Constitution in every way possible every chance they get, they have either authorized or condoned the slaughter of our children in an almost continuous series of wars under an ongoing policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace and perpetual profits in order to line the pockets of trillionaire pigs who never have enough, they have stifled the moral outcry of our pulpits using the Income Tax laws to threaten their tax-exempt status if they speak out, and now they threaten to launch us into World War III over an issue that should have been
settled 90 years ago. We would have been better off with a dictatorship! Don't laugh, because that is where we are headed!
We would like to see a third party with Ron Paul and Jerome Corsi as the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates. While we hope he succeeds in getting the Republican nomination, Ron Paul's attempt to run within the current political system may not work because the system is rigged so that only the candidates approved by the elitists for the parties of Satan will ever get a nomination to run for political office. We also note, incidentally, that the symbols that were chosen for the parties of Satan are most appropriate, having been foreordained by our Lord in his perfect knowledge and wisdom. That's right, a Jackass and a Dumbo. Perfect.
The leaders of the religious right need to pull their heads out of their butts and stop endorsing Jackass and Dumbo candidates just because they might be pro-life and anti-gay marriage. Their myopic and incredibly naive view of our world is something the Lord will hold them accountable for, because, like the Pharisees, they have failed to discern the nature and the signs of our times or to distinguish between truth and lies. They have foolishly allowed a pack of ravening wolves wearing sheep's clothing to manipulate them by showering them with a plethora of contrived and worthless platitudes and by approving token actions on moral issues, actions that are taken solely for political reasons and not because of any underlying moral conviction. They can't even get our so-called Christian President to sign an executive order that would allow our military chaplains to pray in accordance with the dictates of their faith. Our Christian chaplains cannot even pray in the name of Jesus without incurring the wrath of their superior officers. Why then does this executive order even need a debate and/or a petition of concerned citizens to get our "beloved," so-called Christian Commander-in-Chief to put it on his agenda? What could he possibly be waiting for, we ask, unless perhaps he's not really a Christian at heart after all? Why doesn't he invite all the generals and admirals into the Oval Office for a little coffee klatch and lay down the law? Perhaps he needs to put a little fear into their hearts the way they are putting fear into the hearts of our chaplains? Don't hold your breath.
Our narrow-minded Christian right talks about pro-life and anti-gay marriage platforms as if these were the only issues that mattered. What about honesty and integrity? What about outright lies to Congress to get them to approve a war for profit? What about traitorous false flag attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the murder of several thousand of our citizens and the baseless and continuing orchestration of a phony war on terror? What about the slaughter of millions of Iraqi civilians and thousands of our soldiers and contractors to facilitate a grab for oil fields by an evil group of satanic trillionaires? Is it pro-life to kill that many civilians for the fun and profit of some of the most evil men that have ever walked the face of the earth, men whose lusts and perversity would make the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah blush? What about the countless financial scandals, one-bid contracts, obstructed investigations into every manner of graft and
corruption and the politicizing of our justice system? What about the blatant invasions of our privacy with illegal wiretaps and data-mining of Internet and telephone service records? What about having a chief executive who thinks he is above the law, who has made the appendage of signing statements to the laws he signs into a form of art? What about blowing the cover of one of our CIA agents because her husband dared to speak the truth about some phony weapons of mass destruction? What about the numerous homosexual pedophiles, child pornographers and sadomasochistic perverts who grace the halls of Congress and the White House, many of whom have been caught in the act of soliciting minors and Congressional pages for sex? Do you think they are anti-gay marriage advocates? What about the male homosexual prostitute who has spent many nights at the White House? What about the torture and the extraordinary renditions of innocent people and the suspension of their rights to habeas corpus, and the humiliation of prisoners, all authorized by the drooling perverts in our current shameless Administration. What about the off-shoring and outsourcing of our jobs, the looting of our pensions, the destruction of our middle class, our economy and our currency, which will no longer be the reserve currency of the world thanks to the profligate policies of the current Administration? What about the incessant and blatant lies about economic statistics and the illegal 24/7 manipulation of all our financial markets? What about the failure to enforce our borders and our immigration laws so big business can have a ready source of slave labor? What about the secret destruction of our sovereignty with a clandestine North American Union, which the current Administration is trying to sneak past us by stealth until they can orchestrate another false flag attack? What about the War in Afghanistan to take over their opium poppy fields so the CIA can continue to fund their black operations, which are aimed at destroying our sovereignty? What about all the laws which have just been passed which give our President dictatorial powers over our military and over our state militias if martial law is declared, or which allow our President at his whim to declare that people who protest against our government's reprobate actions are enemy combatants and are no longer entitled to the protections provided by our Constitution? What about allowing the separation of church and state to widen even further and allowing evolution to be taught to the exclusion of God's creation? Have they done anything at all about this issue? Have they done anything about banning abortion completely by overturning Roe vs. Wade? Have they supported any states that have tried to do either of these things? Have they even attempted to do anything to discipline activist judges whose opinions are overturned over and over again as they try to make new laws instead of applying existing laws? Did they fight hard enough to get federal judge appointees of the President confirmed, or did they just make the appointments to make you happy and then not follow up, blaming it all on those pesky Jackasses? Do you think we should stop with a ban against partial birth abortion? Have they passed any laws, which in any way discourage gay marriage or civil unions or have they supported any states that have tried to do this? And finally, what do you think about a President who thinks that followers of Mohammed, who use the Koran, worship the same God as Christians and Jews, who use the Bible? Wow, the depth of his Christian understanding is nothing less than profound! He says that he prays every day, but we can assure you these prayers are to the prince of this world and not to the God we worship! Ask him about the Bohemian Grove!

