Occupation, Bound for Conflict: US Builds New Military Base on Syrian-Iraq Border
The Military Industrial Complex will need reforms, remove profit motive
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Despite the losing position of the US in its bid to destroy and divide Syria, the illegally occupying Atlanticist power is apparently making a statement that it intends to make its eventual exit as lucrative for the military industrial complex as possible. Today FRN has confirmed that the US is going to be building a new military base in the Al Qaim region which sends some extremely important signals, internally in the US. At issue is the organization of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) as a ‘for profit’ enterprise which forms a whole leg of the economy on its own.
Rather than being a total loss ‘cost’, it is a subsidy which was historically parlayed into a ‘revenue positive’ enterprise as it opened up ‘new markets’ for investment by the entire US economy, its industrial barons and Wall Street speculators and bankers. However, the era of using the military to open up markets is generally over, and now the speculative part alone, aided by fake news and skewed investment newsletters and falsified numbers at quarterly share-holder meetings, is all that generally remains.
That means that the present US military adventures are creating a speculative bubble, which works short-term for the MIC and some of the industries that the MIC promises to open up for general investment (through occupation of other countries’ resources), but mid-to-long term will be exposed as having accomplished next to nothing. A prime example of this is the occupation of the Al Qaim region. In short, as we will explain, the US MIC is ‘conning’ the US economy at large, as the MIC itself has transformed into a pyramid/Ponzi scheme of its own.
According to a source of the Iraqi Kurdish forces known as Peshmerga, the US has built a new military base in the Al Qaim region, on the border between Syria and Iraq.
Al Qaim
The US military was reportedly also preparing to set up a military base of strategic importance in the mountains of Sinjar in Iraq’s northern Mosul province. However, Iraqi general Najim Jabouri denied information on the construction of the base.
Now the situation is different, as the commander of a Peshmerga subunit, Xelil Sirvan, confirmed the fact, stating that “[…] according to the evidence, the US has built a new base in the important strategic region of Al Qaim, Anbar province, on the border between Syria and Iraq. The Americans are increasing the military presence in the region, so additional Iraqi troops have been sent to the Al Qaim region, strengthening security at the border.”
The new base is being used as part of the Syrian Democratic Forces operation in the Hejin region on the Syrian side of the border, a member of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the region said.
In addition, a senior military official indicated that the Iraqi Armed Forces were in charge of defending the border between Syria and Iraq before possible attacks by ISIS.
It is worth mentioning that the important strategic region, Al Qaim, is located along the border between Syria and Iraq and was liberated from ISIS in November 2017. This is an interesting point, because the Syrian Democratic Forces evolved out of the U.S backed Kurdish forces, but was rebranded as a successful international media campaign was able to demonstrate that the so-called FSA was, or had become, little more than a collection of defected Syrian officers leading international mercenaries and Salafists. This was no different in function than the Iraqi ISIS composed of suddenly ‘Naqashbandi former Iraqi Ba’athist officers and Sunni rebels’.
The mythology of ‘liberation from ISIS’ by U.S backed forces has also been a fascinating one. By and large, it has been exposed that the low-level small arms exchanges and skirmishes between various U.S backed forces were by and large a simulacrum, made chiefly for television (Al Jazeera, etc.), in order to explain why the U.S was suddenly occupying a part of Syria. Recall that the U.S intervention in Syria was never officially premised upon overthrowing the Damascus government, or to divide the country, but rather to ‘fight ISIS’.
This means that the rebranding from Kurdish forces into the ‘SDF’ allows the U.S to deploy this army much further south than the word ‘Kurdish’ would seem to have previously allowed for.
In reality, the strategic significance of the Al-Qaim region is, in terms of justifying empire for the MIC and the US economy along holographic ‘speculative’ lines, frankly limited to two realms – it controls a major road way which allows for the easy military transport of Iraqi and Syrian forces to reinforce each other – now specifically against the US occupation, should events go that way, as it appears they eventually would now.
Second, it happens to sit right upon the presently defunct (due to sabotage and war-damage), Iraq-Syria gas and oil pipeline. Compare the map below to the map above, of the pipeline, the road way, and the US base being built right now.
