The White House indicated Tuesday that President Barack Obama will sign into law a Pentagon spending bill that significantly raises the base budget of the US war machine while prohibiting the shutdown of the prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba or the transfer of its detainees to US facilities.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides for a base Pentagon budget (excluding expenditures on active military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria) of $548 billion, larger than any year since the end of the Cold War.

On top of the base budget, the funding bill includes $50.9 billion for "overseas contingency operations," that will pay for ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, down from $64.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Together with a few smaller increments, this brings the total in military spending to $607 billion for the fiscal year that began October 1.

Over the past 15 years, the base Pentagon budget has risen by 42.7 percent, growing steadily as Obama replaced Bush, the Iraq war was wound down and then restarted, and the Afghanistan war was escalated and then scaled back.

The White House indicated that Obama would approve the legislation. "I would expect that you would see the president sign the NDAA when it comes to his desk," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a news briefing.

Let's begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that's just what happened as the starting gun went off.

It's never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American "reconstruction" of Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed "as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security." It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, "feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks" and that was only the beginning of its problems.

When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid. A year later, a New York Times reporter visited and found that "the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling, and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning." This seems to have been par for the course. Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.

And these were hardly isolated cases or problems specific to Iraq. Consider, for instance, those police stations in Afghanistan believed to be crucial to "standing up" a new security force in that country. Despite the money poured into them and endless cost overruns, many were either never completed or never built, leaving new Afghan police recruits camping out. And the police were hardly alone. Take the $3.4 million unfinished teacher-training center in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, that an Iraqi company was contracted to build (using, of course, American dollars) and from which it walked away, money in hand.

And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region's booming drug trade in opium and heroin). In Afghanistan, Highway 1 between the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, unofficially dubbed the "highway to nowhere," was so poorly constructed that it began crumbling in its first Afghan winter.

And don't think that this was an aberration. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to "less than 100 miles of gravel road completed."Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.

In these years, the cost of reconstruction never stopped growing. In 2011, McClatchy News reported that "U.S. government funding for at least 15 large-scale programs and projects grew from just over $1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government's questions about their effectiveness or cost."

European Union governments will solicit Turkey's help in stemming the flow of refugees by offering financial aid, visa waivers for Turkish travelers and the relaunch of Turkey's membership bid.

EU leaders will debate the incentives package for Turkey at a summit in Valletta, Malta, on Thursday, before the bloc's top officials meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Group of 20 summit starting Sunday.

Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria, one of the refugees' main destinations, said the EU has to move faster to seal an agreement to step up aid for Turkey as the price for Erdogan's cooperation in halting the refugee tide.

"When are we going to pick up the pace?" Faymann told reporters Wednesday in Valletta.

The victory of the pro-presidential party in the parliamentary elections in Turkey inspired Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to make sharp statements against Russia, the German newspaper Der Spiegel wrote.

The President issued "a friendly warning" to Moscow regarding Russian airstrikes in Syria and said that those who would fuel the conflict in the Middle East would soon find themselves in this fire.

Inspired by his party's victory in the parliamentary elections, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apparently decided that his country can play a more serious part in resolving regional problems and said that "political uncertainty" in his country is over, Der Spiegel wrote.

Speaking at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, US Secretary of State John Kerry discussed Washington's foreign policy in Syria.

"The stakes could not be higher," Kerry said on Thursday, before insisting that the United States is "on the right track and we are making gains and we are clear on the road ahead."

The secretary of state also reiterated the Obama administration's three principle goals for ending the conflict. The first is the necessity for defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State terrorist group, the second is the intensification of diplomatic efforts, and the third being a determination to support regional allies to ensure that Syria's instability does not spread beyond its borders.

Israeli warplanes have struck targets near the international airport in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Syrian media says. The reports said the attack happened Wednesday morning. There were no immediate comments from the Syrian government on the issue.

In October, the Israeli military launched a number of artillery attacks against Syrian army posts in the Golan Heights. Syria says Israel and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri militant groups operating inside the Arab country.

The Syrian army has repeatedly seized huge quantities of Israeli-made weapons and advanced military equipment from the foreign-backed militants inside Syria. The Tel Aviv regime has a long history of supporting militant groups against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the past few years of turmoil in the Arab country.

One of GOP presidential hopefuls, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, is deadly serious when he says that he would bring down Russian military aircraft taking part in Moscow's counterterrorism efforts in Syria because they allegedly attack US-backed rebels.

"I would literally shoot [Putin's] planes down if he attacked the people we trained because we have to do that," he told AM 970 The Answer.

In other words, the Senator, who is still harboring hopes of becoming America's next commander-in-chief, believes that a country unauthorized to operate in Syria's airspace has a right to shoot down military planes of a nation which was officially asked to assist Damascus-led forces in their fight against radicals trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. And to what end?

Relations between the US and Russia are at an all-time low prompting many to call this era the "Cold War 2.0." An incident in the Syrian skies would have unpredictable and extremely grave consequences. Shooting a Russian military aircraft means taking a huge leap towards a major (possibly military) confrontation.

A top Saudi commander of the Al-Nusra Front - Al-Qaeda's official branch in Syria - urged all militant groups across Syria to leave their positions for Aleppo, warning that the strategic territory near the border with Turkey will soon be completely lost if thousands of fresh forces do not join them in coming days.

Abdullah al-Muhsini, the al-Nusra's senior commander, wrote on his social network pages that in case all militant groups do not join their comrades in Aleppo, the entire province "which is of vitally strategic value will soon be lost" to the Syrian army.

The Saudi Sheikh who is also a religious leader voiced deep concern over militants' status quo in Aleppo, saying that the Syrian army and its allies have increased the momentum of their advances in the last few days.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) achieved its greatest victory in the four year-long war on Tuesday when it recaptured the strategic Kuweires military airbase in North Syria. Hundreds of ISIS terrorists were killed in intense fighting while hundreds more were sent fleeing eastward towards Raqqa. The victory was announced just hours after Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour that Turkey would be willing to invade Syria as long as Washington agreed to provide air support, create a safe zone along the Syrian-Turkish border, and remove Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

Now that Kuweires has been liberated, Davutoğlu will have to reconsider his offer taking into consideration the fact that Russian warplanes will now be within striking distance of the border while troops and artillery will be positioned in a way that makes crossing into Syria as difficult as possible. The window for Turkish troops to enter Syria unopposed has closed. Any attempt to invade the country now will result in stiff resistance and heavy casualties.

To fully understand the significance of Kuweires, we need take a look at Amanpour's interview with Davutoğlu and see what was being planned. Here's an excerpt:

The end of the Kuweires Military Airport's long siege has created a world of problems for the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) inside the Deir Hafer Plains, as their once untouched supply route that stretched from the from the provincial capital of the Aleppo Governorate to the provincial capital of the Al-Raqqa Governorate has been cutoff by the Syrian Armed Forces.

The Kuweries Military Airport is strategically located 8km west of ISIS' stronghold at Deir Hafer and 17km south of the imperative city of Al-Bab - both of these cities are separated by the Aleppo-Raqqa Highway.

Deir Hafer is situated along the Aleppo-Raqqa Highway and it provides ISIS a gateway from their capital at Al-Raqqa to the entire eastern Aleppo countryside; without control of this highway, they will have to rely on the season roads that are within range of the Syrian Arab Army's anti-tank missiles.

Without direct access to Al-Bab from Deir Hafer, ISIS will be forced to find another supply route that will likely take them much longer to travel through, which, in turn, will leave them vulnerable to airstrikes and other militaristic obstacles.