October 12, 2007

How to Cope with Global Jihad

By Ariel Cohen

[Any Ariel Cohen item is worth a read IF you have a pointy head and can keep a good sense of humor YOURSELF. He's the ultimate digg at clear thinking! Just pure rhetoric and right-wing Isreali thinking disguised as MURKAN, but a true "strategic policy" "wonk", eh? Way way way to the right of James Baker III who loves to issue his "edicts" behind a wall of political subtrafuse. Sort of agitprop for those who just couldn't STAND fishing out FACTS and wishing to defuse situations. A nice little footnote kinda guy in Armed Madhouse, I thought I would take on his nice little overpriced remarks on all things Middle East as they are not that taxing, but very mean hearted and mean spirited.

For information - The Soviet UNION collapsed due to the explosion of Chernobyl, and the West SURELY does not want the effects of low level radiation exposed, so we'll just keep spinning "other reasons". Wow! Ariel are YOU ever clever!! The exposed republics just figured HEY! DUDE! You might shot us down with tanks but we're all glow worms now anyway . we'll take our chances and lumps and dump ya now! Saudi oil the reason?? NO WAY!

Another Biggie, Ariel (besides your typos and bad English), is that no one needs a Big Bomb any more - a nice little powdering of du does the trick. Shock and awe is just to trot out the fast-speed demons on real methampethamine and give them something to DO! until their brains are totally fried.

Another question, does no one "under" you have access to the oil map and who is controlling what and where the oil pipelines are desired to go? Hmmm? I mean the strategic parts of Africa that need CONtrol are well known to the rest of us. OF course, there are Muslims in the Sudan, Darfur, Somalia! There are muslims EVERYWHERE. I mean it, everywhere. I guess we'll just have to wipe out the entire world by your way of thinking. Then we can have security and prosperity for all - in the RICH West - once again?? This is just plain lunacy. Do you really think we are all stoopid and can't figure out where that "argument" of yours leads??

Somehow you've missed the little item about the SCANDAL of Russian arms dealers getting caught running gunz into the Middle East - you know where the Italians really mucked it all up! How very very convenient. This makes the entire power equation you are drawing up very very different. However, it DOES ensure that the US comes along with BAGZ and BAGZ and BAGZ of more money to buy off everyone, doesn't it? But the players at the top stay firmly in power, the advanced weapons systems keep being developed and NO ONE at all has to engage in DIPLOMACY or acting like anything but schoolboyz with nukes. NO GROWN UPS ALLOWED in your scenarios, just overgrown GI Joes with HUGE military budgets to play with, all saber rattling away.

Question: Where are you gonna get this intelligence guyz and galz you are after? Canada? Hey! CSIS TRIED THAT, and it just didn't work. And the education system sure ain't produce them in the USandIsrael, as I like to call it. Truly a too little, too late scenario you've cooked up!! People everywhere are dis-HEARTENED when they see genocide day after day after day. But that never ever sinks in with you guyz. No one really wants to lay in their talents with such ruthlessness; it's been exposed.

And your answer to NOT relying on the UN IS .... ??? Please don't "beg the question". This is real life and the profs are the rest of us, Ariel - those outside the Beltway who have to slog through this stuff.

Oh, man! You shoulda seen the handwriting on the wall about intelligence necessity LONG ago - but that be said, you're at least ensuring YOU get long-term employment out of this "quagmire", aren't you? That's the MOST IMPORTANT thing of all!

The truth is the healers and artists of this world are going to be doing the REAL WORK now, and big time. Full time; just as we have been doing since before the first black op set up his dirty little shop in Iraq.

And the truth be told - STRATEGICALLY, the US would have been FAR WISER to have cast its lot with Iran than with Israel and gotten down to real peacemaking (no Henry the K allowed) in the Middle East. Yup, a little late for that, but still a real important reconsideration could still be made. But you and the boyz will avoid that little confrontation with REALITY. Just as you will continue to avoid looking at how to make restitution on a people(s) little bombed back into the stone age.

