Another war warning

In December last year, and again last month, I warned that conditions appeared ripe for an outbreak of war somewhere in the globe during the following year.  Now Karl Denninger has issued his own warning, based on current events.  It's relevant to my earlier articles linked above, and also to my perspective on Islamophobia published a few days ago.

Perhaps we should ... reflect a bit on where we are, where we're headed ... and why the policies and positions taken by our current administration, along with the ham-handed garbage coming from the Romney campaign, are so dangerous both to us and on a global scale.

I presume that we all know that we were "sponsors" of the "Arab Spring", right?  After years of funding and protecting the murderous bastard Hosni Mubarak we suddenly "decided" that we'd go along with a civilian uprising protesting (and reasonably so!) his behavior.

Ordinarily this would be an easy sale; after all, freedom is a good thing, right?

There's only one problem -- we had been funding and arming this thug for decades.  When the crowd got a bit rowdy, as a consequence, the tear gas cannisters that started flying had Made In The USA emblazoned on their sides.  This didn't do anything for our international standing among these people, as you might imagine.

Mubarak, for his part, didn't exactly go quietly.  And who would blame him?  Up-armed and up-armored with American funds he used them -- on his own people.  It was illegal for civilians to own a rifle in Egypt, but pistols were lawful.  Soon rifle shots could be heard into the crowd; they were coming from the police shooting from the roofs, not the citizens.

Eventually Mubarak left, but not before the people basically shut down the country.

What wasn't paid attention to was where the tinder came from to get the fire burning nice and hot -- our own Fed and monetary policy were largely responsible by nearly doubling the cost of food commodities in a land linked to our dollar.

Hungry people are pretty easy to gin up into a riotous mob.

You might have thought these pressures had decreased and improved over the last year and change.  You'd be wrong.  Over the last week or so an emboldened Taliban and Al-Qaeda decided to "commemorate" the terrorist acts of 9/11 with a bit of trouble over in the Middle East and Afghanistan, what has been come to be known as "The Suck."  You've probably all heard of the sackings of our diplomatic missions in various countries around the Middle East, including the forcible sodomy and murder of one of our ambassadors.  But you may have not heard much about an audacious raid on a NATO base in Southern Afghanistan.

We killed the attackers in the latter case, but not before they damaged or destroyed eight Harriers, causing $200 million in damage to material and killing two marines.  This was a sophisticated assault, not the act of a "riotous mob."  Likewise, the attacks in Libya and elsewhere showed evidence of significant planning, command and control.  None of these assaults were simple acts of an angry mob of people*****ed off about some video; these were military operations taken against United States soil, men and material and they were coordinated by the parties undertaking them.

. . .

The worst of the unrest, however, isn't there and isn't being widely-reported.  It's in China.

China and Japan have had a long-running territorial dispute over some a handful of islands.  Over the weekend what had been a simmering issue turned into a real problem with Chinese rising up and doing something extraordinary:  They are demanding WAR with Japan.

These are not just people waving signs either.  They are burning Japanese-linked stores and factories, from sushi places to car dealers.  Automobile owners are being ejected from their vehicles on a forcible basis and their cars destroyed.   And while I'm sure some official agitation is involved this appears to have caught a number of people by surprise, including officials from Japan and the United States.

Behind this, once again, is rapidly-deteriorating economic "progress" in China.  Once again rapidly rising inflation in a nation that has a per-capita GDP of about $4,000, where what we would consider small changes in food and energy cost literally put people into a situation where they are now hungry, can severely destabilize a society.

. . .

Economic dislocation can rapidly escalate into military action, and a military act undertaken between China and Japan would be catastrophic for the global economic trade system.

I'm not particularly concerned about China's military capability with regard to the United States. Japan, on the other hand, has something to be worried about, and these are people with very old grudges embedded into their national psyche.

. . .

Anyone who thinks this is going to remain contained or calm down in the short term has rocks in their head.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended (and very disturbing) reading.

Peter