The Build-Up To War Continues: Wars And Rumors Of War IV

First of all and quite predictably, we see that Iran will basically ignore the provisions of the so-called "agreement". Meanwhile their build-up to war also continues, along with the other nations mentioned below:

Iran Halts Nuclear Talks

Iranian negotiators in Vienna called off nuclear talks late Thursday with world powers, citing a need for “consultations” with Tehran.

“The Iranian negotiators interrupted the talks with the P5+1 [Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany] for consultations in Tehran,” the Islamic Republic New Agency (IRNA) reported Friday.

Negotiators from both sides had been discussing implementation measures to the interim nuclear deal reached in the Swiss capital last month, in which Iran agreed to scale back parts of its controversial nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

AFP reported Friday that the decision to halt the talks came hours afterWashington blacklisted a dozen overseas companies and individuals for evading US sanctions on Iran.

“Today’s actions should be a stark reminder to businesses, banks and brokers everywhere that we will continue relentlessly to enforce our sanctions, even as we explore the possibility of a long-term, comprehensive resolution of our concerns with Iran’s nuclear program,” Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence David Cohen was quoted by AFP as saying.

Spirit Of Deal 'Violated': Iran Quits Nuclear Talks

Iran has halted fraught nuclear talks with the West, saying that Washington has acted contrary to the spirit of a ‘landmark agreement’ established last month. The US has widened its blacklists, adding further people and companies under current sanctions.

“The negotiations were halted by [the] Iranian delegation because of new American sanctions. The Iranian negotiating team has halted the talks at this stage and are headed back to the capital due to America's lack of commitment to the agreement,” Iranian news agency, Mehr, reported Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Abbas Araqchi, as saying.

Iran had agreed to freeze sections of its program, in exchange for approximately $7 billion in relief from economic sanctions imposed by the West. However, it emerged that approximately a dozen international firms were blacklisted for evading US-imposed sanctions on Thursday, despite warnings.

Araqchi said that the US was “against the spirit of the Geneva deal,” and that Tehran was weighing up its‘appropriate’ response.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said on Tuesday that the recent nuclear deal struck between his nation and world powers would evaporate should the United States Congress impose new economic sanctions on Iran.

Russia fully backed Iran’s indignant sentiment: “The US administration's decision goes against the spirit of this document,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said, referring to the deal reached on November 24. Russia was among the six world powers brokering the talks.

“Widening American 'blacklists' could seriously complicate the fulfillment of the Geneva agreement, which proposes easing the sanctions regime,” Zakharova added.

US administration officials insisted that the timing was coincidental.

Iran Returns Space Monkey To Earth, Stages Crisis In Nuclear Talks

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani announced Saturday, Dec. 14, that a monkey had been successfully launched into space and brought back to earth safely aboard a home-made bio-capsule. The mission, dubbed Fargam (Auspicious), was the first to run on liquid fuel, he said, without providing any further technical information.

In January, when Iran sent its first monkey into space, American and Israeli strategists were caught by surprise by the technological capability displayed and alarmed by its military connotations.
Tehran’s space program demonstrates its missiles’ capability to reach any point on earth.

This is all the more disturbing in the context of the commitment Iran undertook under the interim nuclear accord it signed with the six powers on Nov. 24, to refrain from developing nuclear-capable missiles with ranges beyond 2,000 km. 

The space launch Saturday virtually nullified that commitment. It was evidently part of a carefully staged action to put the entire Geneva accord on the skids at the first opportunity. The Iranians followed through on it after the White House acted Thursday, Dec. 12, to tighten sanctions by adding new Iranian companies and individuals engaged in the oil industry to the list of targets.

Tehran had repeatedly threatened to break off nuclear negotiations if more sanctions were imposed.

And indeed, Friday, the Iranian delegation abruptly terminated the talks taking place with the six powers in Vienna, announcing they must return home for consultations.

The course Tehran has embarked on in the last 24 hours has three objectives:

1. To squeeze President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry into implementing the Geneva accord on Iran’s terms.

The administration began releasing frozen Iranian assets after the signing in Geneva but neglected to write into the document a date for Iran to start implementing its part of the deal.
This omission has given Tehran additional leverage.

2. The space monkey’s launch symbolized Tehran’s determination to carry on with the military aspects of its nuclear program (which too were left out of the Geneva agreement) and the development of ballistic missiles able to carry nuclear warheads.

