As members of Congress vote to confirm Gina Haspel as the next director of the CIA, the majority of her record and her experience overseeing illegal torture programs remains classified.
The post Senate is Confirming a War Criminal as CIA Head—And They Won’t Be Shown Most of Her Record appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Pink Floyd"s Roger Waters revealed that he was one of many celebrities who has been approached by a group working with the White Helmets and asked to participate in their propaganda campaign.
The post Pink Floyd Frontman Leaks Email Exposing How White Helmets Recruit Celebs With Saudi Money appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Once again, the US has been exposed airlifting ISIS commanders to safety as eyewitnesses watched terrorists get evacuated from the Deir ez-Zor region in Syria.
“Progressives” would have you believe the best way to deal with Islamic terorists on American soil is for citizens to disarm.
“The Islamic State militant group (ISIS) on Wednesday published a propaganda video that showed a one-legged fighter, purportedly American, ordering Muslims living in the United States to use the country’s flexible gun laws to carry out mass-casualty attacks,” Newsweek emphasized.
“Take advantage of the fact that you can easily obtain a rifle or a pistol in America,” the presumed traitor identified as Abu Salih al-Amriki urged. “Spray the kuffar [infidels] with bullets so that their fear of the Muslims rises, and they continue to reveal their hatred towards Islam.”
al-Amriki’s message is emphasized by a tactically-placed photo of semi-auto rifles for sale at a Las Vegas gun shop ( to evoke the Mandalay Bay shootings no doubt) and a confirming statement designed to spook the herd from Nicholas Rasmussen, outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
“We find ourselves in a more dangerous situation because our population of violent extremists has no difficulty gaining access to weapons that are quite lethal,” Rasmussen told The Washington Post.
Constitutionally-recognized freedom is the problem according to the Obama-appointed insider. It helps to consider that he’s a career policy wonk with a B.A. in social studies from private liberal arts college Wesleyan University, and a Masters in Public and International Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.
This isn’t the first time gun-grabbers have exploited jihadi threats against Americans.
Writing for the “progressive” Huffington Post in 2008, gun-hater John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence cited a “How Can I Train Myself for Jihad?” manual titled, “How Can I Train Myself for Jihad” that “singles out the US for its easy availability of firearms and states that al-Qaeda members in the US can ‘obtain an assault weapon legally, preferably AK-47 or variations’.”
And in 2011, Media Matters and others were making great hay out of an ignorant video-taped call for jihad by Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn:
“America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?”
No you can’t, but you don’t expect the truth to get in the way of the totalitarian lobby agenda, do you?
Left unsaid is what this country is doing welcoming in those who mean to destroy it. Suggest that maybe we ought to hold things up until we can come up with safeguards and not only get accused of being a racist, a xenophobe and an Islamophobe, get ready for Obama-appointed federal judges to rule that such precautions are “antithetical to American principles.”
Proving once more the truism that for “progressives,” every day is Opposite Day, what they don’t find antithetical are infringements on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Their solution…? Forget about the mission statement articulated in the Preamble about “insur[ing] domestic Tranquility, provid[ing] for the common defence … and secur[in]g the Blessings of Liberty,” and focus instead on eviscerating the one thing the Framers considered “necessary to the security of a free State.”
Instead the want to let our enemies in and disarm their countrymen. There’s a plan.
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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”
The post Gun-Grabbers Off-Target on Threat of ISIS Call to Arms against Non-Muslim Americans appeared first on Oath Keepers.
While the media obsesses over Russiagate, it ignores the Pentagon"s admission to aiding genocide in the Middle East with ground troops and airstrikes.
Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
In the run-up to Christmas, President Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of some surprisingly good news and glad tidings.
Sunday, Vladimir Putin called to thank him and the CIA for providing Russia critical information that helped abort an ISIS plot to massacre visitors to Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg.
Monday found polls showing Trump at his highest in months.
Stocks soared 200 points at the opening bell in anticipation of pre-Christmas passage of the Republican tax bill. The Dow has added a record 5,000 points in Trump’s first year.
And the Russiagate investigation may have busted an axle. Though yet unproven, charges are being made that Robert Mueller’s sleuths gained access to Trump transition emails illicitly.
This could imperil prosecutions by Mueller’s team, already under a cloud for proven malice toward the president.
Recall: Daniel Ellsberg, who delivered the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, walked free when it was learned that the White House “Plumbers” had burgled his psychiatrist’s office.
With things going Trump’s way, one must ask: What was U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley doing last week at what looked like a prewar briefing at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in D.C.?
Looming behind Haley was part of what was said to be an Iranian missile fired at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh.
Though the rocket had Iranian markings, it was not launched from Iran, or by Iranians. Houthi rebels, for two years victims of a savage war waged by the Saudis — using U.S.-made planes, missiles, bombs and drones — say they fired it at the Riyadh airport in retaliation for what the Saudis have done to their people and country.
If so, it was a legitimate act of war.
Indeed, so great is the Yemeni civilian suffering from a lack of food and medicine, and from malnutrition and disease, Trump himself has told the Saudis to ease up on their air, sea, and land blockades.
As there is no evidence as to when the Houthis acquired the missile, or where, the question arises: What was Haley’s motive in indicting Iran? Was this part of a new propaganda campaign to drum up support for America’s next big Mideast war?
There are reasons to think so.
Haley went on: “It’s hard to find a conflict or a terrorist group in the Middle East that does not have Iran’s fingerprints all over it.”
But Iran is Shiite, while al-Qaida, which brought down the twin towers, aided by 15 Saudi nationals, is Sunni. So, too, are ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in Somalia and Islamic Jihad. Most Mideast terrorist groups are Sunni, not Shiite.
As for these Mideast “conflicts,” which did Iran start?
We started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO started the war in Libya. The U.S. helped trigger the horrific Syrian civil war by arming “rebels.” Only when President Bashar Assad looked like he was about to fall did Russia and Iran intervene on his side.
As for the “Shiite crescent,” from Tehran to Bagdad to Damascus to Beirut, who created it?
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was Sunni dominated. It was the Americans who overthrew him and brought Shiite power to Baghdad.
In Syria, it was U.S.- and Sunni-backed “rebels,” allied at times with al-Qaida, who drew Iran and the Shiite militias in to save Assad.
And the Israelis called the Shiite Hezbollah movement into being by invading and occupying South Lebanon in 1982. As Yitzhak Rabin ruefully said, “We let the Shia genie out of the bottle.”
Are we now want to fight a new Mideast war against a larger enemy than any of the others we have fought, to clean up the bloody mess we made of the region by our previous military interventions?
Before we march, with Haley as head cheerleader, Trump should consider the likely consequences for his country, the Middle East, and his presidency.
