Failures in Ukraine’s much-touted counteroffensive against Russia stem from the West’s inability to provide Kiev with the necessary military equipment within a reasonable timeframe, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton has said.
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal published on Sunday, Bolton lamented that Kiev’s long-anticipated push, which started in early June, “isn’t making the headway some proponents had forecast,” adding that the disappointing results must become a “wake-up” call for Washington.
The former White House official – widely regarded as a foreign-policy hawk and who has advocated regime changes in Iran, Syria, Libya, and Cuba – insisted in his article that Kiev’s “inability to achieve major advances is the natural result of a US strategy aimed only at staving off Russian conquest,” while he also urged US President Joe Biden to start “vigorously working toward Ukrainian victory.”
“Ukraine’s offensive failures and Russia’s defensive successes share a common cause: the slow, faltering, non-strategic supply of military assistance by the West,” Bolton claimed, adding that the US-led support for Kiev has been hampered further by speculation that Moscow might escalate the conflict.
This is just a ridiculous position. The Ukraine never had any chance against Russia. Anybody with even just a minimal amount of knowledge about the situation knew this to be the case. It didn’t matter how much equipment Biden or anybody else gave the Kiev regime. It defies comprehension that Bolton doesn’t understand this.
Bolton by making these statements is simply pushing for a full NATO intervention in the war. All Bolton has done throughout his sorry career is push for Jewish wars. It is not surprising at all for him to say that Biden and his Jew handlers weren’t hardcore enough and that we now have to commit NATO to the fight.
The thing is NATO is not equipped or prepared to defeat Russia in a war. They’ve spent the past two decades shaping their forces to occupy third world countries opposed to Jews and Israel.
Any sort of NATO intervention will turn into another disaster and may even spark a nuclear exchange.
Around 3,500 MKO members, many of them child soldiers, were living at the notorious Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad, when the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988. (File Photo)
Syed Zafar Mehdi is a Tehran-based journalist, political commentator and author. He has reported for more than 13 years from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and West Asia for leading publications worldwide.
Luisa Hommerich, a Berlin-based investigative journalist with the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, couldn’t hide her joy and thrill on February 10 as she triumphantly announced the end of a protracted legal battle against a terrorist cult.
Hamburg district court had a few days ago dismissed a lawsuit filed by the German branch of the dreaded West-backed terrorist group, Mujahedin -e-Khalq Organization (MKO), after a legal fight that lasted more than ten months.
The lawsuit, in particular, took umbrage to an investigative report published in Zeit Magazine on October 28, 2021, which laid bare how the anti-Iran terrorist cult, with overt and covert support from German authorities, trained refugee children from the city of Cologne as “soldiers” in a military camp in Iraq’s Diyala Governorate in the 1990s.
Hommerich, who painstakingly worked for months on the explosive story, took to Twitter to declare that the MKO had been “unsuccessful” in the legal battle, and hastened to add that the original article was removed from the paywall “to celebrate”.
MKO, she explained in one of her tweets, was “once on terror lists (of Western governments)”, but “are today engaged in lobbying work and maintain contact with (Western) politicians”, pointing to the collusion between the terrorist cult and Western states.
Lawsuit ‘rejected’
In a press statement released on February 23, Zeit publishing group said the lawsuit filed by the MKO terrorist cult had been “rejected” by the Hamburg court, paving way for the re-distribution of the October 2021 report “in its original form”.
The default judgment in the case was issued on January 28 and delivered to the publishing group on February 7, which announced it through a press statement on February 9, which editors at the publishing group shared with the Press TV website.
The statement said the Albania-based terrorist cult and its local branch in Germany were “supported by some members of the Bundestag”, referring to the German federal parliament.
The lawsuit filed by the MKO, in particular, took exception to “eight passages” in the Zeit Magazin article and pressed for their removal. The magazine stood its ground, triggering a long-drawn-out legal battle that ended earlier this month.
In a preliminary verdict on January 19, the Hamburg court found most passages “lawful” and “rejected the request for an injunction”, the Zeit statement noted, adding that the main protagonist of the story, Amin Golmaryami, an Iranian-German national, was indeed recruited as a by the terrorist cult.
The court battle kicked off in April 2022, almost six months after the article was first published. In a Twitter post on April 22, Hommerich said she had reported about Golmaryami being “smuggled into Iraq” by MKO sleuths and was ready to “defend the investigation” before the Hamburg district court.
Later that day, after appearing in the court, the Die Zeit journalist said Golmaryami and five other victims of the terrorist cult had turned up to “testify as witnesses” but “were not heard”.
“One of them demonstrated in front of the courthouse, and in front of about 30 MKO supporters brought by the other side,” she wrote, sharing pictures of a person holding a placard that read “I was a child soldier, I demand justice”.
Anti-MKO protesters at a court in Hamburg in April 2021. (Twitter)
Key protagonist
The report, originally published in Zeit Magazin on October 27, revolved around Golmaryami, who came to Germany as a refugee child in the early 1980s.
At the tender age of 15, he and many other young Iranian refugee children in Cologne were forcibly taken to Iraq to be trained as “child soldiers” against the Islamic Republic.
While other victims chose not to narrate their harrowing ordeal in the captivity of the MKO terrorist cult due to safety concerns, Golmaryami decided to break his silence.
“Blame the man himself with his wishes – and the family. You have to renounce all of that. Only through devotion to a leader can one become “pure”,” the Zeit Magazin report cited Golmaryami as saying, recalling how he and his compatriots were indoctrinated by the Maryam Rajavi-led extremist cult.
The investigation revealed that at least 40 children and young people, who had come to Cologne as refugees without their parents, were smuggled into Iraq in the mid-1990s.
Golmaryami, born in southwestern Iran’s Abadan city, was one of them who spent at least 12 years at Camp Ashraf, the notorious headquarters of the terrorist cult at the time.
The camp has since been closed and shifted to Albania on southeastern Europe’s Balkan peninsula, where among others, Golmaryami’s mother also lives.
She was “brainwashed”, her son exclaims, distraught and helpless.
Golmaryami was allowed to see his mother last time in the summer of 2019, in a restaurant in Tirana. When he offered to help her escape the camp, she became aggressive.
German magazine Die Zeit’s article about the former MKO child soldier, Amin Golmaryami, published in October 2021. (Die Zeit)
“Only traitors and agents of the Iranian regime say things like that,” she yelled at him, the report noted. “He no longer hopes to be able to save her.”
The report quoted Golmaryami as saying that he “internally resisted being brainwashed” by the MKO. “Only rarely did he express his true thoughts. That’s how he kept a clear head.”
“Most of the 40 minors who are believed to have been smuggled into Iraq from Cologne (by the MKO) have reportedly gotten out in the meantime. Many are said to be living in Cologne again,” the report stated.
“At least 10, however, are said to be with the People’s Mujahideen (MKO terrorist cult) somewhere in the world. Some are said to have died in attacks in Iraq.”