Here's a little hint, Ariel - give Wesley Clark a thorough read. Remember you are a human being, not your role. We ALL have alot of work to do to heal from this GRAVE TRAUMA perpetrated on one and all.

Here's a little PARADIGM shift for ya -- it's worth the pair a dimes to start taking a good hard look at how to GROW UP and stop making WAR. That's what civilized people do -- they don't just change "Tactics".

Veeger]

The conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan and the global Islamist insurgency have revealed that Western democracies and their political and military leaders do not fully comprehend the multifaceted threats represented by radical Muslim nonstate actors. In this, they violate the most famous dictum of Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategic genius of 2,500 years ago: "If you know yourself and understand your opponent you will never put your victory in jeopardy in any conflict."

The broad support that al Qaeda jihadis and radical Islamist militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah enjoy in the Muslim world and in the global Muslim diaspora, as well as among non-Muslim anti-American political forces around the world demonstrates that describing the global Islamic insurgency as a fringe or minority phenomenon is unrealistic and self-defeating. Since 9/11, democracies have fought three wars against nonstate Islamist actors. The West needs to draw important lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the clash between Israel and Hezbollah to address these strategic deficits. Lack of clarity in defining the enemy and delays in formulating political and information strategy severely endanger U.S. national interests and the security of the West.

Fighting the wrong enemy

The bush administration lost valuable time before it finally defined radical Islam as the premier national security threat in October 2005. Initially in the post-9/11 period, the president targeted "evildoers" and "terrorism" as the enemy. Moreover, Islam was declared a "religion of peace" and Saudi Arabia, which has spent the last 30 years spreading its Wahhabi/Salafi gospel, was labeled as"our friend." Unsurprisingly, the nation and the military were somewhat disoriented.

The U.S. military quickly and successfully destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. After that, however, the menu of enemies became slim: Saudi Arabia, from which 15 out of 19 hijackers came, was considered too important an oil supplier and too pivotal a state in the Middle East to be engaged. Pakistan, both the parent and the nursemaid of the Taliban, promised cooperation. Most important, the U.S. did not know (and still does not know) how to fight nonstate actors, be they sub-state terrorist organizations, militias, or supra-state religious/political movements.

The jury is still out as to all the reasons for the Soviet collapse, but it was defeated in part through an indirect strategy formulated by the Reagan administration, and in part because it disintegrated due to its own internal weaknesses. If we are to believe one who was "present at the destruction" -- Russian Prime Minister Egor Gaidar -- a key reason was the flooding of the world market with cheap Saudi oil. The Soviet Union was also bankrupted by its unsustainably expensive military-industrial complex. In addition, it was burdened with ideological fatigue and cynicism, torn by ethnic centrifugal forces, and being bled in Afghanistan by the U.S.-supported mujahedeen.1

For over a century, the U.S. military and other arms of the government have been designed, nurtured, and financed to fight nation states, from Spain in 1898, to Germany in the two world wars, to Japan in 1941-45. Working with insurgencies or counter-insurgencies hasn't been Washington's forte for a long time. The U.S. military did not succeed in defeating the North Vietnamese insurgency, nor did its Cold War guerilla allies prevail in Angola or Mozambique. Beside the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, and support of Afghan mujahedeen, U.S. insurgency and counterinsurgency successes have been limited and peripheral to war-fighting. The current conflict is fundamentally different.

The wars that went awry

The U.S. entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan are exactly where the jihadis want the United States to be. According to Ayman al Zawahiri, in a taped interview at the second anniversary of 9/11, "If they withdraw, they lose everything, and if they stay they will continue to bleed to death."2 In other words, damned if you do and damned if you don't.

U.S. abandonment of Iraq would be seen as a major victory for anti-American and Islamist forces in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world. After Iraq, jihadis may target Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and eventually Egypt and nuclear-armed Pakistan for takeover. It is the belief of al Qaeda leaders from Osama bin Laden all the way down that Iraq is going to do to America what Afghanistan did to Russia. And this would be a major accomplishment for a nonstate actor in a confrontation with the mightiest state on earth.

Meanwhile, the future of NATO operations in Afghanistan remains uncertain, with many European allies foretelling the Alliance's defeat there. A resurgent Taliban, supported by al Qaeda and by elements within Pakistan, is threatening to overwhelm the NATO effort. At the same time, many in the Middle East believe that Israel, which they see as America's proxy, was defeated in Lebanon by Hezbollah; and Iran remains defiant, bringing on line batteries of 3,000 centrifuges capable of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons as well as funding Shiite extremists in Iraq and Lebanon.