3.  To show Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that his campaign for harsher sanctions against Iran - and the support it has gained in the US Congress - will lead nowhere. President Obama is given a choice between going back on the new sanctions or forgetting about a negotiated settlement of the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program.

Either way, Tehran doesn’t have much to lose. The promise to freeze its nuclear program, for the six months of negotiations on a comprehensive agreement, was left up in the air in Vienna and the Islamic Repubic's legitimate right to continue enrichment has been undersigned by six world powers.

Pace Of Russian Rearmament Quickens

A massive modernization push is imminent for Russian aerospace defense: The air force alone could receive 4.5 trillion rubles ($136 billion) over 10 years, about one-quarter of the overall drive to upgrade Russia’s Soviet-era weaponry.

The money will help replace about 70% of the air force fleet by 2020 and position it to acquire the Sukhoi T-50—a fighter advanced enough to rival the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—as well as a stealthy, long-range bomber, and to overhaul its surface-to-air missile stockpile. However, analysts caution that the plan’s financial scope may be unrealistic.

For now, the investments are on track. During a series of briefings by military officials and defense manufacturers in late November, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the procurement program adopted in 2010. The meetings amounted to the first public audit of the program to ensure that the investments are on track—a domestic show of support for the Russian defense industry, despite the country’s economic stagnation.

The list includes accelerating replacement of old aircraft in the air force fleet. Putin has announced that the military will have received 86 new and, modernized fixed-wing aircraft and more than 100 new helicopters this year, and will take delivery of up to 120 fixed-wing aircraft and 90 helicopters in 2014. In 2011 and 2012, just 263 new aircraft were delivered to the military units.

By 2020, the air force aims to have a total of 1,600 new aircraft, renewing about 70% of its fleet.

So far, the air force’s orderbook consists of Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bombers and Su-30M2/SM and Su-35 multirole fighters. In 2014, the air force plans to rearm one air regiment with the Su-34s, according to Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. A training air base in Borisoglebsk is to be reequipped with Yakovlev Yak-130 jet trainers; 18 of the type were delivered in 2013, out of 55 ordered.

According to the head of the United Aircraft Corp. (UAC), Mikhail Pogosyan, the Sukhoi T-50 will start official evaluation tests with the air force in 2014. The first phase of these trials is expected to be completed in 2015, he says. The five prototypes involved in the preliminary test program have logged more than 450 flights. The Russian defense ministry issued technical requirements for the future long-range bomber to the corporation in September. “We are now at the stage of drawing up the contracts to start the full-scale development of this aircraft beginning next year,” Pogosyan says.

Is War With China Inevitable?

As a general rule, extreme economic decline is almost always followed by extreme international conflict. Sometimes, these disasters can be attributed to the human survival imperative and the desire to accumulate resources during crisis. But most often, war amid fiscal distress is usually a means for the political and financial elite to distract the masses away from their empty wallets and empty stomachs.

War galvanizes societies, usually under false pretenses. I’m not talking about superficial “police actions” or absurd crusades to “spread democracy” to Third World enclaves that don’t want it. No, I’m talking about REAL war: war that threatens the fabric of a culture, war that tumbles violently across people’s doorsteps. The reality of near-total annihilation is what oligarchs use to avoid blame for economic distress while molding nations and populations.

Because of the very predictable correlation between financial catastrophe and military conflagration, it makes quite a bit of sense for Americans today to be concerned. Never before in history has our country been so close to full-spectrum economic collapse, the kind that kills currencies and simultaneously plunges hundreds of millions of people into poverty. It is a collapse that has progressed thanks to the deliberate efforts of international financiers and central banks. It only follows that the mind-boggling scale of the situation would “require” a grand distraction to match.

It is difficult to predict what form this distraction will take and where it will begin, primarily because the elites have so many options. The Mideast is certainly an ever-looming possibility. Iran is a viable catalyst. Syria is not entirely off the table. Saudi Arabia and Israel are now essentially working together, forming a strange alliance that could promise considerable turmoil — even without the aid of the United States. Plenty of Americans still fear the Al Qaeda bogeyman, and a terrorist attack is not hard to fabricate. However, when I look at the shift of economic power and military deployment, the potential danger areas appear to be growing not only in the dry deserts of Syria and Iran, but also in the politically volatile waters of the East China Sea.

