Ramadan Violence is Not Good

Fundamentals: Spain is going to need a bail out from the EU and ECB or it is likely to default. Greece has exhausted its bail out funding and it too will probably default on existing debt. Much of Greece's debt has been written down, but it hasn't been written down to zero, so it can obviously still default. The ECB could just print Euros out of thin air and vaporize all this bad debt. This would only work if southern European countries actually implemented free market reforms, giving them the ability to start growing again. But they refuse to make these reforms. So huge injections of ECB funds would just flow into foolish make work projects and wealth transfer schemes. So the fundies look really bad.

Long War: Al-Qaeda in Iraq killed over 100 people today, including dozens of Iraqi soldiers. A while ago the CIA told us quite openly it was pulling all assets out of Iraq. I speculated that the CIA was pouring its Iraqi resources into Syria and wanted to leave a juicy target behind in Iraq for the bad guys to play with, preventing them from getting too heavily involved in the Syrian Civil War. Looks like I was right. The CIA is stretched thin. It can't be everywhere at once and is therefore doing the right thing. The Long War is a nasty business and there are no wonderful Hollywood answers to every problem.

The Muslim majority Mombasa region on Kenya's coast is being infiltrated and taken over by Al-Shabab, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia. A small guerrilla war is brewing there that will someday explode into a big war. Remember my long term prediction, that jihadist wars will spread down either coast of Africa, forming a gigantic pincer movement that ultimately will be directed at South Africa? Facts on the ground are bearing this prediction out.

At some point the sleeping giant will be awakened. At some point South Africa will rise up and send divisions of Christian soldiers north. The Long War will become more religious and much more bloody when that happens. Scary.

Syria is making statements about when and how it will use chemical weapons. The statements are disinformation of course. The take-away here is that chemical weapons will soon enter the battlefield. Not good.

In Saudi Arabia, Sunni/Shiite violence is increasing on a street level. Violence across the Muslim world is increasing as the Holy month of Ramadan gets underway. It is not good that Ramadan is causing violence to go up rather than the opposite.

Time to analyze the analyst.... Analysts that are good at making forecasts usually have one big weakness: they always get the timing wrong. They think future events they are predicting will happen either too quickly or too slowly. The Long War is moving more quickly than I thought it would.