Japan Times:Obama will formally present a new national security strategy early next year

Okay …good job American Media, but I know you are busy demonizing the cruel overlords of Hobby Lobby right now,and their tyranny in forcing women employees to have sex and and have children by not paying for their birth control or abortions, and also spending all that time researching Obamacare success stories.

The new policy document will be the second of Obama’s administration and will likely update the previous one, released in May 2010, in several important areas. Those include policies for fighting the next phase of the war against al-Qaida, the shift of national security resources to Asia and a plan to manage declining defense budgets amid fiscal strain.

The administration will present another strategy paper on how it intends to achieve the policy ambitions to be outlined in the new national security doctrine sometime in the spring, Obama told Congress in a letter made public Friday.

The new strategy is being drafted at a time when Obama continues to face questions over his counterterrorism policy, particularly the use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the U.S. military withdraws from that region.

Meanwhile at RCD:

Would the U.S. Still Lose the Naval War of 2015?

By Harry Kazianis

The article creates a fictional scenario whereChina ”sinks” a U.S. carrier. The scenario itself is rather, well, interesting:

"Americans woke up to a different world the day after the attack. The war was over almost as soon as it had started. Outmaneuvered tactically and strategically, the United States suffered its greatest defeat at sea since Pearl Harbor. The incident—could it really be called a ‘war’?—had been preceded by a shallow diplomatic crisis between the two great powers. No one in the West expected the dispute to spiral out of control. George Washington was conducting routine patrols off the coast of China to send a signal of U.S. resolve. China responded with a signal of its own—sinking the massive ship. The ship broke in two and sank in twenty minutes. The Chinese medium-range ballistic missile had a penetrator warhead that drilled through all fourteen decks of the ship and punched a cavernous hole measuring twenty-feet wide from the flat-top landing deck through to the bottom of the hull. Ammunition stores ignited secondary explosions. Two million gallons of JP-5 jet fuel poured into the sea. The attack was calamitous and damage control was pointless."

The next paragraph then crafts a rather clever Chinese response:

"While the Pentagon was reeling to determine exactly what happened, a well-orchestrated and pre-planned ‘rescue’ effort was already underway by a flotilla of first responders from China. The Chinese media reported on the bravery of Chinese naval forces, fisheries enforcement police and common fishermen who happened to be in the vicinity of the disaster and were able to save numerous lives. The massive warship had a crew of 3,200 sailors, and there were nearly 1,800 additional sailors and airmen embarked with the wing of aircraft on board the ship. Among this floating city, thousands of souls either incinerated or drowned. In the end, China saved hundreds of desperate survivors floating in the water. Chinese state television filmed distraught young U.S. navy personnel, weeping, grateful to be alive as they were plucked from the oily water. Family members back in the States rushed to Beijing to reunite with their sons and daughters, hosted by the Chinese government and state media."

Original article is here and is well worth the read if you are cutting down on your coffee. You won’t need any after you read it.

And then …

U.S., Iran to Create Joint Chamber of Commerce, Resume Civilian Flights

The U.S. and Iran are planning to create a joint chamber of commerce within a month and resume direct civilian flights between the two countries, an Iranian official told the Iran Daily on Wednesday,AFP reported.

An “Iran-U.S. chamber of commerce will be launched in less than one month,” Abolfazl Hejazi, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture, said in the newspaper, adding that the work underpinning the project had already been registered in the U.S.

Hejazi said the Iranian government has already authorized the private sector to work with American companies, while direct flights connecting Kish Island, in southwest Iran, with New York City were also in the works, AFP reported. Kish Island was chosen because it “is a free trade zone and Iranian passengers who have U.S. citizenship will not need to obtain visas to enter it,” he said.

Hejazi said direct flights would “enable us to export domestic products to the U.S. and import high-tech products and raw materials from the country.”

Barack Obama is NOT on Israel’s ‘side’ and now CLEARLY feels that this american ally and the USA have very different goals. Fine. Say so. It happens. Every act, every word, every attitude now adopted makes it clear.

So, then that ally will pursue IT’S own interest, sort of like Turkey buying China’s air defense system, or then Israel selling Phalcon AEW systems to a China that will use them over the Senkakus?

That the plan?

Just askin’.

These people are delusional.

Is that the way to go about US strategic interests?

Is that our new national security strategy?