A war in the Persian Gulf would send oil prices soaring, and stock markets plummeting, even as it would split us off from our major allies in Europe and Asia. The Airbus-Boeing deal to sell Iran 300 commercial aircraft would be dead.
While the U.S. would prevail in an air, naval and missile war, where would the troops come from to march to Tehran to “democratize” that nation? Do we think a bloodied revanchist Iran would be easier to deal with than the one with which John Kerry negotiated a nuclear deal?
Would Hezbollah go after U.S. soft targets in Beirut? Would Iraqi Shiite militias go after Americans in the Green Zone? Would the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the oil-rich northeast of Saudi Arabia rise up and rebel?
And who would our great fighting Arab ally be?
Jared Kushner’s new friend: a 32-year-old Saudi prince who has become famous for putting down $500 million each for a chateau near Versailles, a yacht on the Riviera, and a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.
On Monday, Vladimir Putin unexpectedly interrupted his journey to Egypt, stopping off at Russia’s Hmeymim airbase in Syria and announcing the windup of Russia’s most successful military campaign abroad.
Thousands of combat sorties have been flown, tens of thousands of terrorists and their infrastructure have been destroyed, and hundreds of Syrian cities and towns have been liberated. We have previously published accounts of how Russian pilots, special ops, marines, doctors, and diplomats spent two years helping the lawful president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, hold his country together and rid it of terrorists.
By the fall of 2015, the war in Syria had already dragged on for four long years. The mass anti-government demonstrations that began in March 2011 had quickly escalated into skirmishes with the military. And terrorist factions immediately “hijacked” these popular protests. Soon, the leading role in the battle against the ruling regime was being played by extremists from the Islamic State, Jabhat Al Nusra, Al-Qaeda, and many factions within what has been called the “moderate opposition” – mainly in the Free Syrian Army that has been so championed by the West.
From the very beginning, Russia provided diplomatic support to Syria. Back in the spring of 2011, Vitaly Churkin, the late Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, vetoed the draft Security Council resolutions being proposed by some Western and Arab countries that were anti-Syrian in nature.
In addition, Russia backed the government of Bashar al-Assad by supplying arms, military equipment, and ammunition, in addition to training officers and providing military advisers.
But as the terrorist organizations and forces of the “moderate opposition” continued to make territorial gains, it became clear that this support was not enough. The Syrian Arab Army was running out of steam. Huge losses, shortages of the most essential materials, plus low morale forced those soldiers loyal to Assad to cede more and more territory, retreating as far as the coastal province of Latakia and the city of Damascus. By September 2015, it looked like Syria’s leader had only a few weeks left in power.
Areas of control in Syria in September 2015
So that month, at the request of President Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s Federation Council approved Vladimir Putin’s decision to move Russian troops into Syria. On Sept. 30, a Russian military operation began in that country.
The composition of the air fleet often changed in accordance with the tasks assigned to it. Based on the data at hand, at various times it included:
Strikes were even launched against the terrorists’ base camps from inside the Russian Federation.
The A-50 early warning and control aircraft, the Tu-214R, and the Il-20M1 radio reconnaissance plane coordinated air operations, carried out reconnaissance missions, and pinpointed targets for the strike formations.
Russian forces in Syria
Russian aviation really ran the show in Syria. Militant training camps, command posts, weapons and ammunition depots, oil fields, and convoys of gasoline tankers found themselves decimated by massive attacks launched from the Hmeymim airbase, the staging bases for air strikes, and the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier. Bombers, close-support aircraft, and fighter planes, taking advantage of their total mastery of the air, managed to destroy more than 100,000 different terrorist facilities. The first wave of the massive air strikes against IS came at the end of 2015. That was when Russian planes pulverized a buried IS command post, underground bunkers, and warehouses in the province of Hama.
During their high-profile mission to “seek and destroy” gasoline tankers, Su-34 fighter-bombers managed to sniff out approximately 500 tanker trucks carrying petroleum products, plus dozens of oil refineries, grinding them into the sand. That was a punch to the gut of the IS war chest, as its main source of income was the illegal sale of black gold.
In late 2015, the Syrian desert was rattled by the most powerful blow yet – strategic Tu-160 bombers, Tu-95MSs, and long-range Tu-22M3s dropped more than three dozen missiles and a multitude of bombs, destroying the command posts of IS detachments in the Idlib and Aleppo provinces, as well as training camps for suicide bombers. In the summer of 2016, long-range Tu-22M3 bombers took off from Hamadan Airbase in Iran and blew out their bomb bays over militant targets in Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, and Idlib. Regular air sorties supported the Syrian operation from beginning to end.
In addition to aircraft, Russia also put its combat ships, submarines, and coastal missile systems to effective use in Syria. Some types of weapons got their first test under battle conditions. In November 2016, to be exact, the Russian military employed its Bastion coastal-defense missile systems to spectacularly obliterate a large warehouse belonging to the militants with the help of its Onyx anti-ship missiles.
In October 2015, the Russian Navy was responsible for a widely reported cruise-missile attack from the Caspian Sea that annihilated militant positions with an unprecedented show of strength. The Dagestan, a missile-armed frigate, and the Grad Sviyazhsk and Veliky Ustyug small missile patrol ships released an enormous swarm of Kalibr cruise missiles that flew over several countries to blow up more than a dozen targets in militant-controlled territory. In June 2017, the Russian Navy’s Admiral Essen and Admiral Grigorovich frigates, as well as its Krasnodar submarine, used Kalibr cruise missiles to inflict a powerful blow from the Mediterranean Sea against terrorist command posts and ammunition depots in Hama province.
The capture of Aleppo marked the final turning point for the government forces in Syria, after which it was possible to withdraw about half of the air formations from the Hmeymim airbase in May 2017 and send them home.
Russian aircraft were able to administer continuous, nonstop strikes against targets belonging to terrorist groups in Syria. From the onset of the military operation until September 2017, over 30,000 sorties were flown and about 92,000 attacks on terrorists were carried out.
Russian planes bashed terrorists with the active support of the most elite force in the Russian military, the soldiers from the Special Operations Forces, who conducted reconnaissance missions, corrected the moves of aircraft and artillery, trained Syrian soldiers and officers, conducted raids deep into enemy territory, set up countless ambushes along the routes of terrorist convoys, and neutralized the leaders of outlaw gangs. The ships and airplanes of the Syrian Express had an important role to play, supplying weapons, armored vehicles, and ammunition to the embattled country. Russian doctors were responsible for true acts of heroism, treating the civilians and servicemen who had suffered injuries in the war.
And a huge role in the resolution of the Syrian crisis was played by the Russian diplomats who set in motion the negotiations in Astana. Those made it possible to establish the de-escalation zones in Syria that are still operating effectively today.