MKO’s German wing
In a follow-up article for Zeit Online in November 2021, reproduced by other news outlets, Hommerich said Golmaryami and others like him were “manipulated and detained” by MKO agents using “psychological techniques”, “mind control”, and “brainwashing”.
Based on months-long research, archive material and internal documents, Zeit Online revealed that the terror cult operates in Europe and the US under the label of the ‘National Council of Resistance Iran’, with German headquarters in a posh neighborhood of Berlin.
The group enjoys the support of the German Solidarity Committee for a Free Iran (DSFI), which has, among others, former Bundestag President Rita Süssmuth on its advisory board.
German lawmakers – including Thomas Erndl (Christian Social Union), Lukas Köhler (Free Democratic Party), and Bernhard Daldrup (Social Democratic Party) – have often participated in the events organized by the MKO and DSFI.
Norbert Lammert, who served as the 12th President of the German Bundestag (federal parliament) from 2005 to 2017, has also been seen attending events hosted by Rajavi.
Norbert Lammert, the former President of the German Bundestag, addressing an MKO rally in front of the German Parliament, in October 2020.
Zeit Online report, citing anonymous sources, revealed that senior German politicians like Süssmuth worked with the DSFI to take many of these young refugees after they left Camp Ashraf in Iraq, and most of them ended up in a villa in Berlin-Wilmersdorf after their arrival.
“We thought we were coming to Europe, to freedom,” one of them was quoted as saying in the report. “But in Berlin, the organization’s officials continued to monitor us mentally, emotionally, socially, and financially.”
Task cut out
They had their day’s task cut out: wake up at seven o’clock and started working, including collecting donations on the street. In the evenings, they would attend “ideological meetings” wherein they had to reveal their forbidden thoughts – including about their own family.
These helpless MKO cadres were also subject to “sleep deprivation” as political meetings sometimes continued throughout the night, from around 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.
“Destruction of social ties” was another diabolic technique used by the cult. They were not allowed to contact family, friends or even fellow cadres. The “mission” was what mattered.
They were also shielded from any outside information and barred from reading newspapers and magazines or listening to the radio or music. Internet available was heavily censored.
This manipulation and mind control, the report cited “dissidents” as saying, was designed to have “cheap workers” who would work for the terror cult’s goals – propaganda against Iran.
“Some would have looked for politicians or kept the German-language websites of the organization up to date. Others organized demonstrations,” the report stated.
Most of these people were also required to collect donations for the terror cult, by standing in pedestrian zones and showing doctored pictures of “victims of torture and starving children”.
This practice also extended to stealth ‘clubs’ that were run from the Berlin villa. Some of these ‘clubs’ are still functional, operating under the names of ‘Aid for Human Rights in Iran’, the ‘Association for People and Freedom’, or the ‘Association for Hope of the Future’.
Lobbying and donations
A former MKO member was cited as saying that all they require for lobbying is “one or two famous names,” shower them with attention and compliments and dole out gifts. In the next step, the person is asked to form an association that campaigns for the MKO.
“It’s a psychological trick: when you ask someone a favor after so much flattery, people think they owe you something and they can hardly say no,” the person asserted.
Donald Trump’s former security advisor, John Bolton, according to award-winning MSNBC journalist Richard Engel, received upwards of $180,000 for speaking at MEK events over the years.
Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton speaking at an MKO rally in New York in September 2017.
A report in The Guardian in July 2018 said Bolton’s ascent as Trump’s security advisor “reinvigorated the group”, and helped it “bury its murky past and portray itself as a democratic and popular alternative to the Islamic Republic”.
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, has also regularly featured in MEK rallies. Engel says Giuliani “doesn’t remember how much money they paid him over the years”, and believes the group’s past designation as a foreign terrorist organization was “a mistake”.
The terror organization has also been involved in party donations. The far-right group Vox, which is the third-largest bloc inside the Spanish parliament with 52 lawmakers, was created in 2013 with around €1 million funded by the MKO, as reported by El Pais newspaper in January 2020.
Two lawmakers for the far-right political group, Santiago Abascal and Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, received party salaries for eight months from MEK donations, around €65,000 in total.
This political lobbying has helped the group, which was on the US list of terrorist organizations until 2012, escape scrutiny for years, with even courts coming to its rescue on several occasions.
In March 2019, a German court ordered the weekly magazine Der Spiegel to delete passages from an article that accused the MKO of engaging in “torture” and “psycho terror”.
The court in its ruling said it would fine the German magazine 250,000 euros (about $282,000) if the passages about a MEK “psycho terror” camp in Albania weren’t removed.
Die Zeit’s significant legal victory against the terror group, however, could be the beginning of the end of its criminal activities in Germany and other European countries.
Syed Zafar Mehdi is a Tehran-based journalist, political commentator and author. He has reported for more than 13 years from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir and West Asia for leading publications worldwide.
Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:
A week after Sy Hersh’s expose on the Nord Stream pipeline explosions, there is still no word that pretend President Biden who denies any knowledge or involvement in causing an Act of War in the Baltic Sea has yet to offer an explanation to the American public or reach out to Russian President Vladimir Putin – but what possible explanation could be offered when the Biden co-conspirators, millions of Americans and Putin’s Security Council all know the truth.
Even though the balloon distraction consumes the American mainstream media with the anonymous buoyant inflatable nonsense of a psyop as if to avoid the inescapable moment of truth – which will come inevitably. In any case, a good guess is that the Russians are not amused by whatever game the Biden Administration has conjured up to deflect attention from the reality of a world level Act of War crisis.
While the media remains aflutter with the guessing-game possibilities, TPTB appear confident that because Russia has been restrained and prudent in its reactions during its special military operation; including the unrelenting NATO lies but especially to the inhumanity of the Ukraine Nazi’s. There is a general refusal on the part of the Americans to believe that The Bear would ever retaliate, that they could never be pushed so far until there was nowhere else to go.
Perhaps as the European mainland flounders in an energy and economic crisis of its own making, they are experiencing a resurgence of lost sovereignty and awareness of their loss of independence at the hands of the US.
As the US and rest of the world await Russia’s response to the Biden Administration’s denial, legendary professor, historian, philosopher and political analyst emeritus Noam Chomsky has reminded us of the reckless and provocative impact of the US withdrawal of arms control agreements on Russia’s well-defined borders and legitimate security interests.
***
The Intercontinental ABM Treaty was signed by President Richard Nixon in 1972 in Moscow with each participant limited to a small portion of their territory. The Russians chose to protect its capitol at Moscow while the US chose to protect an ICBM site at Grand Fork, North Dakota – what does that tell you?
