|
The MoA Week In Review – ISIS and U.S./Saudi Weapons – Open Thread 2018-26
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
U.S. Secretary of State Pomous Maximus laid out 12 demands towards Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei responded with 6 demands to the Europeans.
How the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the Zionists bought the White House.
Since the Central Bank intervention on Wednesday the Lira stopped its scary drop. I expect it to resume soon.
With their flurry of action the Korean President Moon and Chairman Kim are running circles around the Trump team. This is not the "maximum pressure" on North Korea U.S. president Trump envisioned.
bigger
Please drop us a dime or two or more.
Here are two more items for you to read:
Hersh describes for Harpers how his classic shoe leather reporting dug up the evidence. A quite amusing read.
CAR with detail data on who supplied ISIS with weapons and ammunition. Unsurprising for those who read here it finds:
Unauthorised retransfer—the violation of agreements by which a supplier government prohibits the re-export of materiel by a recipient government without its prior consent—is a significant source of IS weapons and ammunition. The United States and Saudi Arabia supplied most of this materiel without authorisation, apparently to Syrian opposition forces. This diverted materiel, recovered from IS forces, comprises exclusively Warsaw Pact calibre weapons and ammunition, purchased by the United States and Saudi Arabia from European Union (EU) Member States in Eastern Europe.
…
Supplies of materiel into the Syrian conflict from foreign parties—notably the United States and Saudi Arabia—have indirectly allowed IS to obtain substantial quantities of anti-armour ammunition. These weapons include ATGWs and several varieties of rocket with tandem warheads, which are designed to defeat modern reactive armour. These systems continue to pose a significant threat to the coalition of troops arrayed against IS forces.
…
The report concludes that international weapon supplies to factions in the Syrian conflict have significantly augmented the quantity and quality of weapons available to IS forces—in numbers far beyond those that would have been available to the group through battlefield capture alone.
Use as open thread …
@63 A good comment from one of Guardian articles regarding Italy. It is worth the read:
“Italy’s written Constitution (1947) bans referenda on any international treaty, so no Italian voter has ever been directly consulted on any of the treaties of the EU since it started in Rome in 1957, not even the Euro. Italy’s Constitution also creates a bicameral structure of equal powers between the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, which has frequently stalemated the Italian Parliament. They also have some ‘Peers’ in Italy, whereby the President can appoint ‘Senators for Life’.
Following a decade of economic stagnation after joining the Euro at the Millennium, Berlusconi threatened to take Italy out of the Single Currency at an EU Conference in 2011 when Merkel and Sarkozy ganged up on him over the Fiscal Compact and publicly mocked him. Within days of his threat, telephone intercepts were released to the media in which Berlusconi had privately described Angela Merkel as ‘an unfuckable lard-arse’, and he was quickly deposed from power and pursued for corruption to prevent him standing for re-election. (By apparent coincidence, the Head of the IMF, Dominic Strauss-Khan, was also removed at this time when his mobile phone was compromised, and he was pursued for sexual assault allegations, preventing him from standing as the anti-Euro Socialist candidate in the upcoming 2012 French Elections). The Italian President then appointed the former Italian PM and EU Commissioner for Financial Services (ex Goldman Sachs) Mario Monti as a technocratic PM, the very same Mario Monti in Brussels today proposing a raft of taxes for the next EU Budget to help bail out the Euro.
When Elections in Italy were allowed in 2013, the result was a hung Parliament under Prime Minister Letta, who was soon replaced by the Italian President in favour of Matteo Renzi, nicknamed ‘Merkenzi’, because of his closeness to Angela Merkel. He in turn proposed a new successor for President, Sergio Mattarella, an ally of former Italian Prime Minister and EU President, Romano Prodi, (ex-Goldman Sachs), responsible for introducing the Euro, despite members like Italy and Greece not meeting the convergence criteria (except by creative accounting and a river of Goldman Sachs credit default swaps).
Matteo Renzi sought constitutional reforms to speed up austerity measures and to abolish Italy’s CNEL (National Council for Economics and Labour) which was opposed to the kind of labour reforms that Hollande and Macron were undertaking in France using presidential decrees to bypass the French Parliament. The Italian Parliament was unable to muster enough votes to pass these reforms, so Renzi put them to a Constitutional Referendum in December 2016, and Italian voters rejected them on a 60/40 vote.
In new Elections in March this year, voters abandoned the Party of Matteo Renzi, breaking unevenly to Five Star and Lega, which both reject Euro austerity, but from different right and left perspectives. Their subsequent attempt to form a coalition led President Mattarella to nominate a mutually-agreeable candidate, Giuseppe Conte, last week. Article 92 of the Italian Constitution sets out his power:
“The President of the Republic nominates the Prime Minister and, on his proposal, the Ministers.”
But having nominated Giuseppe Conte as PM, he did not reciprocate in Mr Conte’s discretion to propose Paolo Savona as Minister of Finance, because Savona had described the Euro as ‘an historic mistake’. Mr Conte has understandably declined to become PM, and the President has turned to Carlo Cottarelli, a former Executive Director of the IMF (previously appointed by Matteo Renzi), and known as ‘Mr Scissors’ for cutting public spending. Mr Cottarelli said ten days ago there was ‘no possibility’ he would become PM.
The Italian President evidently doesn’t want another Election before 2019, to avoid clashing with the end of Brexit negotiations, supposed to be finished by October, and the last thing Brussels wants is a controversial Election in Italy on the Euro, which could seriously compromise their negotiating position on Brexit.”
Posted by: Peter Schmidt | May 29 2018 5:31 utc | 57
|
