Russia threatens to shoot down our bombers

Russia has warned the United States not to intervene militarily in Syria against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, threatening that it may shoot down any aircraft attempting to launch strikes.
In a bluntly worded statement, a spokesman for Russia’s defense ministry warned that Russia and the Syrian government had deployed sufficient air defenses to block any potential attacks.
It follows rumbling in Washington that the White House may be considering launching limited strikes against some Syrian regime military targets as an alternative option for moving forward in the Syrian conflict after the collapse of U.S.-Russian cease-fire negotiations.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the Pentagon was presenting the Obama administration with the option of strikes at meetings this week. The strikes, which the Joint Chief of Staffs and the CIA are now said to favor, according to the Post, would see missiles fired at Assad air force bases, intended to punish the regime for its failure to abide by the cease-fire, hamper attacks against civilians and pressure it and Moscow to begin negotiating again.
Although, the strikes are now back on the table, President Obama is still very unlikely to approve them, according to administration officials speaking to the Post, as well as former State Department officials and outside analysts.

Pentagon threatens back

I n the 48 hours since the administration cut off bilateral talks with the Russians over the war in Syria, the tide has turned toward American military intervention in Syria. This was perhaps predictable given Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks in Brussels on Tuesday in which he expressed his “great sense of outrage” that “the Syrian regime and Russia seem to have rejected diplomacy in furtherance of trying to pursue a military victory over the broken bodies, the bombed-out hospitals, the traumatized children of a long-suffering land.”
The administration’s diplomatic efforts were undermined almost from the very start, when US airstrikes killed over 60 Syrian government troops only days after the announcement of the September 9 cease-fire agreement. As Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen recently observed, the Pentagon’s “opposition was so intense that one of its spokesmen told the press it might disobey a presidential order to share intelligence with Moscow, as called for by the agreement, in flagrant violation of the US constitution.” On Tuesday Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook issued a warning to Russia over its deployment of anti-aircraft missiles to Syria.
Meanwhile, Arizona Senator John McCain seemed positively cheered by the news that our so-called Gulf state “allies” are seeking to provide the Islamist rebels in Syria with man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS). McCain told The Hill last Wednesday, “It’s about time…because the [Obama administration] is not going to do it.”
And while Congress is on recess until after the election, pressure on the administration to allow the dispersement of MANPADS to rebel fighters continues apace. Alarmingly, as one congressional source familiar with the fight over MANPADS told me, “the House has repeatedly voted unanimously to block MANPADS from being sent to Syria. But when the defense-spending bill goes to conference, someone anonymously removes the provision, overturning the will of the House without explanation.”...
Still worse, in July, New York Congressman Eliot Engel introduced the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2016 to halt to the “wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people, encourage a negotiated political settlement, and hold Syrian human rights abusers accountable for their crimes.” Good intentions aside, the bill would, in reality, help lay the groundwork for a no-fly zone in Syria. Engel’s bill, which now has 70 co-sponsors from both parties, requires the administration to assess the “potential effectiveness of and requirements for the establishment of safe zones or a no-fly zone in Syria.”

Without ISIS, Iraq has no common enemy

The turmoil began with a Shia-led parliamentary sit-in against Iraq’s Shia-dominated government. Next, a top Sunni minister was dismissed with the help of Sunni rivals. A few weeks later, the leading Kurdish minister was sacked — thanks partly to lawmakers in his own political bloc.
Since the 2003 US invasion fostered splits along Iraq’s three main ethno-sectarian faultlines, Iraqis have grown accustomed to the country’s raucous factionalism. But now, those blocs are not only fighting each other, they are fighting among themselves, creating new schisms that risk fragmenting the political, social and tribal forces that keep Iraq patched together....
“One of the greatest challenges this country is going to face after Isis is the Shia-Shia, Sunni-Sunni and Kurdish-Kurdish conflicts that are going to happen,” says Hanan al-Fatlawi, a Shia lawmaker and opponent of Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister. “This next struggle is coming soon.”
Nearly all Iraq’s political and sectarian blocs have built their own paramilitary groups as the country mobilised against Isis. Fears are growing that this could spark a new wave of fighting between different groupings of Sunni, Shia and Kurds as they try to establish themselves as the dominant player within their communities.
“Instead of unifying the country and creating a more powerful executive branch, the war against Isis has further fragmented Iraq on all levels of state and society,” says Ramzy Mardini, an analyst at the Atlantic Council. “The US is going to find its influence dwindle even further when it has to deal with more players in the political landscape.”

Another recession indicator

September’s jobs report contained a sign that investors should be on alert for a U.S. recession, judging by bond guru Jeff Gundlach’s favorite warning signs.
During a panel discussion at the New York Historical Society back in May, the Doubleline Capital LP chief executive officer revealed that one of his top three recession indicators was when the unemployment rate breaches its 12-month moving average...
Here’s what Gundlach had to say about the evolution of the unemployment rate five months ago, in a statement that proved perfectly prescient.
"The bad news is it's going to go above its 12-month moving average with a high likelihood in September," something that puts us "on alert" for a recession, he said.