Islamist extremist/jihadi organizations, including movements and militias from Egypt to Afghanistan, represent clear and present dangers to American homeland security, our vital interests, and to our Arab and Israeli allies. If and when victorious, today's terrorist organizations, global Islamist movements such as Muslim Brotherhood or al Qaeda, and "civil militias" such as Hezbollah or the Mahdi Army, are likely to take over countries and acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. With their implacable anti-American and anti-Western agendas, they will represent dangers comparable to, or greater than, those presented by the fully armed and mobilized nation states which topped the threat hierarchies of the twentieth century. Hezbollah's relative success against Israel in the summer of 2006 is an important case study, worth analyzing in greater detail.

The Hezbollah war as jihadi war

The Israeli-Hezbollah front, which had been relatively dormant since the hasty Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, erupted as world leaders gathered for the July 2006 G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. Hezbollah's unprovoked killing of eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping of two resulted in 34 days of fighting. The hostilities will have long-term repercussions for Israel and other states confronting terrorist organizations, militias outside of state controls, and other nonstate actors.

The main lesson of the Hezbollah war is that military responses are simply not enough. The jihadi threat needs to be defeated by a combination of political, ideological, media, military and intelligence measures. The good news is that the potential does exist for a broad coalition between Western, non-Western and Sunni Muslim and Arab nation-states to get the job done. The bad news is that these actors are still obsessed with weakening Israel and forcing its withdrawal from the West Bank without the foundations for durable peace and have not fully realized the necessity of working together against radical forces. The process of attaining this realization itself is likely to be painfully slow and costly in blood and treasure.

The Hezbollah war is at least the third conflict in the Greater Middle East characterized by the involvement of an advanced Western democracy on the one hand and a sub-state actor on the other. The first two are the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the fighting against the Sunni and Shiite anti-American insurgencies in Iraq. The three wars have important commonalities, as the guerilla forces are religiously motivated, demonstrate a willingness to fight to the end, possess superior knowledge of the local terrain; and rely on dispersal among the local population, often utilizing systems of underground bunkers and strongholds which they prepare in advance.

The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was hardly the first -- or the last -- jihadi war. Israel is already involved in a low-intensity conflict in Gaza, primarily against Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Resistance Committees, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of theplo, elements of al Qaeda, and a bevy of other jihadi organizations. The Gaza forces have used Qassam rockets, which are primitive compared with Hezbollah's Katyushas, the Zilzal 1, 2, and 3, and the Fajar low trajectory short-range ballistic rockets supplied by Syria and Iran, along with sophisticated anti-tank Russian-made missiles andsams.3 Additionally, Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (the global Islamic Party of Liberation founded by a Palestinian cleric in the early 1950s) called for the creation of a caliphate (an expansionist military-religious dictatorship operating under strict interpretations of Islamic religious law) in Gaza.4 The declaration of a caliphate anywhere on the globe would allow jihadi movements everywhere to shift from a "defensive" jihad to an offensive one -- the jihad to impose Islam on the non-Islamic world, something only a caliph is allowed to do.

At least two additional theaters are worth mentioning, as they are not yet attracting as much attention. The first is Somalia, until recently under the tenuous rule of the Islamic Courts. While the Ethiopian Army and the provisional government defeated the Courts in December 2006, the Islamists dispersed among the population and are in the process of making a comeback. The international links of the Islamic Courts are clear. Chechens, Arabs, and even British and Swedish Muslims were killed fighting in Somalia.

The second theater is Darfur, where the Arab Islamist militia Janjaweed, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and other jihadi organizations have promised to fight any U.N. peacekeeping contingent deployed there.5 Somalia and Sudan's combined population is 44.4 million, thus the potential of these two impoverished countries to serve as a base of jihad in Africa and elsewhere can be vast -- as long as the oil money from Islamist sponsors keeps flowing in to recruit, train, and deploy their populations as jihadi shock troops. Moreover, if Somalia reverts to Islamic rule despite the December defeat of the Islamic Courts, its location next to the Bab-el-Mandeb strait may put this strategic shipping lane at the mercy of suicide boat attackers operating from Somali coastal bases.

The future of deterrence

Even the most advanced militaries, such as the U.S. and Israeli, which relied on the deterrent capacity and reputation they gained in conventional, twentieth century warfare, will need to reaffirm or re-establish deterrence against sub-state actors by successfully destroying enemies in the future. This will not happen unless the nature of the new enemy is fully understood and new doctrines, approaches, tactics, and procedures are developed. Moreover, in the Israeli case, the reassertion of deterrence will not be complete before the appropriate reforms and training have been fully implemented in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

In the past, the U.S. relied on the power of its combined operations and technological and industrial superiority. Its aircraft and ships dominated the skies and the oceans during World War II. In addition, the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a clear demonstration of overwhelming force by a weapon which, for a short time, remained exclusively in U.S. hands. The U.S. military performed majestically in Gulf One, in Afghanistan, and during the opening of the current conflict in Iraq. What happened after the last two campaigns is eroding U.S. power and the perception of that power around the world.

