Instahoglets October 26th 08

By Cernig

It's been a while since I did one of these, but with the elections dominating the news cycle there's some interesting foreign affairs "news less travelled" getting next to no notice right now.

- AIG, even after it had taken a bailout deal that left it 80% taxpayer owned, was still actively lobbying. The millions of your money it has spent influencing your representatives included a big chunk in favor of the US/India nuclear deal. Say whaaa?

- The Pentagon are preparing for a period of increased danger as various undesireables might decide - as they did during Brown's transition in the UK - that a new guy in charge is a good time for an attack. They don't think it matters whether the new guy is McCain or Obama, though, proving they're saner than the average Cornerite.

- Syria is claiming US helicopters attacked a village just inside its border with Iraq, killing 9 civilians and wounding 14, in a possible sign that cross-border strikes based on crappy intel aren't just for Afghanistan. If true, it's technically an act of war unless the US military claim "hot pursuit" of militants, which might be difficult to do if no militants were there. One worth watching.

- Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, there are reports that US aircraft mistakenly bombed and killed 20 private security contractors guarding a road construction project which came under attack by the Taliban. Airstrikes account for the vast majority of coalition-caused deaths in Afghanistan, and are vying with the Taliban to be the major killer of Afghanistan civilians. Its a tactic that has alienated the populace, handed propaganda victory after victory to the militants and weakened the Karzai government, but the military keep doing it.

- Newsweek says that Iran's nuclear facillities are too deeply buried for Israel to harm with conventional weapons even if it wanted to - which always leaves nukes. Meanwhile Obama's nuclear-weapons expert is suggesting getting rid of all nukes but in the meantime adopting a posture "limiting the purpose of nuclear weapons to preventing their use by others". If that sounds like a First Strike Doctrine to you - well, it does to me too.

- Georgia is still bubbling. "The leader of Georgia's pro-Russian breakaway Abkhazia region has ordered Abkhazian military forces to retaliate against what he calls all "provocations" from the Georgian side." And: "Georgia says Russia has deployed 2,000 additional troops in the pro-Russian breakaway region of South Ossetia, a move Russia denies."

Update: The US has confirmed the raid into Syria in an "official leak".

A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military's reach.

"We are taking matters into our own hands," the official told The Associated Press in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

The attack came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

A Syrian government statement said the helicopters attacked the Sukkariyeh Farm near the town of Abu Kamal, five miles inside the Syrian border. Four helicopters attacked a civilian building under construction shortly before sundown and fired on workers inside, the statement said.

The government said civilians were among the dead, including four children.

If the Syrians choose to make it so, America has a new war. It's unlikely that they will, for one since the U.S. is calling it hot pursuit even as the Syrians say only civilians died. It's still an escalation in the region, though, the first such cross-border raid into Syria in all this time.