China is THE key to any outright implosion of the U.S. monetary system. Other countries, like Saudi Arabia, may play a part; but ultimately it will be China that deals the decisive blow against the dollar’s world reserve status. China’s dollar and Treasury bond holdings could be used as a weapon to trigger a global sell-off of dollar-denominated assets. China has stopped future increases of dollar forex holdings, and has cut the use of the dollar in bilateral trade agreements with multiple countries.  Oil-producing nations are shifting alliances to China because it is now the world’s largest consumer of petroleum. And, China has clearly been preparing for this eventuality for years. So, given these circumstances, how can the U.S. government conceive of confrontation with the East? Challenging one’s creditors to a duel does not usually end well. At the very least, it would be economic suicide. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps America is meant to make this seemingly idiotic leap.

Here are just some of the signs of a buildup to conflict…

Currency Wars And Shooting Wars

In March 2009, U.S. military and intelligence officials gathered to participate in a simulated war game, a hypothetical economic struggle between the United States and China.

The conclusions of the war game were ominous. The participants determined that there was no way for the United States to win in an economic battle with China. The Chinese had a counterstrategy to every U.S. effort and an ace up their sleeve – namely, their U.S. dollar reserves, which they could use as a monetary neutron bomb, a chain reaction that would result in the abandonment of the dollar by exporters around the world . They also found that China has been quietly accumulating hard assets (including land and gold) across globe, using sovereign wealth funds, government-controlled front companies, and private equity funds to make the purchases. China could use these tangible assets as a hedge to protect against the eventual devaluation of its U.S. dollar and Treasury holdings, meaning the losses on its remaining U.S. financial investments was acceptable should it decide to crush the dollar.

The natural response of those skeptical of the war game and its findings is to claim that the American military would be the ultimate trump card and probable response to a Chinese economic threat. Of course, China’s relationship with Russia suggests a possible alliance against such an action and would definitely negate the use of nuclear weapons (unless the elites plan nuclear Armageddon). That said, it is highly likely that the U.S. government would respond with military action to a Chinese dollar dump, not unlike Germany’s rise to militarization and totalitarianism after the hyperinflationary implosion of the mark. The idea that anyone except the internationalists could “win” such a venture, though, is foolish.

I would suggest that this may actually be the plan of globalists in the United States and their counterparts in Asia and Europe. China’s rise to financial prominence is not due to its economic prowess. In fact, China is ripe with poor fiscal judgment calls and infrastructure projects that have gone nowhere. But what China does have on its side are massive capital inflows from global banks and corporations, mainly based in the United States and the European Union. And, it has help in the spread of its currency (the Yuan) from entities like JPMorgan Chase and Co. The International Monetary Fund is seeking to include China in its global basket currency, the SDR, which would give China even more leverage to use in breaking the dollar’s reserve status. Corporate financiers and central bankers have made itmore than possible for China to kill the dollar, which they openly suggest is a “good thing.”

Is it possible that the war game scenarios carried out by the Pentagon and elitist think-tanks like the RAND Corporation were not meant to prevent a war with China, but to ensure one takes place?

The Senkaku Islands

Every terrible war has a trigger point, an event that history books later claim “started it all.” For the Spanish-American War, it was the bombing of the USS Maine. For World War I it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. For U.S. involvement in World War I, it was the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-Boat. For U.S. involvement in World War II, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor. For Vietnam, it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (I recommend readers look into the hidden history behind all of these events). While the initial outbreak of war always appears to be spontaneous, the reality is that most wars are planned far in advance.

As evidence indicates, China has been deliberately positioned to levy an economic blow against the United States. Our government is fully aware what the results of that attack will be, considering they have gamed the scenario multiple times. And, by RAND Corporation’s own admission, China and the United States have been preparing for physical confrontation for some time, centered on the concept of pre-emptive strikes.  Meaning, the response both sides have exclusively trained for in the event of confrontation is to attack the other first!

The seemingly simple and petty dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea actually provides a perfect environment for the pre-emptive powder keg to explode.

Also see:

The One About...Loaves, Fishes, Math And Marxism

[This is a really good read by Ann Barnhardt. Her conclusion:

God always performs the miracle first, then invites us to worship Him, and delivers heaven.

Satan, through the State, demands the worship first, promising miracles as a reward for the worship, and then delivers nothing but hell.]

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Obama Setting Dangerous Precedent

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