Three days after the 911 attack, President GW Bush with vice President Dick Cheney at his side, decided that the ABM was a ‘relic’ of the Cold War that had outlived its usefulness; announcing the withdrawal citing the Treaty’s hindrance of the US protecting itself as if it might be subject to a ballistic missile attack from ‘terrorists’ or ‘rouge states’ with access to comparable nuclear weapons. Despite its original intent of “unlimited duration,” the ABM included a withdrawal option in case of ‘extraordinary events” that jeopardized the parties’ “supreme interests.” The US then notified Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan of its intent. It was the first time the US withdrew from a nuclear arms agreement but not the last.
Withdrawal of the ABM allowed offensive weapon facilities to be located close to the Russian border as Putin described the Treaty as a “cornerstone” of Russia’s security system. In his 2018 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin spoke of the US unilateral withdrawal:
“We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty. All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the Americans. All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected.”
“All these years, the entire fifteen years since the withdrawal of the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, we have consistently tried to reengage the American side in serious discussions.”
***
By the mid 1990’s President Bill Clinton abandoned Secretary of State James Baker’s “categorical assurance” to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev that “there would be no extension” of NATO’s jurisdiction “one inch to the east.” As Gorbachev put it in 2008:
“the Americans had promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and Eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”
As a result of the Malta Summit in December, 1989 between President GWH Bush and President Gorbachev, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock said that
“..if Bush had been re-elected and Gorbachev had remained as president of the USSR there would have been no NATO expansion during their terms in office. There was no way either could commit successors” and that “I personally opposed the way NATO was extended to Eastern Europe, greater effort should have been made to create a “Europe whole and free,” by developing a new security structure including Russia”.
In addition, Robert Gates, then deputy national security advisor believed that “Gorbachev…” had been “led to believe” that the “expansion of NATO eastward” would not happen.
***
The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan in 1987 in Reykjavik, Iceland eliminating thousands of missiles that would potentially have carried nuclear warheads. To Gorbachev and Reagan’s credit, the INF abolished an entire category of nuclear weapons while allowing first-hand observers of missile destruction and on-site verification as part of Reagan’s ‘trust but verify’ motto.
By 2019, President Donald Trump announced that he was suspending compliance with the Treaty and cited development of a prohibited missile by Russia while Putin countered that the US anti ballistic system in Europe which was within striking distance of Moscow could be used for offensive purposes. The Treaty ended a superpower build up in Europe as it banned ground launched missiles with a range of up to 3400 miles.
In October, 2018, US national security advisor John Bolton arrived for two days of talks with Russian officials who called the INF withdrawal as “dangerous” and “showing a lack of wisdom” as a “mistake.” Known to be belligerent to the Russians and arms control agreements, Bolton was also to meet with Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov and Secretary to the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin who was looking for ‘clarification’ on US intentions.
In response, Putin denied any violation of the INF and announced suspension of Russian involvement in the Cold-war era INF Treaty to pursue a new generation of hypersonic missiles.
Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC.
Between the riots in Iran, the war in Ukraine, and the talks to revive the JCPOA, Iran has certainly had a busy year. Perhaps it would be good for us to look over the year from an eagle’s eye view so that we can get a feel of how 2023 might play out in Iran.
Between riots, drones, and diplomats, 2023 looks like it’s going to be one heck of a year, both for Iran, and the world.
This was certainly a busy year for the world. We left 2021 pondering on the prospects of a possible JCPOA revival (though to be fair, I did say it was highly unlikely it would happen at the time), looking forward to the winter Olympics, and thinking about what would unfold in the newest episodes of Boris Johnson and the party bunch.
But here we are now, amid a war in Ukraine, fully-backed and stoked by NATO, a continued escalation of tensions with China, a cost-of-living crisis in the West (alongside an energy crisis), full-on riots that quickly turned into armed attacks on security forces in Iran, and the death of Barbara Walters.
This has certainly been a whirlwind of a year, so perhaps looking into how things progressed, at least as far as Iran is concerned, could help us get a feel for how 2023 might unwind?
Perhaps the easiest place to start would be the beginning. Looking back into the early days of 2022, one main idea was being repeated in Iranian diplomatic circles on all levels for several months: We are very close to reaching a deal, but the move necessitates a serious, realistic decision by the US.
Really, you’d think the US would’ve been able to make a decision by now. But it isn’t about a sovereign decision so much as it was hoping for a repeat of 2015. Meaning a deal that it can go into and leave at will.
One of the main reasons the Vienna Talks took so long really goes back to a simple principle. Iran had seen firsthand the consequences of US deception: The US signed the JCPOA, did not implement it, and suffered no consequences, then left it unilaterally and still suffered no consequences, and then sanctioned Iran through its maximum pressure campaign and still, suffered no consequences.
Meanwhile, the EU stood idly by, twiddling its fingers, also failing to abide by its side of the bargain, calling on Iran to implement the deal in full.
So now, the matter was simple, if the US needed to return to the deal, the Iranians needed to make sure that there would be no loopholes that Washington could use to leave the deal without consequences, and moreover, if that were to happen, then Iran also needed to make sure it could easily go back to where things were before the deal, in terms of the nuclear program.
As far as the US was concerned, there were two main issues driving it to drag its feet…The first was the fact that no loopholes meant that it would become more difficult to leave the deal, as it had been hoping for what Alastair Crooke called “A Pop-in, Pop-out JCPOA”, a doggie door if you will.
The second was due to political circumstances: Biden had been afraid of how the outcome of the Midterm elections might play out, and so was working the two sides by making headway in the talks (which explains the recurring statements that a deal was close to being reached) while also looking out for his administration’s and Democrats’ numbers in the Midterms, so it wouldn’t look like they were being weak on Iran, which the GOP could then exploit to boost its Midterm numbers.
One unforeseen event was the riots in Iran. Although they were stoked by the West – primarily the US, which is trying to push for regime change –if it hadn’t been for the riots, the US would have probably agreed to go back to the deal once the Midterms were done.
But why would the US go back to the deal if it considers it so binding? The reasoning’s pretty straightforward, and also has to do with geopolitical shifts. The disruption of global energy supplies following Western sanctions on Russia has the West scrambling to look for alternatives to Russian gas and oil, and the EU is pushing for Iran to be brought back to the global energy market, while the US is still dragging its feet, ostensibly hoping at the moment for regime change through the Iran riots.
Iran riots
Ah yes, the Iran riots, which the West rather impetuously calls protests. It’s funny how when some people take to the streets armed with weapons to use against security forces and civilians, they’re called peaceful protests by Western mainstream media who go out of their way to challenge any narrative that brings any evidence showing the violent intent of the rioters to light.
Can it get any clearer than the interview that famed war hawk and mustache aficionado John Bolton had with BBC Persian’s Rana Rahimpour?