Syrian peace talks in Astana
But of course it was the Syrian people who won the real victory – the Russian military just helped to remind them that the enemy can be defeated even if it enjoys the unconditional support of the West.
It was revealed in late November that the Russian forces currently stationed at the Hmeymim airbase near Latakia and the naval base in Tartus would remain there. Their presence will clear the path for Russia to fend off any threat in the Eastern Mediterranean and to thus ensure the strategic parity that guarantees long-term peace in this volatile region. While the Syrian peace process is under its way the situation in the country and around is very fragile. The key game players and war profiteers are still on the ground and they are not to leave the Syrian territory. So the primary goal is to prevent anybody from the “defeated party” to undermine the talks and to secure desperately needed reconstruction programs, renovation and stabilization of normal social, economic and political life in Syria.
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The orchestrated hostility toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea protects the $1,000 billion annual budget of the military/security complex by convincing the American public that the US is threatened by enemies. It also keeps alive Democratic Party hopes that Trump can be removed from office, and it has prevented President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia. I have emphasized for some time that Washington’s gratuitous and aggressive actions against Russia and the constant barrage of false accusations against Russia and its government have convinced Russia that Washington is planning a military attack. There is nothing more reckless and irresponsible than to convince a nuclear superpower that you are preparing an attack on them.
One would think that such irresponsible and reckless behavior would have the citizenry aroused and the media reporting the risk. Yet, there is only silence. It is more important to the media whether NFL players stand for the national anthem and that some male politicians show sexual interest in women in inappropriate ways. Insouciant America is walking into Armageddon.
A few days ago former US Secretary of Defense William J. Perry added his voice to mine and to those of the few who understand the danger. Perry said:
“When the Cold War ended, I believed that we no longer had to take that risk [nuclear annihilation] so I put all my energy into efforts to dismantle the deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War. During my period as the Secretary of Defense in the 90s, I oversaw the dismantlement of 8,000 nuclear weapons evenly divided between the United States and the former Soviet Union. And I thought then that we were well on our way to putting behind us this deadly existential threat, But that was not to be. Today, inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers.
… We are doing this without any serious public discussion or any real understanding of the consequences of these actions. We are sleepwalking into a new Cold War, and there’s very real danger that we will blunder into a nuclear war. If we are to prevent this catastrophe, the public must understand what is happening.”
How can the American public understand when they do not know, because the few voices telling them are not reported. Indeed, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby and the lobby’s American agents among the neoconservatives are actively working to discredit those who are aware of the dangerous situation.
The power of the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby, the two prime war-mongers of the 21st century, have immobilized the President of the United States. Trump is helpless in the face of a special prosecutor who is “investigating Russiagate,” a hoax created for the express purpose of preventing President Trump from restoring normal relations with a nuclear superpower.
Experts including William Binney, who developed the universal spy program for NSA thinking mistakenly that it would not be used against American citizens, have stated publicly that, if Russiagate were real and not an orchestrated hoax, the NSA would have all the evidence, making special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s “investigation” completely pointless.
One would think that even those who comprise the presstitute media would be able to figure out that NSA has the evidence if it exists.
Instead, the presstitutes cooperate with Mueller in creating a fake news story, one that has been kept alive for over a year.
A country in which the media lack integrity cannot be a democracy as the people have no accurate information with which to make decisions and hold government accountable. The American presstitute media functions as a control arm for the powerful vested interests that are turning the United States into a police state that serves only a few hundredths of One Percent.
Americans have been lied to about everything. I agree that the lies go back a long way. To keep this column to a readable length, we can start with the many lies of the Clinton regime. The war on Serbia was done in order to humiliate Russia by proving that Russia was helpless in the face of American might to come to the aid of its ally, and it was done to establish the use of NATO as an arm of, and cover for, US military aggression.
Then we come to 9/11, the official explanation of which is rejected not only by Osama bin Laden but also by every expert unafraid to open his/her mouth.
Then we have the fake reason for the US invasion of Afghanistan, a disaster for America as it was for the Soviets. A handful of lightly armed Afghans defeated “the world’s only superpower,” just as they defeated the powerful Soviet army.
Then we have the fake charges of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” hyped to the heavens by the corrupt American presstitutes. This amazing lie, disavowed by the UN weapons inspectors, was used despite the evidence to the contrary to invade Iraq and to destroy a country. This lie was later repudiated by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who regretted the stain on his reputation caused by the George W. Bush/Dick Chaney regime’s misuse of his credibility before the UN.
Then we have the fake charges against Libya’s Gaddafi that were used to murder Gadaffi, to Hillary’s great delight, and to destroy the most successful country in Africa.
The ISIS mercenaries that Hillary and Obama used to destroy Libya were sent to destroy Syria when Russia and the British Parliament blocked Obama’s plan to send American troops to invade Syria. We have been subjected to years of lies from Washington and the presstitutes that Washington is fighting ISIS, when Washington sent ISIS to Syria to destroy Assad and the Syrian government.
And there is Somalia, another packet of Washington/presstitute lies. And the violation of Pakistan with the bombing of tribal areas falsely claimed to be al-Qaeda or Taliban supporters.
And there is Yemen devastated by Washington’s puppet Saudi Arabia.
And there are the false news reports of “Iranian nukes” and Iranian belligerent actions against Israel.
And “Russia invaded Ukraine” when in fact Washington overthrew with its financed NGOs the democratically elected Ukrainian government.
And now we hear that those who dare to tell the truth to Americans are “Russian agents” and “fake news purveyors.”
When a country’s government and media do nothing but lie 24/7, how can democracy exist. Clearly, it cannot.
Environmental organizations are reporting that President Trump intends to abolish two national monuments by executive order in order to open protected lands to rape, ravage, and ruin by corporations. The two national monuments are Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
If Trump has the power to turn national monuments over to corporate campaign donors, he most certainly can have his Attorney General open an investigation of Hillary Clinton or even indict her on the already known evidence. He can issue a pre-emptive pardon of General Flynn, who is being framed on charges that do not relate to Russian influence in the presidential election. Indeed, he can have the Attorney General investigate or arrest Mueller for sedition and an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. These charges are far more realistic than the charge Mueller has brought against Flynn.
But what does President Trump do? He twitters, complaining that Gen. Flynns life is being destroyed while “Crooked Hillary Clinton” walks around free.
Trump is correct, so why doesn’t he do something about it? What Flynn did was to ask the Russians not to over-react to the new sanctions that Obama placed on Russia in an effort to create such bad relations between the US and Russia that Trump would be unable to normalize them. What Flynn did was entirely appropriate and has nothing to do with the hoax story of Russiagate. The real reason that the military/security complex is after Gen. Flynn is that he is the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and he said on a TV news show that the decision by the Obama regime to send ISIS to overthrow Syria was a “willful decision” that went against his recommendation.