Israel has relied on the deterrence value of its military prowess, earned in the hard-won victory against five attacking Arab armies in 1948; the four-day defeat of the Soviet-equipped Egyptian army in the Suez campaign of 1956; and the victory over the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces in 1967, in which Israel lost 779 soldiers while the combined Arab forces lost 21,000.

In the 1973 war, Israel was stunned by a Syrian-Egyptian surprise attack. Nevertheless, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recovered in time to take back all of the Golan Heights, put Damascus within artillery range, and surround the Third Egyptian Army at Suez, with no effective fighting force between the Israeli troops on the African side of the Suez Canal and Cairo, within three weeks. In1982, the IDF was at the gates of Beirut within a week, forcing the evacuation of Yassir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to Tunis, Iraq, and Yemen and destroying a third of the Syrian airforce (86 planes) in one day. While Israel lost 675 soldiers, close to 10,000 Syrian and PLO combatants were killed. Between 1982 and 2000 Israel lost over 1,200 soldiers in Lebanon. But the defeat handed to Syria and the PLO in Lebanon, despite the war having been strategically bungled and the occupation domestically unpopular, bought Israel a quarter of a century without a major war.

The deterrence value of these victories could not last forever, however. The 1982-2000 South Lebanon conflict ended with Israel's poorly managed withdrawal and abandonment of the South Lebanon Army in May 2000. Prime Minister Ehud Barak and then-Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz supervised the retreat, which was primarily triggered by internal Israeli protests and dismay over casualties being suffered by Israeli troops deployed in the self-styled "security zone" in South Lebanon. The fact and the form of the withdrawal generated a perception of Israeli weakness. Shortly thereafter, Yassir Arafat unleashed the Terror War (the Second Intifada) which lasted until 2004, in which over 1,100 Israelis were killed in bombings and shootings, 75 percent of them civilians. Many speculated that the hasty retreat from Lebanon contributed to Arafat's decision to launch the Second Intifada. However, if this was correct, the Israelis certainly failed to internalize the lesson. Their 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, including the abandonment of Jewish villages there, did nothing to stop the volleys of short-range Qassam rockets from Gaza into pre-1967 Israel. Many analysts now argue that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, billed by the Sharon government as yet another "painful concession for peace," only contributed to the Hamas electoral victory in January2006 and increased the Arab perception of Israeli weakness. In fact, in June 2006 Hamas conducted an assault and kidnapping operation similar to Hezbollah's subsequent attack, which triggered the latest war.

Systemic failure

Many israeli and foreign commentators are focusing, correctly, on the failures of the political leadership and top military to anticipate, evaluate, prepare for, and defeat the Hezbollah threat. They cast the net broadly, to include sociological, morale, bureaucratic and political issues -- not only narrow military ones. All these categories of analysis are valid. They point out that the Tel Aviv-based secular leftist European elite of Israel, including many in theidf high command, bought into the same approach to military transformation that had been promoted by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The current generation of Israel's political and military leaders had dismissed the concept of overwhelming military victory in favor of a dysfunctional technocratic reliance on a "Revolution in Military Affairs," emphasizing high-tech systems and air power.6 While high-tech gives an important advantage to developed countries and modern militaries, it cannot replace good old intelligence and boots on the ground.

There clearly was a misguided belief that Israel is so powerful, nothing bad could happen to it. The political, military, and strategic results of this, yet another failed Israeli "concept," are there for all to see.

The process of self-examination, investigation, and conclusions will be heart-wrenching. Israel went through a similar exercise after the perceived "earthquake" of 1973. However, the current war is viewed as a limited one but an even more decisive Israel failure than the Yom Kippur War was ever perceived to be. In 1973, the Israelis believed that the Arabs would not attack after the disaster of 1967 -- and paid for the misconception with 3,000 lives in a country of 3.6 million. Then, as now, the Israeli political class and the military became enamored of a concept which turned out to be a self-defeating construct rather than a valid reflection of reality.

In 2006, the political and military leadership suffered from a severe case of negligence and neglect. Israeli government and military institutions had been focused on "unilateral withdrawal" -- first from Gaza and, with an eye toward the future, from the West Bank -- to combat the perceived "drawbacks of occupation." The Olmert cabinet, and especially then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz, a former trade union leader, were busy championing social welfare issues instead of preparing the country for the forthcoming confrontation. At the same time, Syria and Iran were busily arming Hezbollah. The Israeli leadership also did nothing to prepare the country for the crucial realization that Hezbollah is not a conventional army, and that a repeat of the lightning victories of the past was highly unlikely.