Bolton, of all people, went out of his way to show that the rioters were being armed by weapons being smuggled from Iraqi Kurdistan, while the BBC Persian host, Rana Rahimpour, of all people, went out of her way to change subjects while also ‘correcting’ Bolton that there was no evidence to the rioters being armed, which led to Bolton replying that they indeed were, as videos on social media clearly showed (You can find the 8-minute video of the interview here, the part I’m referring starts at 5:16. However, it’s in Farsi, so you may want to get your Iranian friend to translate it for you over some Chelo Kebab and Doogh).
Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton said on UK state owned BBC Persian that the Iranian opposition is armed. The BBC Persian host tried to refute him & change the topic.
Meanwhile, the terrorists shoot at the armed forces & send footage to US state owned Persian TV! pic.twitter.com/TWa7Iy4euY— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) November 9, 2022
By the way, this was the same Rana Rahimpour who just a few days earlier had an audio leaked from a conversation with her mother, saying that some media outlets (namely the Saudi-funded Iran International) were clearly working toward an end goal of weakening and dividing Iran.
Or how about the blatant way in which none other than famed media personality, broom-riding extraordinaire, and lover of gingerbread houses, the US-paid, VOA-employed, and friendly neighborhood spider woman Masih Alinejad was pushing for more riots in Iran, and constantly calling for even more sanctions against her own country, whose people were suffering because of the US-imposed sanctions.
The #CIA-backed instigator, #MasihAlinejad, is making a lot of money in exchange for inciting violence in #Iran and even using victims’ mothers to provoke more riots in the country. pic.twitter.com/k4svccmz96— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) November 20, 2022
Perhaps it’s telling that the same countries that have sanctioned Iran for its ‘crackdown’ on ‘protestors’ had earlier resorted to more forceful measures in their crackdown on actual, unarmed protestors in their countries. It may be useful for us to remember Canada and its crackdown on anti-vaccine mandate protestors, which went as far as to freeze their bank accounts. How about Freedom Convoy protestors? Or how about the French police’s violence against protestors and racism against minorities? Or how about Australian police shooting anti-lockdown protestors?
It’s understandable from the Western point of view of course: You see Iranians are so ‘repressed by their government’ that they’re not allowed to leave their homes once they finish working, and by ‘protesting’ they’re actually running and getting their fair share of exercise; but Europeans get enough exercise as it is, so police aren’t actually using violence! They’re sparring with them because they’re so physically fit and need the challenge!
But seriously, let’s keep in mind that the West cannot expect the riots to end and for Iran to go back to how things were before pre-riots. Germany, France, the UK, Saudi Arabia, “Israel”, and the US all stoked the riots, overtly supporting them. Although Iran is very pragmatic, it also possesses a very good collective memory, and diplomatic relations and economic opportunities won’t mean that it will forego hostile actions taken against it.
Of course, that’s not to forget the impact that the war on Ukraine left on Western-Iranian relations, which further cemented Iran’s pivot to the Global South.
The war in Ukraine
Although at the start of the war in Ukraine, relations between Iran and the West went unaffected, they devolved as the war progressed on account of Western accusations that Iran had sent Russia drones for use against Ukraine. The problem for the West wasn’t that Iran denied supply of the drones for use during the war; as far as they were concerned, they were dead set on implicating Iran against Ukraine, regardless of the circumstances, rather it was that the drones were very effective in a battleground the West was using to test out its own arsenal.
Just to be clear, Iran’s stance on the war in Ukraine is still unchanged. It’s only natural that Tehran would want to further its ties with Moscow as part of its strategy to deepen its ties with the Global South and push for a new world order of multilateralism. That doesn’t mean that it ever supported the war in Ukraine, as in fact it said it was against the war, favoring a diplomatic resolution, but made it clear NATO was the party who instigated the war through its attempts to expand eastward.
To put things in perspective, Iran’s ties with Russia will only grow in the future, regardless of the war in Ukraine. The focus on Iran and the Global South creating international and regional institutions to counter US hegemony is only set to increase amid NATO’s policy to create new coalitions and alliances in Central Asia and the Asia Pacific. Moreover, the war in Ukraine served to stretch the US’ forces around the world even thinner, as it continues to make overtures against China in the Asia Pacific, while also announcing support for “Israel” and the normalization process in West Asia, in a bid to create an anti-Iran coalition. This is perhaps best evidenced during a recent June 24, 2022, policy speech made by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Hudson Institute:
“Moving past our current geo-strategic focus, the United States must help in building of the three lighthouses for liberty. These beacons should be centered on nations that have great strife: Ukraine, ‘Israel’, and Taiwan. They can be the hubs of new security architecture that links alliances of free nations globally, reinforcing the strengths of each member state, in time, linking these three bastions with NATO, as well as the new and expanded security framework for the Indo-Pacific will form a global alliance for freedom. This will benefit America.”
Although it might be a bit difficult to hear someone who used the words ‘lie, cheat, and steal’ in the same context as a mugger would talk about “lighthouses for liberty”, this person — by a rather strange twist of fate and improbable circumstances, without a doubt due to a great disturbance in the force brought on by the birth of the antichrist — was a decision-maker in the former US administration, and apparently what he says has some measure of weight.
Maybe it is also telling, in this regard, that Pentagon upgraded its security ties with “Israel”, making it a full military partner, meaning that “Israel” has been transferred to CENTCOM, in a development that hasn’t happened in the US military establishment since 1948 (go figure, Pompeo might have been right!).
The Pentagon announcement made it clear that both were preparing for a potential war against Iran by both elevating “Israel’s” position and paving the way for a regional alliance against Iran.
“The easing of tensions between ‘Israel’ and its Arab neighbors subsequent to the ‘Abraham Accords’ has provided a strategic opportunity for the United States to align key partners against shared threats in the Middle East. ‘Israel’ is a leading strategic partner for the United States, and this will open up additional opportunities for cooperation with our US Central Command partners while maintaining strong cooperation between ‘Israel’ and our European allies,”.
Ok, so where does this leave us next year?
If we ever thought 2022 would be uneventful, then brace yourselves for next year! Russian, Iranian military cooperation is still in its early stages, as is a cooperation between Iran and Asian powers that would prefer a multilateral world order. It is without a doubt that we will see an increase in tensions around the globe, but West Asia hinges on the provocations of a very important actor: The Israeli occupation.
How the Israeli occupation’s incoming government, the most extremist to date, chooses to deal with Palestine and the Resistance Factions will leave a great impact on the region as a whole.
Sure, we can opine on whether or not the JCPOA might be revived, because it’s still comatose, regardless of what the Americans say in the media; but the most significant variable, and certainly the hottest flashpoint as of the beginning of this new year in West Asia, is Palestine. If the Palestinian Resistance continues its victory streak and manages to pacify the Israeli occupation, then it is assured that “Tel Aviv” will seek to increase its regional power through alliances, while continuing to work for the next few years: Biding time until it overhauls its airforce, waiting for a change in the US administration that places “Israel” higher up on its list of priorities, and attempting to destabilize Iran’s domestic through intelligence, while at the same time attempting to drag the US into a regional war that it is wholeheartedly against.