In other words, Flynn let the cat out of the bag that ISIS was not an independently formed organization but a tool of US policy.
The presstitutes, of course, ignored Gen. Flynn’s statement. The only effect of Flynn’s statement was to set him up for retaliation, and that is what Mueller is doing.
What Mueller is doing is so corrupt that he really should be arrested and renditioned to Egypt.
Private interests and agendas have control over the US government. The people have no control. Washington works by selling legislation to the interest groups in exchange for campaign contributions. The private interests that provide the money that elects politicians get the laws that they want. For example, President Trump is giving the environmental despoilers two protected national monuments, but he is powerless to protect himself and has advisers.
The ruling oligarchy is making an example of Trump in order to ensure that no future presidential candidate makes a direct appeal to the people. When Trump said that he was going to govern in the interest of the people by bringing the offshored jobs home, he attacked the profits of the global corporations, and when he said he was going to normalize relations with Russia, he attacked the power and profit of the military/security complex. He is now paying the price for his rashness.
The larger question is: what price will the American people and the rest of the world pay for the constraints the military/security complex has placed on Trump’s ability to normalize relations with Russia?
Authord by Burak Bekdil via The Gatestone Institute,
Turkey"s strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, may have exhibited all possible features of political Islam since he came to power fifteen years ago, but at least he has been bold and honest about his understanding of Islamism: There is no moderate Islam, he recently said again.
This comment does not mark any U-turn, or a radical deviation from his earlier freshman-self back in the 2000s. The problem is that his Western "allies" have stubbornly preferred to turn a blind eye to his poster-child Islamism. Worse, they still do.
Several years ago, Erdogan"s ideological-self clearly stated that "Turkey is not a country where moderate Islam prevails." In the same speech, his pragmatic-self -- the one that wanted to look pretty to a chorus of Western praise -- added that, "We are Muslims who have found a middle road". But which "middle road?"
In the several years that followed, Erdogan proudly exhibited another feature of Islamism in a make-believe assertion: Muslims never do wrong; if a Muslim does wrong then he is not Muslim.
In 2009, when Sudanese paramilitaries committed acts of genocide against the population of Darfur, and Sudan"s president, Omar al-Bashir, was guilty of the crimes for which he was indicted by the International Criminal Court, Erdogan simply said: "It is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide." Instead, he said, Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza are worse than anything that has taken place in Sudan. As he said that, victims in Sudan had already numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
In February, at a meeting in Ankara, Erdogan slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkel"s phrase "Islamist terror". He angrily said to his guest, "Islam means "peace," it can"t come with "terror"".
When Erdogan (then prime minister) famously claimed that "there is no Islamic terror" in 2010, the satire website Zaytung fabricated a story, the lead paragraph of which read: "Erdogan"s claims that "There is no Islamic terror" have left several Islamic terror organizations heart-broken. A press release from al-Qaeda"s press office read: "The prime minister"s remarks are very discouraging. We are doing our best!"".
In 2011, when Hamas" charter called for the annihilation of the State of Israel by means of violence, Erdogan claimed that "Hamas is not a terrorist organization." Instead, he said: "I don"t see Hamas as a terror organization. Hamas is a political party -- it emerged as a political party that appeared as a political party. It is a resistance movement trying to protect its country under occupation".
 In February, at a meeting in Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan slammed German Chancellor Angela Merkel"s phrase "Islamist terror". He angrily said to his guest, "Islam means "peace," it can"t come with "terror"". (Image source: Ruptly video screenshot) |
In a similar show of ideological wishful thinking, Erdogan has often come out in defense of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, despite international pressure against the movement, particularly from the United States, which has debated listing the group as a terrorist organization. Erdogan said he did not consider the Brotherhood one because "it is not an armed group, but is in actual fact an ideological organization".
The Obama administration sounded as if it were trying to deal with the Turkey it wished it had, instead of dealing with the Turkey it had.
In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Obama referred to Turkey as a "great Muslim democracy". Obama should have seen that a democracy is a democracy -- without any religious prefix. He would see in later years the difference between a democracy and a Muslim democracy.
But it took Obama many years to see that. In 2011, Tom Donilon, Obama"s former national security advisor, said that the U.S. president regarded Erdogan as "a man of principle, and also a man of action." In a 2012 Time interview, Obama named Erdogan as one of the five world leaders with whom he had the strongest bonds.
Seven years after Obama"s pathetic diagnosis about the kind of democracy Erdogan brought to an otherwise secular country, the Turkish president said that "There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. There is only one Islam." Worse, he claimed that the term "moderate Islam" had been fabricated by the West in order to weaken Islam. From the Muslim democracy to the former U.S. president, with love...
The U.S. ambassador to Ankara from 2003 to 2005, Eric Edelman, said, "We basically have turned a blind eye to Erdogan"s drive towards an authoritarian, one-man system of rule in Turkey". The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic"s April 2016 issue:
"Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West — but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian..."
The Trump administration has two options: It can either deal with the Turkey it has or the Turkey it wished it had.
Just days after Israel launched a combined air and surface-to-surface missile attack against what it claims is an Iranian military base south of Damascus, Israel has again attacked targets inside Syria, this time striking closer to the Syrian capital in the Jamraya area according to early reports.
Jamraya is an area well-known for multiple government facilities, including a branch of Syria"s Scientific Studies and Research Center, which was the site of a major 2013 attack by Israel, but also has sprawling civilian residential areas. It lies on the other side of Mt. Qasioun, against which the Damascus city center is nestled.
Screenshot of first footage to emerge of tonight"s Israeli strikes outside of Damascus
“Our air defenses are confronting an Israeli missile attack on one of our sites in the Damascus suburbs and three of the targets were downed,” state news agency SANA said, adding the attacks happened at 11:30 p.m. Monday. Beirut-based Al-Masdar confirmed that the strikes occurred during the evening (Middle East time):
At least two massive explosions ripped through the Syrian capital moments ago as battles for two rebel-held bastions in eastern Damascus continue.
While the reasons for the explosions are still unidentified, some local activists spoke of an Israeli airstrikes that hit Jamraya area (located 3 miles to the northwest of Damascus) where the facility of a very important government-run facility – namely the Scientific Research – is located.
Two witnesses told Reuters late on Monday three strong explosions were heard from the direction of Jamraya. While details are still unclear and unconfirmed, it appears that Israeli jets once again attacked while over Lebanese airspace in order to avoid Syria"s sophisticated Russian supplied anti-air defense systems.
