All CIA Channel

All CIA Channel: CIA drones attacked and killed three low ranking militants in the Pak tribal region. With all the intel the CIA has gathered recently it could surely have attacked a higher ranking target. The drone moratorium has been getting a lot of press recently and this is the CIA's way of saying there is actually no moratorium. There is a moratorium but this little flea bite of a drone strike is taking Agency actions out of the glare of headlines. The press has been saying the moratorium is designed to increase America's approval ratings in the Muslim world. This is not true. Opinion polls conducted in Muslim majority countries show that drone strikes don't help or hurt America's image. Most Muslim countries have about a 90% disapproval rating of the USA and this number stays constant no matter what the superpower does. It doesn't even make any difference if a Muslim country is invaded with American troops, the approval rating will stay the same.

No, this is all about the coming peace talks. Step back in time and remember when the US was conducting peace talks with North Vietnam, the B52 bombing campaign was ratcheted up and down according to how well the talks were going. If the talks were going poorly, then the tempo of bombing increased. When the talks went well, fewer bombs were dropped. The drone strikes in Pakistan today are like the bombing campaign in Vietnam and Cambodia. Contrary to what you might think, Kissinger's peace treaty with North Vietnam was a good one, it would have held if the US had simply maintained its support of South Vietnam after 1972, just as the armistice with North Korea has held up over the decades because the US has kept supporting South Korea.

Finally, the CIA has killed another Iranian nuclear scientist. We can assume that he was a key member of the bad guys nuclear weapons development program. It must be demoralizing when a scientist makes a breakthrough and is then quickly killed. Imagine a classroom where the students who get good grades are killed. What an incentive to leave early and goof off.