As for the riots in Iran, they’re not completely over, yes they’ve fizzled out to a large extent, but it wouldn’t be farfetched to expect that Iran may have some changes in store on the domestic scene. That’s not to say the hijab law will be removed because of pressure from the riots, that is a resounding no, but what’s going to change is how the law is enforced.
Aside from the riots, a more interesting development for Iran was certainly the unfolding of Merkel’s confessions on the Minsk agreements. The whole point behind the color revolution that happened in Ukraine and the subsequent Minsk agreements was not appeasing Russia, inasmuch as it was about buying time for Ukraine and disarming Russia. This was the same trap that the Iranian team fell into during the 2015 JCPOA when it agreed to restrict its arms exports for years (five years for heavy arms, and eight for ballistic missiles). Though thankfully, Iran never stopped expanding its drone and ballistic missile program, although it would have been in a more advanced position now had it not agreed to that at the time.
This time, Iran will go into the talks with Merkel and the Minsk accords in mind, and an eye out for Western attempts to disarm it or pull the rug from under its feet.
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Israeli concern about Iranian-Russian military cooperation / Al-Ain Al-Israeli with journalist Hassan Hijazi
Following the 2034 collapse of Britain and the popular overthrow of its millennial Establishment after nearly two decades of political turmoil, England moves ahead. Last week international arrest warrants were issued by the new People’s Government for the detention of the elderly war criminals Blair (Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq), Cameron (Libya, Syria and the Yemen) and Johnson (the Ukraine), who are all believed to be in hiding, cowering from justice somewhere in Florida, where they are now being hunted down.
As regards internal changes to the English Capital, just today the following changes have been announced by the People’s Government in London, the Capital of England, part of its programme of ‘Re-Englanding England’, also known as ‘Debritainisation’.
England Square
Today, exactly two hundred years after ‘Trafalgar Square’ in London was given the name of an Arabic-named Cape in Spain, the Square is to be renamed ‘England Square’. The statue of Nelson on its column is to be replaced by a statue of the effective founder of England, King Alfred the Great, known as ‘England’s Darling’, ‘The Truthteller’ and ‘The Lawgiver’. It will then be known as ‘Alfred’s Column’. A spokesman for the People’s Government said that it in no way wished to denigrate Nelson, whose tactical genius and personal bravery are undoubted, but Demilitarisation is an inherent part of Debritainisation. The statue will be removed to the English Museum, formerly called ‘The British Museum’. This has plenty of empty space, since so many of its artefacts, looted from around the world by British imperialists mainly since the eighteenth-century, have been returned to their countries of origin.
At the same time the four lions around the base of Alfred’s Column will also be sent to the English Museum as part of the policy of Demilitarisation, that is, as part of the policy of the removal of aggressive symbols of imperialist militarism. They will be replaced by four female figures, personifying Motherhood, Peace, Justice and Freedom. The four plinths for statues on England Square, at present occupied by three statues (the fourth plinth is empty) of the German King George IV and the imperialist militarists, Napier and Havelock, are also to be sent to the English Museum. They will be replaced by statues of literary and social geniuses of English history, known as ‘The Four Williams’: William Langland (1332-1386), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), William Blake (1757-1827) and William Cobbett (1763-1835).
As readers may know, Langland wrote a visionary English-language poem and allegory called ‘Piers Plowman’, in which he denounced the corruption of the medieval Catholic Church and praised the simple faith of the people. As for Shakespeare, he was the most brilliant poet of the English language and a very perceptive psychologist, who described in detail the good and bad in human nature and their motivations. Blake was the visionary poet and artist who opposed the appalling exploitation of his age and wrote the new English National Anthem, ‘Jerusalem’, in which he denounced the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution’, that is, of the mass exploitation of industrial workers. Cobbett was a politician who struggled for social justice and wrote against the collectivisation, or privatisation, that is, just plain theft, of the common land in England, euphemistically called the ‘Enclosures’. He constantly campaigned against corruption and poverty and in favour of rural prosperity and freedom.
As for the busts of the three imperialist Admirals, Jellicoe, Beatty and Cunningham, in England Square, they are also to be sent to the English Museum and be replaced by busts of three well-known poets: a soldier (Wilfred Owen), a merchant sailor (John Masefield) and an airman, John Gillespie Magee (author of ‘High Flight’). They are in memory of the sacrifices of ordinary men, ‘the lions led by donkeys’, in the imperialist wars of the British past. The statue of Charles I on the south side of England Square, usurped and then beheaded by a clique of grasping merchants, will be retained. However, the statues in front of the National Gallery, of the Scottish King James II and of the slave-owning colonist George Washington, will be sent to the English Museum and be replaced by statues of the two Patronal Saints of England, St George and St Edmund.
The Square of the Peoples
Meanwhile, there will also be changes to the statues outside ‘Parliament’, renamed ‘The House of the People’ since the abolition of the House of Lords, to that in the Guildhall, and to the twelve statues in Parliament Square, now renamed ‘The Square of the Peoples’. Outside the House of the People, the statue of Cromwell is to be replaced by a statue of an Irish peasant, at least 200,000 (10% of the population) of whom the brutal thug Cromwell had massacred. In the Guildhall the statue of Thatcher is to be replaced by the statue of a Yorkshire coal-miner. Both old statues are to be taken to the English Museum to protect them from vandalism.
In The Square of the Peoples, nine of the present twelve statues are also to be removed. These are, in anti-clockwise order: the statue of Churchill, replaced by that of an English child orphaned by bombing in the Second World War; that of David Lloyd George by an injured World War One Welsh soldier; that of the South African Prime Minister Smuts by a Boer woman from a British concentration camp during the Boer War; that of the British Imperialist Prime Minister Palmerston by that of a Russian peasant-soldier from the British invasion of Russia (the so-called ‘Crimean War’); that of the British Imperialist Prime Minister Smith-Stanley (the Earl of Derby) by that of a Chinese woman suffering in the so-called, British-caused ‘Opium War’ (Genocide of China); that of the British Imperialist Prime Minister Disraeli by that of a Bulgarian peasant-woman, oppressed by the Ottomans whom Disraeli immorally supported; that of the British Imperialist Prime Minister Peel by that of a starving Irishwoman from the Irish Potato Famine; that of the British Imperialist Prime Minister Canning by that of a Scottish crofter, removed by force from his land which was stolen from him in the so-called ‘Highland Clearances’; that of Lincoln by that of a Tasmanian Aborigene, representing the treatment of North, Central and South American Natives, Australian Aborigenes, genocided Tasmanians and Maori, all as a result of British ‘colonisation’ (land-theft). The statues of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Millicent Fawcett will remain as symbols of the striving for freedom of Africans, Indians and of women, who were freed from Victorian oppression and the deprivation of rights.