First footage of tonight"s Israeli airstrikes near Damascus is below:
#Pt. Assad"s air defenses fired missiles during suspected #Israel|i strikes on Jamraya"s Scientific Research Complex. #Damascus - #Syria. pic.twitter.com/euqKcM9GOF
— Qalaat Al Mudiq (@QalaatAlMudiq) December 4, 2017
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— roi kais • ???? ???? (@kaisos1987) December 4, 2017
#BREAKING: unverified images of Jamraya millitary facility in #Damascus, #Syria after reports that Israeli warplanes conducting airstrikes on against the site pic.twitter.com/9ILyhnaSSv
— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) December 4, 2017
According to a follow-up report by Al-Masdar News, Syria intercepted some of the missiles, while others appear to have hit a military site in rural Damascus:
For the second time in 72 hours, the Israeli military has targeted the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) positions in rural Damascus. According to a military report, the Israeli forces fired at least seven missiles from Lebanon, scoring a direct hit with at least three of the missiles.
The remaining four missiles were intercepted by the Syrian Air Defense above the West Ghouta region of Damascus.
The tempo of Israeli attacks on Syria have intensified over the past months - this as mortar shells fired on Damascus have significantly increased in the last three weeks from the dwindling anti-Assad insurgent stronghold"s around the capital. Israel has long sought to weaken and ultimately topple the Syrian government, which it sees as an extension of perceived Iranian hegemony, a years long endeavor which has further involved covert assistance to anti-Assad militants - many of them linked to al-Qaeda.
Though still rarely acknowledged in international reports, Israel has engaged in open acts of war in Syria since at least 2013, when it initially launched a massive missile attack against a Syrian defense technology facility in Jamraya outside of Damascus - the unconfirmed area of tonight"s attack.
In 2016 Israel went so far as to target Damascus International Airport, killing a well-known Hezbollah commander. In total the head of Israel"s air force has previously acknowledged nearly one hundred IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) attacks on convoys and sites inside Syria over the course of the past 5 years.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been more frequent and aggressive in his rhetoric toward both Syria and Iran of late. On Sunday, he told an annual gathering of American and Israeli leaders in Washington hosted by the Brookings Institution (the Saban Forum), “We will not allow a regime hell bent on the annihilation of the Jewish state to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not allow that regime to entrench itself militarily in Syria, as it seeks to do, for the express purpose of eradicating our state.”
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
The temptation to revel in the implosion of the extreme political Left is high, and it"s understandable.
I could go through a long list of insane offenses by the cultural Marxist cult of the church of "social justice," but I think this latest example summarizes the problem nicely.
In this video, teaching assistant Lindsay Shepard at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada is reprimanded and brow beaten by two professors for daring to commit the heresy of showing her students BOTH sides of the debate over transgenderism and pronoun politics.
The zealotry on display here by these professors is indicative of a deep-rooted cancer within the Left. Shepard was not attempting to troll her class with misinformation or subtly manipulate them with propaganda, in fact she wasn"t seeking to pressure them to support either viewpoint. She was not violating anyone"s private property rights to assail them with her arguments, either. Her only goal was to show people in a public space that there are in fact at least two opposing viewpoints on the issue in question. But in a cult it is unacceptable to acknowledge that there are different ways of thinking from the prevailing doctrine. Other beliefs and evidence must be filtered out completely, otherwise, the devout members of the cult might be faced with uncertainty.
If an ideological system is so fragile that it cannot tolerate the slightest hint of legitimate counter-evidence, then something is very wrong with that system. If that system is incapable of arguing its merits using facts and instead relies on the argument of "How dare you!," the only things that could possibly keep it alive are threats of force and terror.
Decades ago, it was the "Christian Right" that was often attacked as being too puritanical and theocratic in its attempts to not only control politics and legislation, but to also control the public mindset. They were not satisfied by merely dictating the laws; they wanted individual people to believe the way they believed, or at least act like it for the sake of conformity. This caused a considerable backlash from the general populace, and over time the image of the rest of Christianity suffered because of the overreach of an aggressive and often self-contradicting and hypocritical contingent.
The social justice cult is running into the same conundrum today. The backlash is reaching epic proportions and the term "SJW" is becoming a household joke, when only a year ago most people had no clue what an SJW was — all they knew was that "political correctness" was furiously taking over Hollywood, the internet, politics, etc.
Most people do not like zealots, no matter what side of the political spectrum they claim to come from. And, whenever zealotry poisons a social movement and causes it to violate the non-aggression principle, there is always a reaction in the other direction from the citizenry. You cannot force people to believe what you believe, to think the way you think or to speak the way you want them to speak.
The laws of social physics at least partially explain the current collapse of the Left. However, I believe there is another underlying agenda taking place here, and it is working to the detriment of all people, regardless of their political affiliations.
In my article "Order Out Of Chaos: The Defeat Of The Left Comes With A cost," published just after Donald Trump"s election win, I warned of the potential danger that the Left is being exploited by the establishment as a sacrificial appendage, a tool used to push conservatives to their own extremes and their own zealotry. Meaning, conservatives could be manipulated into embracing government power and totalitarianism in order to crush the zealotry of the cultural marxists. Essentially, we would become monsters in order to defeat monsters.
The next stage in this theater of fourth-generation warfare would be for the Left to hit rock bottom and then rise again from the ashes as something new, and entirely more dangerous.
So, has the Left hit rock bottom yet?
I would note that the tidal wave of mainstream media reports on sexual deviance and misconduct on the part of celebrities and politicians has been composed primarily of people on the left. Celebrity icons that are long time representatives of Democratic party money and support. I find it interesting also that many of these celebrities are people who attacked Donald Trump for his rather minor recorded discussion of sexual activity, the same recording the mainstream media used to admonish him as akin to a rapist.
Whether or not the accused people are guilty, or even require a self-flagellating apology, remains to be seen. I am not one to take the court of public opinion very seriously. That said, I wonder why there have not been more accusations against Republican icons recently? I mean, Republican figures have certainly not been strangers to sexual misconduct in the past, so why are the vast majority of pariahs being exposed today, including Harvey Weinstein, major Democratic players?
My theory is that the establishment and the controlled media are being very selective in their targets and are going after mainly leftists who represent low hanging fruit. But why? As mentioned above, the extreme Left must hit rock bottom, and then mutate into something else. They must be molded into something even more extreme. The social justice cult must be pressured into doubling down.
The people who supported attacks on Trump over his sexual commentary now look like idiots because some of their favorite Hollywood idols are being exposed as allegedly much worse in their behavior. What will their response be, I wonder? Admit they were wrong? Or become even more zealous in their political correctness and indignation?
