Submitted by Joao Peixe via OilPrice.com,
The Islamic State (ISIS) is taking on recruits faster than anyone can keep up with, and it’s heading towards Libya’s oil crescent, eyeing billions of barrels that a country at war with itself cannot protect - even with U.S. air strikes.
Presidents have more latitude in foreign affairs than in domestic policy, and the trend over the past two administrations has been for presidents to be more hawkish than their campaign pledges led voters to expect. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy.” Instead, he gave us the Iraq War. Barack Obama was elected in part to end Bush’s wars. But he too pursued regime change, with Pyrrhic success in Libya and abortively in Syria.
In the lead up to elections last June that saw Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling AKP lose their absolute majority in Parliament, Turkey had long been criticized for not doing enough to assist in the fight against ISIS.
If you listen to administration officials, the key to winning the war on ISIS is to cut off the group’s funding, some of which the government claims is tied up in stacks of U.S. dollars. At the same time, banking interests and policymakers claim possession of a $100 bill is practically evidence of criminality in and of itself. As these two efforts to stigmatize cash intersect, America faces a dramatic push to eliminate, or at the very least drastically curb, the existence of physical money.
The recent carnage in Ankara comes at a good time for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has been demanding that the United States and other NATO allies support him in his war against the Kurds of Syria, who are, incidentally, regarded as allies by Washington in the war against ISIS. The Turks have been bombarding Kurdish positions and staging special ops raids, warning the Kurds against the dangers of becoming too successful in their drive to occupy territory vacated by a retreating ISIS.