Europe
The new English People’s Government, elected by over 85% of the electorate according to the new proportional democracy, is keen to depose the old tyrants and celebrate the victims of tyranny. It has come to our knowledge that parallel events are about to occur not only in newly-reunited Ireland and newly-independent Scotland and Wales, but also in the newly-freed countries of the former EU. This follows last month’s sacking of the EU headquarters in the Berlaymont building in Brussels. Everywhere in Western Europe the flags of freedom are beginning to flutter defiantly.
In Paris the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is to be renamed ‘L’Arc du Peuple’ (‘The People’s Arch’) and Napoleon’s bloody battles are to be removed from it. Rome, Brussels, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon – all are reviewing names of streets, statues and monuments. As for the English Government, it has already joined the new Confederation of Free European Nations (CFEN), a loose structure which will meet in various European Capitals. It was originally suggested by the paternal Russian government and has been formed to replace the old centralised EU and its unelected bureaucrats and tyrants.
15 August 2035
Breaking News:
It has just been announced that Antony Blair has been captured by the Free American Police after being found hiding in a hole in the ground near a farmhouse outside Miami. Blair was shown in a photograph with a full beard and hair longer than in his familiar appearance. He was described by police officials as being in good health despite his 82 years. The details of his double trial, which is to take place in Belgrade and then in Baghdad, have not yet been determined. The local police call their prisoner ‘Vic’, which stands for ‘Very Important Criminal’. Officials said that Blair whined to them after his arrest: ‘I am innocent, I did not do anything, I was only following orders from the White House’.
“ Washington and London have drawn ´useful European idiots´ into an economic war against Russia ” – said former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev – adding that “the onset of a systemic crisis in the Eurozone is beginning to come true.” He added that Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic conned EU members “like a couple of shell-game tricksters” by drawing them into an unwarranted economic war against Moscow which is actually an Anglo-Saxon project, not theirs. Paraphrasing James Carville, “it´s the Anglo-Saxons, stupid”. The US-UK cabal does not want Europe and Russia to trade, do business, relate, or grow together in any way, shape, or form. So they designed, built and forced upon Europe the current John Bolton-Ukraine war which had plan A (now failed) with Russia as target and plan B as substitute with Europe itself as the intended victim coming next. What Dmitry Medvedev may not know though is that such ”useful European idiots” can be broken down into 3 fairly distinct categories starting with the EU “well-trained career idiots” basically focused on continuously earning salaries and perks way above their capabilities. So they know that (a) the EU system rewards them generously despite their obvious mediocrity and limitations and (b) thus do not dare to question, doubt, let alone defy the EU system or dictats. They all know and feel every day of their lives that the EU ´system´ has a very strict pecking order and what top-cock (or top-hen) says to do or say or think is to be summarily executed without questioning the mandate, even if against European best interests as is the case.
This simplifies the problem from the Washington-London perspective as by controlling a handful of EU leaders (more on that later) the rest just follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Furthermore, these EU-captured intellectual simpleton retards are not dumb enough to the extreme of questioning their unequivocal role (they are aware of it) and accordingly constantly strengthen their vested-interests relationship. In sum, they work hard at it.
Then there is a second category of “useful European idiots” grouping the visible top EU leaders – many unelected — who can either be (a) plain corrupt as traditionally allowed for in Europe or (b) perceive themselves as God-chosen to lead Europe to a glorious yet undefined destiny no matter if actively hijacking any representational capacity and values they may have received. For lack of a better term, this “affection” – which pretty much comes with the territory – in medical circles is sometimes also known as “bronzemia” a rare hematological disease that makes the patient believe his destiny is to end up in a bronze sculpture and adored – literally — just like a Greek God of sorts. For example, it is very well known that EU Commission President Ursula von den Leyen abhors British leadership, let alone after the yet un-resolved Brexit due to unconfessable trickery from Perfidious Albion. But she still accepts and follows Anglo-Saxon mandates because of what she perceives to be her role in achieving the still unknown greater European “good”. Go figure… Finally, the third group of “useful European idiots” are regular everyday Europeans that – so as not to abandon their zone of political and economic / financial comfort – knowingly allow their leaders to betray their best interests without getting their feet wet in any way.
Pepe Escobar says in his latest article referenced below: “ The combo in power in Washington actually “supports” the unification of Britain, Poland, Ukraine and The Three Baltic Midgets as a separate alliance from NATO/EU – aiming at “strengthening the defense potential.” That’s the official position of US Ambassador to NATO Julian Smith.
So the real imperial aim is to split the already shattering EU into mini-union pieces, all of them quite fragile and evidently more “manageable”, as Brussels Eurocrats, blinded by boundless mediocrity, obviously can’t see it coming. More on the UK + Australia roles later.
Meanwhile the Austrian Chancellor himself thoughtfully posits that “Alcohol could be our last resort ” and the EU gaslights environmentalists by grossly redefining what ‘green’ energy is. This resembles quite closely former US President Bill Clinton’s dilemma in his grand jury testimony regarding his acknowledged and intense sexual relationship with young White House intern Monica Lewinsky “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is” (sic). No typos in that quote, so say no more…
“Rape Russia” was plan A, by first provoking Russia 24x7x365 into an existential armed conflict, then let´s defeat Russia militarily (ha!) and change the regime, then balkanize the Russian Federation and fragment it into manageable pieces, and then plunder all of Russia yet again just like we did in Yeltsin´s time. Easy does it. Problem is plan A failed miserably on all fronts no matter how much and how well hundreds of Anglo-Saxon experts – the real puppeteers moving the EU-Ukraine strings — planned for it, some of whom still insist it´s only a matter of pressing yet longer and harder. Others say let´s not lose this war, let´s just go nuclear (more on that later). Yet others – probably cool-headed baldy boomers with Cuban missile crisis personal experience – warn that let´s better not try nuclear warfare as Russia, at least today with fully proven hypersonic vector delivery… would also win. Besides, European capitals nearby would be very soft and quick targets, would they not? Furthermore, Russia´s Sarmat ICBM would immediately step into the act able to ´demolish half a continent as the most powerful missile of its class in terms of range and warheads invincible to all existing air defenses´(sic) And also possible unstoppable latest generation UAV drone fleets already under Russian deployment and/or drone-bot or regular submarines could also nuclear-trigger unheard-of massive tsunamis at every targeted coastline in Western seaboards that ´almost´ land-locked Russia does not have… plus EMP mid-air detonations grinding the crowded Western cities to a halt. All politically impossible and Russian very highly-improbable… but let´s just hope and pray that it doesn´t happen by accident either…
At any rate, plan A took several disciplines and many years of design and training probably more than 10 as proudly explained by NATO´s top dog, Jens Stoltenberg. Also, as per the latest public statements made by former White House National Security Adviser John Bolton, it took a lot of hard work, many US and UK agencies and hundreds of experts, think tanks, rivers of ink, and Zettabytes of documents (no pun intended) plans, maps, satellite imagery, logistical research, telecommunications development, and testing, interviewing and questioning of many thousands of Ukraine soldiers and foreign mercenaries, political influencing, and many billions of dollars – skeptics please refer to Victoria Nuland — sending tons of lethal, modern, sophisticated weaponry to Russian enemies … and still plan A failed, and badly at that for reasons explained hereafter. Only Field Marshall Nazi General von Paulus and Napoleon Bonaparte would possibly share the disgusting feeling of such terribly frustrating defeat.