The obviously fraudulent and completely fabricated Russia-gate issue is also disintegrating. But, contrary to what many conservatives and liberty movement analysts assumed, this piece of propaganda was NOT meant to take down Donald Trump; not in the slightest. In fact, it was meant to help radicalize the Left, to make them more aggressive and violent and to give them false hope that there was a way to get rid of Trump without waiting for another election. That hope is being taken away from them as Russia-gate fumbles.
The people who blindly supported the Russia-gate narrative now look like idiots. What will their response be, I wonder? Will it be to admit they were wrong? Or, will they become even more angry and violent?
The U.S. government is clearly ready to help this narrative along. The FBI and DHS officially classified ANTIFA activities as "domestic terrorist violence" back in September. And, according to Edward Klein who is publishing FBI documentation on leftist groups in his new book, the government is also asserting that leftists have been traveling to Europe to meet with Al-Qaeda and ISIS representatives, apparently to form ties with said organizations and to learn terrorist skill sets.
Do I believe this to be true? No, not really. This kind of agency propaganda reminds me quite a bit of the propaganda used against "patriot groups" over the last decade, including the not so subtle insinuations that "right-wing extremists" would work with Al-Qaeda and form an alliance. Which is, of course, absurd, because right-wingers are pretty adamant about opposing the tyranny inherent in Islam.
The claim may be more believable in the case of cultural Marxists, but still unlikely. What is MORE likely, and what I have been warning about since before Trump"s election, is that there will be terror attacks in the name of leftist ideologies, but that these attacks will for the most part be initiated by the establishment. Just as the establishment funded and trained Al-Qaeda and ISIS and then set them loose to create havoc, and just as the establishment has engineered false flag attacks that were automatically blamed on a designated bogeyman, it now appears to be the extreme Left"s turn.
If we see catalyzing events like war and continued economic downturn, the chances of Leftists being swept into an engineered fervor are even higher.
The Left is plummeting into the depths of embarrassment and despair. As Trump"s first term goes forward, these feelings are probably only going to fester. Civil unrest and rioting are inevitable, but the greater threat is the issue of Gladio-style terror that is obviously being prepared. The narrative is being carefully set. And, at this point, conservatives are all too happy to believe that the Left is capable of almost anything. With the madness they have displayed so far, why wouldn"t we think the worst of them?
Again, the danger is that when this begins to happen in great frequency, conservatives may respond by acting against their own ideals of limited government and individual liberty. When terror attacks are blamed on the Left, how will we react? Will we question the validity of the narrative? Will we apply suspicion to the Trump administration, which has only increased the number of swamp creatures in "the swamp" since its inception? Will we seek out solutions to the problem by staying true to the Constitution and without turning to state power? Or, will we embrace the narrative, embrace the Trump administration without question, throw our full weight behind government power and say "Let"s stomp lefty faces into the dirt!"
I hope this will not be the outcome, because if it is, then the last vestiges of liberty in America are doomed. Hating the Left could be seen as reasonable and rational in our era, but abandoning our principles is not.
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
Awan, a Pakistani national, worked for dozens of Democratic members of Congress along with his wife, two brothers and a friend. Following the publication of DNC emails by WikiLeaks in the lead-up to the 2016 election, Congressional investigators discovered that the Awans had a secret server being housed by the House Democratic Caucus backed up to an offsite Dropbox account.
“For members to say their data was not compromised is simply inaccurate. They had access to all the data including all emails. Imran Awan is the walking example of an insider threat, a criminal actor who had access to everything,” -Daily Caller
According to a briefing, "all five of the shared employees system administrators collectively logged onto the [House Democratic] Caucus system 5,735 times, or an average of 27 times per day,” despite only one of them being authorized to do so.
The Awans were banned from the House IT network on February 2, 2017 after being named in a criminal investigation - however they continued to work in the building for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz until Imran Awan"s arrest at Dulles Airport trying to flee the country in late July. Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, were charged with conspiracy and bank fraud in relation to a real estate transaction.
The laptop in question was tucked away in a tiny room formerly used as a phone booth on the second floor of the Rayburn House Office Building late one night in March, only to be found by Capitol Police just after midnight on April 6, 2017 along with notebooks marked "attorney client privilege," letters addressed to the US Attorney of DC regarding Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and several forms of identification. Based on the contents of the backpack, some believe Awan wanted the laptop to be found.
Attorney-Client Privilege
Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller, who has been tracking the Awan case, reports that Awan"s attorney Chris Gowen - a former aide to Hillary Clinton, is seeking to block the laptop evidence by arguing the "attorney client privilege" note attached to the notebook found with the laptop covers the contents of the hard drive, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Via the Daily Caller:
"Chris Gowen, Awan’s attorney, said at the last hearing: “We do expect there being an attorney-client privilege issue in this case… What occurred is a backpack from my client was found, he was trying to get a better signal, there was a note that said attorney client privilege and a hard drive. We feel very strongly about this.”
A Capitol Police report reveals the following items were found in the backpack:
#1 a Pakistani ID card with the name Mohommed Ashraf Awan
#2 a copy – not original – of a driver’s license with name Imran Awan
#3 a copy (front and back) of his congressional ID
#4 an Apple laptop with the homescreen initials ‘RepDWS’
#5 composition notebooks with notes handwritten saying ‘attorney client privilege’ and possibly discussing case details below
#6 loose letters addressed to US Attorney of DC discussing the apparent owner of the bag being investigated.
As Rosiak points out, it is unclear how the handwritten note saying "attorney client privilege" could be construed to cover a hard drive, rather than the pages of [the] notebook it was contained on.
Andrew McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who has followed the case, said “The A/C (attorney-client) privilege only applies to communications between the client and lawyer that are for the purpose of seeking legal advice and that are intended by both parties to be kept confidential… Moreover, asserting that something is A/C protected does not make it so. You still have to show that the material in question constitutes communications strictly between the lawyer and client that were for the purpose of seeking legal advice.
“If I give my lawyer my bank records and ask him if they show evidence of a crime, the bank records do not become A/C-privileged — only his advice to me would be A/C-privileged. And if I stuck a sign on my bank records that said ‘A/C-privileged documents,’ that would not make them A/C-privileged documents,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation Wednesday." -Daily Caller
Debbie Downer
In May of 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schulz - an employer and personal friend of Awan - spent several minutes browbeating the Chief of DC Capitol Police at a budget meeting, claiming the laptop should be given back since it was hers and threatening "consequences" if it wasn"t returned.
#DebbieWassermanSchultz threatens DC Police Chief over not returning Arwan Bros laptop. "there will be consequences" https://t.co/2phDMnvWq5 pic.twitter.com/e2wkBJSaim
— ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) May 25, 2017
Of Note
Also of note
The brothers were "shared employees," hired by multiple Democrats for IT work whenever it was needed - so they floated all over the place doing all sorts of work on House members computers. Democrats Juaquin Castro, Cedric Richmond, Andre Carson, Jackie Speier, Tammy Duckworth, and Louis Frankel all employed the Awans.
