Watchman Newsletter

Hezbollah says it’s ready for fresh war with Israel – and stronger now

Christian Science Monitor (Link) - Nicholas Blanford (May 7, 2010)

Nearly four years after Hezbollah fought invading Israeli troops to a standstill in south Lebanon, the militant Shiite group says it’s prepared for a fresh conflict and confident of victory.

“We are ready for another war and we eagerly await it,” says veteran Hezbollah fighter Abu Hadi on a drive through the Bekaa Valley. “We expect the next war to be short. The Israelis will not be able to endure what we will do to them.”

Hezbollah’s leadership insists it does not seek a war and that its military preparations are a defense against potential Israeli aggression. Yet, the inconclusive outcome of the 2006 war has stoked a feeling here that another war is inevitable.

War drums have been beating faster in recent weeks amid allegations that Syria has supplied Hezbollah with Scud ballistic missiles – a development that has enraged Israel, forced Lebanese leaders to seek international support, and complicated a gradual US-Syria rapprochement. On May 3, President Obama renewed sanctions on Syria for a year because of its “continuing support for terrorist organizations and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and missile programs.”

8 Theories For Why The Stock Market Plunged Almost 1000 Points In A Matter Of Minutes On May 6th

The Economic Collapse (Link) (May 7, 2010)

In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points on Thursday, May 6th before bouncing back to close down 347.80 points.  This represented the biggest intraday decline since 1987.  But what made this crash so absolutely shocking is that it happened in the course of less than an hour.  Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. the Dow lost over 700 points before dramatically bouncing back about 600 points.  Two of the 30 stocks in the Dow, Procter & Gamble and 3M, plunged more than 30% in just 15 minutes.  Accenture went from trading at around 40 dollars a share all the way down to one cent before bouncing back.  Traders and investors were left completely stunned and wondering what in the world had just happened. 

So what did happen? The following are some of the most common theories being put forward to explain what happened....

Time to plan for war

The Jerusalem Post (Link) - Caroline Glick (May 7, 2010)

So much for US President Barack Obama’s famed powers of persuasion. At the UN’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference that opened this week, the Obama administration managed to lose control over the agenda before the conference even started.

Obama administration officials said they intended to use the conference as a platform to mount international pressure on Iran to stop its illicit nuclear proliferation activities. But even before the conference began, with a little prodding from Egypt, the administration agreed that instead of focusing on Iran, the conference would adopt Iran’s chosen agenda: attacking Israel for its alleged nuclear arsenal.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that US officials were conducting negotiations with Egypt about Egypt’s demand that the NPT review conference call for sanctions against Israel for refusing to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state. The Journal quoted a senior administration official involved in the discussions saying, “We’ve made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the US has been willing to do before.”

Among other possibilities, that proposal may have included a US agreement to appoint a UN envoy responsible for organizing a UN conference calling for the greater Middle East to become a nuclear-free zone. In diplomatese, “Middle East nuclear-free zone” is a well-accepted euphemism for stripping Israel of its purported nuclear capability while turning a blind eye to Iranian, Syrian and other Islamic nuclear weapons programs. Egypt’s demand, which it convinced more than 100 members of the Non-Aligned Bloc to sign onto, is for Israel to open its nuclear installations to international inspectors as a first step towards unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Sophisticated M600 Missiles Put Tel Aviv in Range of Hizbullah

The Media Line (Link) (May 5, 2010)

Syria has provided Hizbullah with a supply of M600 missiles during the past year according to the head of research for Israel’s military intelligence. The Syrian copy of an Iranian design has a range of 187 miles, which places Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, within Hizbullah’s sights. The weapon carries an explosive payload of up to one-half ton.

Attention was recently focused on whether Syria has transferred Scud missiles to Hizbullah – a charge American and Israeli leaders have since been wary of making. But word that Hizbullah has M600s renders the Scud issue less significant because of the missile’s range and the power it packs.

The majority of Israel’s population is clustered within the greater Tel Aviv area. The revelation was made before the parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee by Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, the army’s head of intelligence research. He confirmed what most believe: that Hizbullah today is much stronger than it was when it fought a war against Israel in 2006. Drawing the line to Damascus, Baidatz said that “Hezbollah is now regarded by the Syrians as a component of their defense establishment.”

Price of peace, unity in Europe

The News Herald (Link) - Georgie Anne Geyer (May 5, 2010)

The last time I visited the European Union offices in Brussels its top official quickly got to the core underlying hope for the unity of Europe in this era.

“After this, we will have no more wars,” the impressive Spaniard Javier Solana stated firmly, but also with a touch of wonder, “because our states will simply be too intertwined for that to be possible.”

Unquestionably, that single noble thought captured the passion behind the determination of many post-World War II Europeans who, since the 1950s, had patiently hammered out the principles and institutions of a united Europe. And today, their accomplishments, with 27 members in the EU and 16 members in the eurozone, are impressive indeed.

But now, as has so often happened throughout history, one of the smallest parts of the union is threatening to tear the entire magnificent weave apart. The miscreant, of course, is Greece, a country whose tax collectors have never quite matched its restaurateurs in cleverness.