With plan A, even Germany broke its long-standing policy of banning all exports of lethal weapons to a conflict zone the instant it agreed to deliver 1,000 rocket launchers and 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and many other states have joined the effort and, led by Germany, have added greater support with whatever including anti-tank, anti-aircraft weapons, howitzers, armored vehicles, body armors, night vision devices, grenade launchers, etc., many/most of which completely uncontrolled and without any oversight actually ended up in the hands of numerous resellers on the “black Internet”, not the Ukraine military. The six EU sanctions “packages” – No. 7 is in the works — did not help plan A at all either and, as a matter of fact, all were badly counter-productive. Neither did the addition of “creative transfers” of truly lethal weaponry from Canada per detailed proposal from The Brookings Institution, probably the most prominent “peace-minded” think tank the US will ever have. So imagine what Hoover or The Heritage Foundation, the Council of Foreign Relations, Cato, CSIS, PIIE, American Enterprise or Rand Corporation might say for that matter. The list goes on and on…
Like many other Western strategic projects, plan A most probably originated and/or picked up critical speed in the keenly Russophobic and always protagonistic UK. Still, the level of US involvement was extraordinary and ever-increasing as plan A kept failing, including sanctions preparation, intelligence sharing, weapons deliveries, and tons of money, bribery included. Add to that the ever-heightening political rhetoric: “The United States is in this to win it… not for a stalemate” as one US Congressman proudly tweeted from Kyiv. Or even claiming that “Supplying Arms to Ukraine is Not an Act of War”… The US has sent many F35 jets to Estonia, yet more to Spain and elsewhere…has increased its military presence with US permanent headquarters and troops in Poland… plus a 10-fold enlarged rapid-response force up to 300,000 with yet additional troops in Romania and the Baltic states… plus yet more destroyers in Europe´s waters and skies. And always of course with the always-instrumental UK helping along as per Foreign Secretary Liz Truss – now confirmed candidate for the Prime Minister position — urging to send more “heavy weapons, tanks, and also airplanes” to Ukraine ASAP “digging deep into our inventories and ramping up production”.
Semantics matter. Sure enough, a formal stake-holder agreement or peace settlement or “peace treaty” of sorts may take very long… or even never happen such as still in Korea. And yes, the conflict will go far beyond Ukraine only as a starting point of a new revolution already outlined by Russia´s President Vladimir Putin splitting the world in two very distinct 21st century halves in a “before and after” moment. Still, I insist in that the current shooting “hot war” in Ukraine will be short, with Russia simply winning by European default come 2023 – or even before — as explained already in depth. So such “cease-fire” does not need any official “Peace Treaty” or settlement, just shooting and bombing stopped altogether. Ukraine will simply depose its aggression for lack of European support or else be run down by Russian forces wherever Russia decides. Europe would have had enough, so they just want OUT.
In sum, backfiring EU sanctions on Russia will be the reason for Europe and Ukraine – not Russia — to abandon the shooting battlefield thus ´ending the shooting war´ soon even if the US would still want to go for it… which actually would not as their plan B (more on that later) would kick in immediately against Europe (!!) as soon as the battlefield war stops in Ukraine. So, thanks to their own EU sanctions, by not having enough Russian oil, fuels, nat-gas, food produce, etc., etc., with social unrest and millions freezing and starving to death, regular public-opinion Europeans would demand the EU to stop battlefield support for the provoked Ukraine war and have their leadership revert sanctions on Russia embracing it as the reliable trading partner as it has always been and thus returning to “normal” ASAP. In that sense, it´d be a short war. Formally, diplomatically, it may never actually end. Just saying…
After Brexit failed, Old Blighty UK more than ever had to overact positing, for example, that the collective West now needs “a global NATO” to pursue geopolitics anew. Or also “ Europe must immediately cut itself completely off from Russian energy supplies oil, gas and coal ”. Actually, the current UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss went yet further by tapping her well-known Rule Britannia Anglo-Saxon exceptionalistic mind-set which now would badly demand a much larger “lebensraum”. By the way, the Rule Britannia lyrics let the world know that “…at heaven’s command…Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”. No way, slaves will exist, but Britons shall make sure they are the owners of such and not any other way around. So now, with strategically located Australia – among the world´s largest LNG and food produce exporters — the AUKUS core concept is “all Anglo-Saxons for one, and one Anglo-Saxon for all”. And do not kid yourself as this is national UK policy from Tories, Lib Dems and also Labour. And per Liz Truss it´d be a flashing new “Network of Liberty” yet global in nature. The time and place of this new “Global NATO” setting Ms Truss says is (1) right now and (2) throughout the whole world. And the “lebensraum” Ukraine would only be the starting point says Foreign Secretary Truss very proud of British colonial history. Actually it´d have to be even far larger than what Adolf Hitler originally foresaw with his Nazi foreign policy dictum left on record in “Mein Kampf”. Unbelievably, and per the Führer´s own description, such “lebensraum” was to be found – oh coincidence — “in the Ukraine and intermediate lands of eastern Europe”… Liz Truss is on record adding that China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t “play by the rules”. The war in Ukraine is “our war” because Ukraine’s victory is a “strategic imperative for all of us” while denouncing the “false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security. We need to pre-empt threats in the Indo-Pacific, working with allies like Japan and Australia to ensure that the Pacific is protected. In the modern world we need both. We need a global NATO,” she said. Also, there is this new US strategy seeking to arm Japan against China, also consistent with such policies. Ref #21 https://www.rt.com/news/554925-missile-study-pacific-rand/
no-one left behind
In addition, the sitting UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss — now official Tory candidate for Prime Minister of the UK — has emphasized that the West “must ensure that, alongside Ukraine, the Western Balkans and countries like Moldova and Georgia have the resilience and the capabilities to maintain their sovereignty and freedom”. So Ukraine is not enough for her. And according to the top UK diplomat, NATO should integrate Finland and Sweden “as soon as possible” if the two Nordic nations choose to join the military alliance something which they are both definitely pressured to do.
Adding insult to injury, British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey also stated it is “completely legitimate” for Ukraine to use UK-supplied weapons to strike deep into Russian territory. Ms Truss also has said it was “time for courage, not caution”, making it necessary for the West to send warplanes to Kiev to defeat Moscow sounding much like the US State Department´s London office. Furthermore, German lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to send ‘heavy & complex weapons’ to Ukraine, thus making Germany the easiest, shortest and most probable first strike in the event that thermonuclear warfare with Russia is provoked. Germany could not have picked a better way to most unnecessarily place itself in harm´s way right next to London… or even before London was struck.