Information Brokers?
Judge Andrew Napolitano appeared on Fox Business Network in late July where he dropped a bombshell: not only did the Awans had access to the emails of every member of Congress, Imran Awan reportedly sold information to still unknown parties, which the FBI is currently investigating.
Napolitano: He was arrested for some financial crime - that"s the tip of the iceberg. The real allegation against him is that he had access to the emails of every member of congress and he sold what he found in there. What did he sell, and to whom did he sell it? That"s what the FBI wants to know. This may be a very, very serious national security situation.
Varney: Wait a second, he was the IT worker along with his two Pakistani brothers, for DWS, and other Democrats in the House - and the theory is that he got access to all of their secrets or whatever, and sold some?
Napolitano: Yes, and this was at the time that Congresswoman Schultz was also the chair of the Democratic National Committee. So at this point I don"t believe they know what he sold, and to whom he sold it - but they do know what he had access to, which is virtually everything in the House of representatives, which would include classified material in the House intelligence committee.
Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer went even further - claiming that the Awan brothers were linked to the Muslim Brotherhood while working for Democrat Congressman Andre Carson, a report reinforced by Frontpage Magazine:
As Frontpage reported in February:
The office of Andre Carson, the second Muslim in Congress, had employed Imran Awan. As did the offices of Jackie Speier and Debbie Wasserman Schultz; to whom the letter had been addressed.
Carson is the second Muslim in Congress and the first Muslim on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and, more critically, is the ranking member on its Emerging Threats Subcommittee. He is also a member of the Department of Defense Intelligence and Overhead Architecture Subcommittee.
The Emerging Threats Subcommittee, of which Carson is a ranking member, is responsible for much of counterterrorism oversight. It is the worst possible place for a man with Carson’s credentials.
Carson had inherited his grandmother’s seat and exploited it to promote a radical Islamist agenda. He has interfaced with a laundry list of Islamist groups from CAIR to ISNA to ICNA to MPAC. Islamists have funded Carson’s career to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. The Center for Security Policy has put together a dossier of Carson’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the parent organization of many key Islamic terror groups posing a threat to our national security including Al Qaeda and Hamas.
Andre Carson shared the stage at a CAIR banquet with Sirraj Wahaj: an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing who had once declared,” You don’t get involved in politics because it’s the American thing to do. You get involved in politics because politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.” CAIR itself had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in terror finance.
Immunity for Hina?
In September, it was reported that Hina Alvi - Imran Awan"s wife, had struck a deal with federal prosecutors to return to the U.S. from Pakistan to face conspiracy and bank fraud charges.
Alvi and her children fled to the safety of Pakistan in early 2017, so her voluntary return - which was structured with an arrest to be made "not in front of her children" is significant. Upon her return to the United States, Hina was arraigned on four felony counts of bank fraud and handed over her U.S. passport to prosecutors.
Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) says that Alvi"s return may be part of a broader immunity deal with prosecutors in return for a "significant" and "pretty disturbing" story about Debbie Wasserman Schultz:
“I don’t want to talk out of school here but I think you"re going to see some revelations that are going to be pretty profound. The fact that this wife is coming back from Pakistan and is willing to face charges, as it were, I think there is a good chance she is going to reach some type of immunity to tell a larger story here that is going to be pretty disturbing to the American people.”
"I would just predict that this is going to be a very significant story and people should fasten their seat belts on this one."
Despite the volumes of evidence stacking up against the former DNC IT staffers, Debbie Wasserman Schultz claims the entire investigation of the Awans is nothing more than Islamophobia.
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Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
In the Middle East and beyond, we are witnessing a series of high-level political meetings between dozens of nations involved directly or indirectly in the Syrian situation. It is crucial to understand all this in order to understand the direction in which the region is going and what the new regional order is.
With the liberation of Abu Kamal on the Iraqi border, the last Syrian town controlled by ISIS, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies have completed the task of eliminating the Caliphate and its control over Syrian cities.
ISIS returns to its original dimensions of being a terrorist organization without control of any territory or a city-state proclaimed as its capital.
These are important days, with political conferences about the future of the region and Syria itself occurring from Sochi to Cairo and passing through Riyadh. In Sochi, Assad met with Putin to confirm the alliance as well as Moscow’s loyalty to the Syrian State, and to also focus on a political solution. The Russian and Syrian presidents agreed on the need to involve the largest possible number of opposition groups in the reform process. In this regard, the meeting between Rouhani, Erdogan and Putin was also aimed at creating the conditions for an inclusive solution for all those who have agreed to put down arms and engage in talks with the legitimate government in Damascus. Turkey is the country that holds together the ranks of the so-called legitimate opposition, and Erdogan’s moves have confirmed that his strategy in the region is based around pivoting towards Russia through a full-fledged cooperation with Moscow. It is an almost unprecedented diplomatic victory for Russia that in two years it has managed to turn a potential opponent into one of the main guarantors of the peace process in Syria.
Riyadh is in the meantime bringing together the not-so-moderate opposition groups that are very close to Islamic extremism, a sort of spin-off of Al Nusra (Al Qaeda) and Daesh, and attempting to apply on them a makeover in an effort to rebrand them. It is important to note that recent meetings between King Salman and Putin seem to have opened some sort of dialogue with a representative of Moscow present at the Riyadh conference.
Firstly Erdogan, and then King Salman and his son Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), seem to have understood that a military defeat in Syria is now inevitable, and the latest developments have been related to the consequences resulting from the defeat of the terrorists. Turkey has much to gain from a convenient alliance with Moscow, both in terms of energy and transit along the East-West route of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and along the North-South corridor contained within the agreement between Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkey. In light of this, Russian planes have been flying over Turkey to reach Syria. A NATO country is letting Russian military aircraft fly over its airspace to reach Syria, something that would have been impossible to imagine not too long ago.
For Saudi Arabia the situation is different. While the meeting between King Salman and Putin represents an absolute novelty, the recent confirmation by MBS of his intentions to oppose the rise of Iran run counter to the possibility of pacifying the region.
The result of the war in Syria has carved out a new Middle East, where the likes of Riyadh, Tel Aviv and Washington, previously regional masters of all they surveyed, appear to have more or less been deliberately cut off from the decision-making process. While it can be argued that Washington has played out its role in the region with the defeat of Daesh, thanks to Trump"s "America first" policies that resists direct involvement in conflicts, Riyadh and Tel Aviv do not seem to have any intention of accepting Tehran’s new role in the region, even as it is supported by Turkish and Russian diplomacy and even military might.