During the period leading up to the war with Hezbollah, Israel under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and then under Ehud Olmert failed to prepare ample bomb shelter space or to deploy the anti-missile defenses it claimed to have developed. It also failed to acquire vital intelligence (such as the location of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, in the early days of hostilities; the scale of presence of Syrian short- and medium-range missiles in Lebanon; and the deployment ofc-801/802 Iranian-made anti-ship missiles). Most important, the idf did not implement existing plans to destroy Hezbollah through a ground operation and ad-libbed almost until the war's end.7 Reports from the field of failures to plan and lead operations; disasters in supply and evacuation of the wounded; missing weapons, ammunition, fuel, and other supplies indicate that the country and the army, which had not been engaged in fighting a major war since 1982, needs a massive shake-up.8

Losing in the battlefield of perceptions

Public diplomacy/strategic information is yet another area in which Israel utterly failed and which requires a major revamping. Throughout the world, Islamist insurgents masterfully use images and propaganda, relying on sympathetic elements among Western media and nongovernmental organizations to focus international attention on civilian collateral casualties (even to the point of staging them). They use these images to stir the outrage that increases recruitment for future rounds in the conflict.9

The Israelis have been particularly inadequate at perception management at least since the 1982 Lebanon war, when they were attacked for allegedly high civilian casualties. In the ensuing years, Israel was systematically smashed in the international media and by thengo community for the "occupation" of Arab lands, the alleged incarceration of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, and other much-publicized misdeeds. In the most recent fighting, many anngo, such as Human Rights Watch, simply refused to recognize that Hezbollah and Hamas deliberately used civilians as human shields and practiced a consistent policy of locating rocket launchers in civilian dwellings, schools, mosques, and hospitals, despite ample reporting in the mainstream, including liberal left, English language media.10

With almost astounding ease, the media fell for every Hezbollah trick and deception, including doctoring Reuters photos;11 publishing a picture of a non-existing Israeli frigate being hit by a Hezbollah rocket (it was an Australian demolition explosion);12 falling for a sob story about an Israeli missile hitting a Lebanese ambulance right in the middle of its Red Cross;13 or using the same ruins to claim Israeli missile hits on different dates and deploying rehearsed "city criers" to feed tear-jerking stories to Western correspondents. Most of these hoaxes were exposed by Western bloggers, not by Israeli information officials, whose job it should be to debunk enemy propaganda.

But, most important, in the war with Hezbollah -- and in previous conflicts, as well -- the media fail to comprehend, and the Israelis fail consistently and adequately to explain, that those who are and were fighting Israel (including theplo's Yassir Arafat, Hezbollah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and his Iranian sponsors) seek genocide and the ultimate demise of the state of Israel in its totality. Similarly, the media often compartamentalize descriptions of jihadi atrocities and the overall strategic goal of jihadis to force the demise of Western civilization. Representatives of Western governments almost never explain these key points, or they explain them without sufficient facts. Western publics are rarely afforded coherent information through which to frame and understand events.

Stigmatized yet again by the conflict with Hezbollah, Israel lost what little support it enjoyed at the beginning of the conflict in Europe, among the American left, and in many developing countries, while the hatred of the Arab world was easily further inflamed by the daily stream of "atrocity news" being served up by Al Jazeera and Al Manar, the Hezbollah satellitetv network. However, Israeli efforts to engage in strategic information operations were and remain virtually nonexistent. The budget of Al Manar is greater than the entire Israeli foreign ministry public diplomacy (hasbara) budget. The architect of this failing public diplomacy/strategic information policy under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, has admitted himself that Jerusalem was particularly lacking on this battlefield.14

The Israelis aren't facing this particular battle alone. The U.S. and the West faced similar difficulties after the liberation of Afghanistan and the "desecration of the Koran" allegations; and continue to encounter a media barrage over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, and other perception crises, both real and media-generated. Winning hearts and minds is and will remain the greatest challenge for Israel -- and the West -- in the forthcoming wars against the jihadis.

Lessons learned

Jihadi organizations, supported by anti-status quo powers such as Iran and Syria, do not threaten only individual states, but are bringing about instability and the destruction of regimes throughout entire regions (Iraq, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf, the Indian subcontinent). At the same time, state support is a source of sub-state actors' vulnerability which is not sufficiently understood, let alone exploited. As nation-states have leaderships, assets, and interests, those need to be put under pressure to promote a cessation of support for sub-state or supra-state actors.

