War

Submitted by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

During a sombre visit to Germany last week, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi urged the international community to help boost his country's crisis economy in the face of plummeting crude oil prices, underscoring a desperate situation in which Iraq has lost 85 percent of its oil revenues.

Iraqi oil revenues have fallen to just 15 percent of what they used to be, the embattled prime minister said, despite a boost in production ordered last year.

Israel and the U.S. have begun a large-scale military exercise as part of their biennial ballistic missile defence drills – Juniper Cobra.  The exercise is designed to prepare both militaries for an incoming missile attack. Timesofisrael.com reports: Over “1,700 U.S. Service members, civilians and contractors” will take part in the multi-day drill, the eighth such exercise since the Juniper Cobra program began in 2001. “This exercise is our nation’s premier exercise in the region, and EUCOM’s highest priority exercise for 2016,” said Maj.-Gen.

by Ron Paul

The use of the US military overseas seems to have become so commonplace that the Obama Administration can bomb a country with no Congressional input and very little media interest at all. Such was the case on Friday, when the US military killed some 49 people in a bombing run near Tripoli, Libya.

Freddy Gray makes mincemeat of David Cameron’s shoddy foreign policy record in the latest issue of The National Interest. After reviewing Cameron’s role in pushing for the Libyan war, he writes:

Syrian President Bashar Assad has given an interview to a Spanish newspaper in which he asserts that Turkey need to stop aiding ISIS militants in order to help Russia and Iran to help the Syrian army defeat the terrorist organisation.  The interview was given to newspaper El Pais, and the Syrian Times have reproduced the entire text of the interview below: Question 1: You have recently allowed humanitarian aid to go into seven besieged areas. Some claim there are at least 486,000 people living in those areas, some for even more than three years. Why did this happen so late in the conflict?