The aggression against the Syrian state initially saw a compact front comprising the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, France and the United Kingdom. All were at the forefront of arming, training, financing, assisting and treating the injured of the tens of thousands of terrorists sent to Syria. It was a destabilization operation with few precedents in history. Already in 2014, at the pinnacle Daesh’s power, Assad"s position seemed firm and immovable. According to the intentions of Western terror planners, Assad was to be expelled within the first twelve months of the conflict. The drawback was the impossibility, for a number of reasons, of NATO and its allies directly intervening a la Libya, foremost among which was Syria’s possession of a good level of air defense, as well as America’s inability to deal with the human and financial costs of yet another conflict in the region, with the inevitable escalation that would follow given Iran"s involvement.
After the failure to remove Assad, the next step for Western policymakers was to deploy Daesh to create chaos and destroy the country, this diabolical force having been born as a result of America’s illegal occupation of Iraq.
Russia’s 2015 intervention in Syria, at the invitation of the legitimate government in Damascus, disrupted Western plans, bringing about the inevitable defeat of Daesh and consolidating Assad"s power.
There are two events between the Russian intervention and the efforts to Balkanize Syria through use of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that served to confirm that the Iran-Syria-Russia axis was destined to prevail in the conflict.
The first is Donald Trump becoming president of the United States. Leaving aside all the negatives related to his presidency, his victory has ensured that there is no direct intervention in Syria against Assad and against Russia. This is in contrast to what would have happened had Clinton won the election, the former Secretary of State prepared to trigger a regional conflict between the great powers by giving the order to shoot down Russian planes in Syria, thereby potentially kicking off World War Three.
The other event that has upset the balance of power in the region concerns the events that have occurred in Turkey over the last two years. Both the failed coup and the downing of the Russian fighter plane played an important role. The turning point was reached with the reconquering of Aleppo, which indicated a clear military failure by the opposition to overthrow Assad. Erdogan faced an unavoidable choice: support the terrorists and have to deal with a Kurdish enclave on the Syrian border; or reach a peaceful solution with the Russian Federation in order to contain the Kurdish threat and guarantee the integrity of Syria.
Erdogan has been rewarded by his choice to side with Russia and Iran, leaving Turkey in a better position than that of a couple of years ago, with him now able to influence the fate of many events in the Middle East, as well as allowing him to focus on his own national interests, in particular on the Kurds. The failure of the plan to balkanize Syria, involving the extreme attempt to declare Kurdish independence in Iraq, has only led to the end of Barzani’s reign. Hardliners committed to regime change in Damascus, such as the international coalition led by the US military and the military-industrial complex, have tried in every way possible to sabotage the SAA"s fight against Daesh along the Euphrates. Saudi Arabia had even ventured to support Kurdish movements directly within Iraq; and Israel was the only country to openly support the referendum on Kurdish independence.
This strategy foundered on the opposition of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, which with Russian military support consolidated the front against the Saudi-Israeli-Neocons-Neoliberals. During this series of changes and upheavals, the anti-Assad front managed to alienate even a country like Qatar, which has explicit ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and the neoliberal part of the American establishment. Although anti-Assad propaganda continues on state media such as Al Jazeera, the concrete effects are zero. Moreover, Qatar, following the Saudi crisis, sought to broaden its geopolitical stance, engaging directly with Moscow (there have been many contacts between the Al Thani family and the Kremlin) and Iran, a historic enemy of Riyadh.
The European component of the anti-Assad alliance is in complete disarray, with Macron in France conducting difficult mediation between MBS and Hariri in an attempt to avert further Saudi-Israeli political disasters that risk pushing Lebanon completely into the Iranian sphere of influence. In Germany, Merkel is experiencing a long wave of pervasive challenges between globalist versus national-sovereignty movements, with new elections looming. In England, the consequences and effects of Brexit are still tangible, with an unstable government and a series of difficult negotiations with the European Union. There no longer seems to be any time or resources available to invest in Syria. The falsification of reality continues through the mainstream media that belongs to the neoliberal world-wide elite, such as CNN, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post. In addition to the usual lies fed through television and newspapers, Europeans and Americans today have no other tool at their disposal.
Trump seems to be contented to have been able to return home from his tour of Asia having secured hundreds of billions of dollars worth of extortion from allies, while not getting embroiled in the type of endless wars that even Saudi Arabia is unable to sustain, as seen with the genocide in Yemen and actions against Qatar. The Trump administration has many flaws as well as a deep aversion towards Iran, but it has no ability or intention to support Israel and Saudi Arabia in their attempt to limit Iranian influence by force. Not even the combined military forces of Israel and Saudi Arabia could pose a threat to Hezbollah let alone the Islamic Republic of Iran.
What we see is a Middle East that is trying to restore a regional order that is practical and functional. Meetings in Sochi between Turkey, Russia and Iran aim precisely to achieve this. In this scenario, Washington"s absence is notable, despite attempts from Staffan de Mistura to revive the now-dead Geneva conference. Russia and its allies, after taking the military initiative, are ready to guide the diplomatic negotiations between the Assad government and opposition forces, to be held under the auspices of the trio gathered in Sochi, with the involvement of the United Nations in a role as guarantor rather than decider. The shots are called by Assad, Putin, Erdogan and Rouhani, even though this new reality will never be accepted by MBS, Netanyahu, the European governments and the US deep state (neocon/ neoliberal).
MBS"s domestic actions, together with Netanyahu"s threats to Iran and Hezbollah, reveal a refusal to acknowledge defeat as well as, in the case of MBS, an extreme attempt to avoid losing control of the country. For Israel, the problem is more complicated. Already in 2006 it was unable to defeat Hezbollah, and now Hezbollah is more developed, better trained, and better able to inflict damage on the Jewish State. Saudi and Israeli military leaders are more than aware that they do not have the ability to defeat Iran or Hezbollah and that only Washington"s direct involvement would be able to change the course of events. This hypothesis, however, must also take into account the reality on the ground, with Moscow now allied to Tehran and Trump more than opposed to any new wars involving the US. In this situation that is chaotic for anti-Assad forces, MBS continues his work of arresting anyone opposed to him and recovering money sunk into wars in the context of the collapse of the oil price.
The new Middle Eastern order coincides with the near-end of the conflict in Syria and the intention to find a political solution to the conflict by pacifying all parties. It is a solution that is increasingly successful, especially in light of Turkey"s abandonment of the anti-Assad front. Moscow is slowly replacing the US as the fulcrum in the region and beyond, solving conflicts and accompanying the progressive withdrawal of US military and economic influence in the region.
Once again, the strategic triangle between Iran, Russia and China finds itself victorious, inheriting and solving one of the most complicated conflicts since the end of World War II. Kudos to Putin, Rouhani and Xi Jinping, the new giants of the 21st century.