The Israel-Hezbollah war, as well as conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, yielded many important lessons vital for the success in the conflict against Islamist radicalism world wide. These include:

Do not underestimate the enemy. Not being a conventional army, Hezbollah elicited the contempt of Israeli political and military elites. The deputy chief of staff and Israeli Air Force intelligence commanders referred to Hezbollah as a "terrorist gang," discounting its lethality.15 Hezbollah wasted no time, putting down roots in Gaza and attempting to penetrate the West Bank. The Pentagon leadership and the U.S. military top brass were slow to recognize the nature of the conflict in Iraq as an insurgency, not just a terrorist campaign.

Find sponsors and leaders. More intelligence penetration of Hezbollah and of Iraqi militias is necessary, both in terms of human intelligence and signal intelligence. More scrutiny needs to be focused on the location of Hezbollah's leadership; the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah link, including the identities of liaison officers; the type and volume of hardware supplied to Hezbollah; the nature and location of the joint Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah command-and-control center in Syria; the identities of Iranian experts and trainers working with Hezbollah; the identities of Hezbollah personnel trained or training in Iran; and the doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) that the Iranians are teaching Hezbollah and their allies in Iraq and elsewhere now or in the future.

Similarly, the leadership and connections to foreign states and funders of the Ba'ath underground and the Shiite militias need to be further mined for actionable intelligence of the kind collected in the January2007 raid on the Iranian representative office in Mosul. Such information can assist in putting down the insurgency.

Local knowledge, language skills, and understanding of political, historical, and religious dynamics of the theater of operations are weapons in themselves. Hezbollah spent a tremendous amount of resources spying on Israel, including recruiting Israeli military officers and gaining a deep understanding of Israeli doctrine and tactics. A similar effort is afoot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every war is a war of intelligence, of strategic and operational deceit and subterfuge, but twenty-first-century wars will be outstanding for their heavily reliance on and integration with intelligence activities. Gathering and analysis of intelligence are impossible without linguistic and cultural knowledge.

Safe havens are crucial. These wars are not local. Just as Syria provided Hezbollah a safe haven, and Iran supplied money, weapons and training, the Taliban and other jihadi groups are using safe havens, such as in Pakistan, to train, equip, treat the wounded, and learn military and technological innovations. A task for the twenty-fist century war against radical jihad will be to render safe havens unsafe, using diplomacy where possible and force where necessary.

The Hezbollah victory is empowering Iran and threatening to destabilize the whole Middle East. Iranian leaders from Ayatollah Ali Khameini to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have called the outcome "the divine victory." Arab commentators have already opined that the Hezbollah success will boost jihadis (Both Sunni and Shiite) from Iraq to Jordan to Egypt.16

Riyadh, Amman, and Cairo were deeply uncomfortable about the Iranian involvement with Iraqi Shiites and support of Hezbollah. Sunni adicals, however, sided with Iran. Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, welcomed Hezbollah's resilience, opening the way to expanded cooperation between extremist Sunnis and extremist Shiites in toppling pro-Western regimes. Cooperation between the United States, European powers, out-of-area actors, and the moderate/pragmatic Arab nation-states, as well as Israel, needs to be boosted to stem the Iranian expansion and a possible anti-American Sunni-Shiite jihadi alliance.

Information warfare and perception management is paramount. Without effective hearts-and-minds strategies that are an integral part of the overall war strategy, the West and its allies in the area have very little in terms of soft power to counter Iran and the jihadis. This information strategy has to affect not just the Western and Muslim media, but also the mosques and the education systems. Modern states and militaries have repeatedly failed to clearly recognize, much less effectively counter, the deliberate campaign of manipulation and propaganda being carried out by militant Islamists/jihadis through the mass media, especially the internet. The largely pacifist Western nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector is often a target of Islamist propaganda that vilifies the U.S. and its allies. Islamists consistently score points through the media, academia, and the NGO community in the court of the public opinion. A case in point for an information warfare offensive would be pressuring the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, to further cut support not just to al Qaeda and other jihadi organizations, but also to radical Islamic charities and madrassahs, and to deligitimize jihadi-supporting preachers and imams. More efforts are needed to boost the profile of those clerics who promote a message of tolerance and to facilitate the launch of satellitetv channels and websites with agendas aimed at reconciliation and peace. This should be the highest priority in the war of ideas -- information warfare that so far the U.S. has been fighting only half-heartedly, and unquestionably losing.