And, irony of ironies, it is big, industrial, tax-paying Germany — the country whose larger depredations in the war formed precisely that postwar generation of Europeans — that the union would like to leave with the bill.

US faces inflation or default

Gulf News (Link) - Nouriel Roubini (May 5, 2010)

There are only two solutions to the sovereign debt crisis — raise taxes or cut spending — but the political gridlock may prevent either from happening.

Financial crises have occurred very often in history. They are caused by unsustainable bubbles that go bust, and from excessive risk-taking and debt-leveraging by the private sector during the bubble. Then in the wake of, and as part of the response to, the economic downturn, government debts and deficits grow to unsustainable levels that can lead to default or inflation if not corrected. The crisis we are going through now follows this pattern.

Today there is a lot of talk about “de-leveraging,” yet the data shows that de-leveraging has barely begun. Debt ratios in the corporate sector as well as households in the US have essentially stabilised at high levels.

At the same time, we are seeing a massive “re-leveraging” of the public sector with budget deficits on the order of 10 per cent of GDP. The IMF and OECD are projecting that the stock of public debt in advanced economies is going to double and reach an average level of 100 per cent of GDP in the coming years.

Denying Jihad — Again

Frontpage (Link) - Robert Spencer (May 5, 2010)

We know now that the car bomb in Times Square was an attempted Islamic jihad attack. But the mainstream media, following its usual pattern, is once again denying, minimizing, or obfuscating this fact.

Writing in The Nation on Monday, Robert Dreyfuss epitomized the mainstream media’s hope that the car bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence plates were stolen.”

In reality, according to Pakistani authorities, Faisal Shahzad, the would-be car bomber, attended a jihad training camp in that country. He spent five months in Pakistan recently, including some time in Peshawar, a center of Al-Qaeda and Taliban activity. A Pakistani Taliban group claimed responsibility for the attack — a claim that American authorities immediately dismissed, but which gained a new claim to serious consideration when Shahzad’s Pakistani connections were revealed.

Is the U.S. Trying to Expose Israel Nukes?

benjamin.joffe-walt.com (Link) - Benjamin Joffe-Walt (May 4, 2010)

Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity seems to be dying a slow death titled ‘nuclear free Middle East.’

On first glance, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments at the United Nations General Assembly on Monday were rather innocuous.

Speaking to the month-long review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the pact meant to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, Clinton accused Iran of attempting “to evade accountability” regarding it’s nuclear program; pointed out that Iran was the “only country in this hall that has been found by the IAEA board of governors to be currently in noncompliance with its nuclear safeguards obligations”; and made a litany of heartwarming remarks about preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

But the ‘sea change’ comment, as some are calling it, came buried in the second part of the secretary’s speech:

“We support efforts to realize the goal of a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East,” Clinton said. “We are prepared to support practical measures that will move the U.S. toward achieving that objective.”

The announcement was coupled with the revelation, first reported in The Guardian, that the U.S. and Russia have drafted an initiative to create a nuclear-free Middle East, with details to be worked out in a future regional conference.

Whoops! CO2 has almost nothing to do with global warming, discovers top US meteorologist

Telegraph UK (Link) - James Delingpole (May 4, 2010)

The other night I had a nightmare in which a general election was approaching and all three main competing parties had the same suicidal policy. They all believed in this thing called the Big Bad Fairy and were convinced that the only way to drive off the BBF and her evil hordes was by spending huge sums of taxpayers’ money – £18 billion a year was, I believe, the figure quoted in the nightmare – and by ruining the country with ugly, spinning Fairy Towers for the bad fairy hordes to nest in.

Then I woke up and found…

Seriously, though, what do we do? How we can possibly stop the environmental and energy policy of our next government being based on what US meteorologist Dr Roy Spencer calls “the worst case of mass hysteria the world has known?”

Dr Spencer, formerly senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, now leads the US science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSRE) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He co-developed the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites. He’s just the kind of egghead the IPCC claims to represent when it tells us the world is getting dangerously warmer, it’s man’s fault – the result of CO₂ emissions – and it must be urgently addressed.

Except Dr Spencer doesn’t agree with any of that. He thinks it’s all nonsense, based on a very elementary error he describes in his new book The Great Global Warming Blunder. I summarise his arguments in this article.

Israel to open peace talks with demands on security, water

Haaretz (Link) - Avi Issacharoff & Barak Ravid (May 3, 2010)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to open the indirect talks with the Palestinian Authority this week with a discussion of the security arrangements in the West Bank and of water resources. A senior official told Haaretz that Netanyahu had recently asked the defense establishment and the National Security Council to elaborate on the so-called eight-points brief, which lists Israel’s security demands in terms of a permanent status agreement, as framed by Ehud Olmert’s government.

The PLO executive committee is expected Monday to officially decide to renew negotiations.

Israeli diplomats believe the Palestinians will prefer to open the negotiations with discussion of the borders - an issue on which the Palestinians think they have an advantage over the Israelis, since the United States position on this matter is close to their own.

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority agreed to the American demand to talk about the core issues of a permanent status agreement: borders, Jerusalem, security, water, settlements and refugees. However, each side has its own priorities which it will choose to focus on, and with which it will prefer to begin negotiations.