This means the US is trying to give speculative signals that its going forward with this part of its occupation and partition plan. As FRN has noted numerous times, the US goes forward with constituent parts of its plans irrespective of whether other critical parts for the plan to work are effectively in place. This is for several reasons, among them it is important to report back to shareholders and investors that ‘things are moving forward as planned, despite less important set-backs here and there’. In reality, this ‘strategic position’ will prove not to be, as Syria and Iraq have been sorting alternatives to the present pipeline for quite some time. This defunct pipeline will remain defunct, and will not serve a strategic purpose for the US, even though the US will effectively sell it as such to MIC shareholders. The swindle is in full effect. Second, in terms of vehicle and soldier mobility, the increase of the use of air by Syria, Iraq, and Iran is also connected to the general decline of US air superiority. The US does not own the skies above ‘Syraq’ and will not, and therefore the strategic significance of road-ways is diminished.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump spoke on Tuesday at the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Emphasizing the need for a new UN-led peace process in Syria, Trump threatened to react if Damascus used chemical weapons.
The US president said Washington is seeking “a political solution that will honor the will of the Syrian people.” Attacking Tehran for its assistance to Syria in its fight against terrorism, Trump noted that the solution to the conflict in Syria must “face the corrupt dictatorship in Iran.”
This is highly problematic, and indicates that the Russian, Syrian, and Iranian leadership have had a correct analysis since 2013/14, that the only way this conflict will come to an end is with a political settlement. The U.S is digging in to various parts of Iraq and Syria, including their massive base in Iraq which is called the ‘U.S Embassy’. All together, this means that there will be some high level horse trading if the U.S is ever to be finally extracted from sovereign Syria and Iraq, or it will have to take a series of large-scale and humiliating military defeats which compels a positive political resolution.
The U.S has presently some 800 military bases around the world, and yet many are under an impression that this creates a more costly manner of maintaining power. Rather, given the high cost of living in the U.S, propped up by a government backed banking system, ‘too big to fail’, there is not a price correction mechanism that can see real-estate prices reach their real equilibrium. This makes housing for soldiers much more expensive than it would be otherwise, and so having a forward deployed military, even under conditions of hostile occupation, is cost effective in terms of the salary/wage commitments to US personnel serving in the military.
Mid to long term, the US dollar will increasingly become an internal currency within the US which has dwindling purchasing power in global markets, as important countries like China increasingly dump US T-bonds. The US will ultimately be forced to either spend its weakened currency to purchase support in various parts of the empire, or it will have to deploy its own increasingly stretched and demoralized military into far-flung regions of its collapsing empire. The second option may work in terms of the use of its own dollar to some extent, but here we are faced with the problem of personnel.
Ultimately the US will require some ‘Marian Reforms’, and change the way that its ‘generalissimos’ are paid. The stock-ownership options within military-industrial-complex firms will have to ultimately be a relic of the past, and the MIC itself will no longer be able to function as it does today. Rather, costs will have to be controlled, the MIC will not be able to function as its own leg of the speculative/investment economy – wherein it presently extraordinarily over-bills for regular costs, making the generals who own stock also very wealthy and prone to make infamous errors of judgment in terms of troop deployment and foreign adventures. This over-billing then, in turn, makes these MIC firms able to invest in other parts of the global economy, making the MIC itself a government financed wing of the economy, not subject to market correction. Presently the US military functions as a ‘ go-to mechanism of socialism-for-the-rich of war and conquest’ rather than a conservative institution of last resort.
The US’s signals that it intends to maintain a serious occupation in Syria means that it is presently reassuring the MIC stock holders, and creating a series of uninformed and speculation based decisions at the level of military planners themselves. By having the generals in on the stock ownership, there is lacking the important fire-wall between sober military analysis and the speculative arm of the economy. Prior to WWII, this division was more clear, and military planners would have been in the position to butt heads with Wall Street and speculators investing into the arms industry. Today, as co-owners with lucrative stock options, America’s generals are first among those to call for strategically retarded decisions, on the sole basis of tax expenditure for war, converted into private ‘profits’ which in fact are subsidies brought in at the financial expense of tax-payers, and the blood expense of the occupied and innocent around the world.
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