The U.N. is an unreliable agency for peace. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the permanent members of the Security Council, especially France and Russia, did precious little to fight terror in Lebanon or Iraq. As far as France is concerned, things are improving under the new administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy. The UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, has collected and published detailed data about Israeli force movements in wartime, endangering the lives of Israeli servicemen and women, and violating its own neutrality mandate.17 Just as the unsc sat on its hands when Lebanon and Hezbollah failed to implementunsc Resolution1559, which stipulated the disarmament of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces to the South, the violation ofunsc Resolution 1701, which demanded the same and more, began the day it was signed. Specifically, Hezbollah announced that it refused to consider procedures to disarm, and it refuses to stop the resupply of weapons from Syria; it considers Israeli troops legitimate targets -- with no repercussions from theun. Syria and Iran are openly defying the UN and furnishing arms supplies to Hezbollah, with no sanctions and no calls for sanctions against these terror-sponsoring states. Those U.S. and Israeli decision-makers who actively lobbied for Resolution1701 as the solution for the conflict now look naïve at best, and possibly worse than that. All this is hardly surprising in view of previousun failures in the Middle East (such as the hasty evacuation from Sinai of the UNEF by Secretary General U Thant in 1967) and the UN "peacekeeping" disasters in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda.

Under-promise and over-deliver. The best strategy is not to advise the enemy of your strategic goals. Policymakers should not have promised "a new Middle East" safe for democracy; they should not have proclaimed that Hezbollah would be destroyed, disarmed, or denied the ability to fire rockets into Israel. All Israeli leaders needed to say was "Hezbollah will pay the price" -- and strike at a time and place of their choosing. Instead, they fought when and where Hezbollah wanted them to. Rather than under-promising and over-delivering, the Israelis inflated expectations, articulated maximum goals, and managed to snatch a public perception of failure from the jaws of potential victory. Similarly, the U.S. over-promised in Iraq by talking about turning the country into a model of democracy for the New Middle East. Now Washington needs to find ways to exercise the art of the possible and achieve pacification with the least number of American and Iraqi casualties. Whether this is in fact possible remains to be seen.

The time is now

When facing sub-state actors, conventional, twentieth-century military doctrines aimed at wars against nation-states and industrial-era mass armies are effectively dead. Even the best traditional militaries, such as the U.S. and Israeli armies, face formidable difficulties when confronted with irregular, well-motivated, and foreign-supported forces, which enjoy media battlefield advantages. The Israel-Hezbollah conflict was not so much a defeat of Israel as it was a defeat of the old-style warfare by the new. The same can be said about the U.S. military in Iraq. The best nineteenth-century cavalry army would be impotent against small and well-trained tank and mechanized infantry divisions. And with modern warfare becoming increasingly political, intelligence-based, and waged on the information battlefield, it is time to restructure the military to answer these challenges. The time to wake up and rethink the paradigms is now. Tomorrow may be too late.

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1 Ariel Cohen, Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Greenwood Publishers, 1998).

2 Ayman Al Zawahiri, quoted in Bruce Hoffman, "Combating Al Qaeda and the Militant Islamic Threat," Testimony presented to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, rand Corporation ct-255 (February 2006).

3 Anthony Cordesman, "Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War," Center for Strategic and International Studies (August 27, 2006).

4 Julie Stahl, "Radical Group May Declare Islamic Caliphate in Gaza," cnsnews.com (August 24, 2006).

5 Opheera McDoom, "Islamist Threaten to Fight U.N. Darfur Force," Reuters (August 25, 2006). See also, Ariel Cohen, "Hizb ut-Tahrir: An Emerging Threat to U.S. Interests in Central Asia," Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder 1656 (May 30, 2003).

6 Ari Shavit, "Systemic Failure," Haaretz (August 4, 2006); Yuval Steinitz (the former chairman of the Knesset foreign affairs and defense committee), "The War That Was Led Astray," Haaretz (August 17, 2006).

7 Interview with the author, retired general, Israeli general staff (August 8, 2006).

8 Ralph Peters, "Hezbollah 3, Israel 0," New York Post (August 17, 2006).

9 Anthony Cordesman, "Qana and the Lessons for Modern War," Center for Strategic and International Studies (July 31, 2006).

10 Alan Dershowitz, "What are they Watching," New York Sun (August 23, 2007).

11 "Reuters Drops Beirut Photographer," bbc, (August 8, 2006).

12 "Hezbollah sinks Australian War Ship," Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt's Blog (August 22, 2006).

13 "The Red Cross Ambulance Incident. How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War" http: //www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/.

14 Raanan Gissin, "The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy in the War Against the Iran-Hizballah Axis of Terror," Jerusalem Issue Brief, Institute for Contemporary Affairs 6:9 (August 23, 2006).

15 Gissin, "The Critical Importance of Israeli Public Diplomacy."

16 Tamim Al-Barghouti, "Two souths, one war," Al Ahram Weekly Online (August 3-9 2006).

17 Lori Lowenthal Marcus, "What did you do in the war, unifil?" Weekly Standard (September 4, 2006).

Ariel Cohen is senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the editor and co-author of Eurasia in Balance (Ashgate, 2005.)

Policy Review

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