The UK lost most of its colonies in the 20th century and economically lost further more with Brexit while the US outsourced most of its manufacturing base in the 21st. So with only their financial and military weapons left, both now are trying to make NATO global. And thus the UK would finally reclaim its universal influence and “take back control” refreshing its natural right to run a financial-military ´Empire on which the sun never sets´. British troops are getting ready for one of their largest deployments in Europe since the cold war, the Defence Ministry (MoD) has said.
Thousands of UK soldiers are going to be sent to countries ranging from North Macedonia to Finland in the coming months to take part in joint drills with their counterparts from NATO, Finland, and Sweden, with British soldiers also training together with US forces in Poland. Also troops from the Queen’s Royal Hussars have just been deployed to Finland, which shares a 1,300-km-long border with Russia, to be embedded in an armored brigade. Convened by US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, and at the behest of US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, representatives from 40 countries gathered at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to set the game plan with the rest of the world as pawns.
In practice, a global NATO is already in the making, and the US-led military bloc’s Madrid summit in late June 2022
is the best proof of this. For the first time in NATO’s history, the Pacific states – Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea – were invited; actions were intensified to form ‘quasi-alliances’ such as the QUAD (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the US, Australia, Japan and India), AUKUS (the trilateral pact between the US, Britain, and Australia), and the Partners in the Blue Pacific (PBP: AUKUS plus Japan and New Zealand). In contrast to the ‘classical NATO’, which has long been perceived in China as a vestige of the Cold War and intra-Western conflicts, these alliances have an unambiguous anti-Chinese orientation.
Since at least 10 years ago, an Anglo-Saxon plan A was proactively deployed for the Ukraine war. It meant having the US + UK fully supporting and pulling the strings from ´behind´ while the EU + Ukraine´s duly bought-out puppets organized a gang-up on Russia from all sides like hyenas on their injured prey. Such plan A by now is obviously failing miserably as the military war is being lost on all fronts and the “sanctions on Russia” have backfired and actually mean terrible “sanctions on Europe” (and “unfriendly” Asians…) with winter rearing its ugly head. Thusly, with plan A failing, Anglo-Saxon plan B is now required. But before getting into its details, let´s first review once more what plan A – or the ´let´s pounce on harmed Russia together´ plan — was all about and how it failed. For Russia was not crushed at all under the weight of sanctions and, actually benefitted in more than one way by collecting ever-larger revenues – due to higher induced prices — for smaller volumes of exports delivered. Furthermore any minute Russia could counter-attack with sanctions of its own regarding many things the West needs besides oil & gas & food & key minerals.
The basic idea behind plan A – not really that “new” by the way — was to prod Russia as much as needed for it to react and then use such reaction to justify a military run-over of Russia. Plan A would take a precise schedule and timing, buying-out whomever wherever, training of the Ukranian military and providing plenty of funding + weapons + intelligence + political coverage + etc. Also there was the requirement to gain time for executing all of the above by actively faking compliance with the Minsk Agreements (shamefully sponsored and led by both Germany & France) which was nothing more than a sham precisely to gain time as readily admitted by former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. So the Western pirating plan was to pounce on Russia hard, produce regime change – despite the “lots of hard work required” per John Bolton former White House National Security Adviser — possibly assassinate Russia´s President Vladimir Putin ( I kid you not ), ruin Russian business capabilities forever, steal Russia´s deposits in Western banks, cut off her trade and finances, “yeltsinize” Russia all over again, fraction down the Russian Federation into weak portions, keep on grabbing Russian resources, just steal all that´s left or buy it on the cheap… and basically schadenfreude it all the way to the bank…
There was nothing to lose as the US & UK productive game of yesteryear was already over and done with, ´Made in USA´ does not exist anymore, the gold-decoupled Bretton Nothing “petro-dollar” standard is in terminal crisis, Brexit did not work out at all as the UK had originally expected, and 75% of the world does not agree with them either. And if while reading this you feel all this is a very unique and peculiar interpretation of facts, I please urge you to (a) take a look at the sources referenced and (b) take into account that if the White House and the worldwide MSM press are willing and able to cover-up today´s US president´s obvious and most dangerous senility, then what other stories are they euthanizing for you not to know about ? Today´s president of the global superpower is permanently confounded by teleprompter and cheat cards telling him what to do and say. Today, the Commander-in-Chief of the by far most powerful military in the world with 790+ military bases spanning the globe and more than 5,000 nuclear warheads, can barely make it through public appearances. Mind you, President Joe Biden wouldn’t pass a driver’s test, unable to distinguish between a pedestrian or a stop sign. But his finger is on the nuclear trigger. Did the MSM press tell you ?
Now Russia is winning on all fronts, be it militarily, geo-politically, strategically, financially, economics or logistics. So in the event that plan A failed – as it is now obviously happening – Anglo-Saxon plan B would soon kick in with Europe and Ukraine the victims, not the victimizers because neither will be able to withstand the tremendous burden that their ´Russian sanctions´ bear upon themselves, not Russia. And who would the victimizers be? Answer: the US + UK pupeteers-in-chief . Please re-read the “ useful European idiots “ paragraph above with very clear statements made by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. So the ´Russian sanctions´ will continue to (1) harm Europe and the Ukraine and (2) leave the Russian Federation basically unscathed and just collecting ever larger revenues – due to higher induced prices — for smaller volumes of exports delivered. This benefits Russia in two ways (a) getting paid more by producing less while saving the difference for future sales (b) it allows to finance Russia´s attrition-war strategy forever. There will be violence and massive migrations in Europe for sure as EU leaders are finally realizing.
gold anyone ?
EU politicking though has now stopped in its tracks right at the physical limit which “lite” and uncommitted European consumer economies will not allowed to be crossed thus altering their “comfort zone”. It is becoming ever clearer for European public opinion that without Russian energy, Russian food, and Russian produce at large quite simply Europe cannot survive. So as Frank Sinatra foresaw, the end is now near and Anglo-Saxon+EU joint plans for Russian piracy – plan A — are just about over. Never in their history have Europeans depended so much strictly from Russian produce that very simply cannot stop coming in. All the way to very distant Japan and South Korea, with these Russian sanctions their much-required ´Just-In-Time´ strategy is rapidly becoming ´Just-In-S**t. So now Europeans and Western-compliant Asians would freeze and starve with massive migrations democratically spread out everywhere. That´s why plan B “let´s rape Europe instead” will necessarily kick in soon.
What Anglo-Saxons may do after raping Europe and making it their own for peanuts is to make an energy & produce & resources supply deal with whomever. They´d just get a hold of installed and already built capacity plus expertise and human resources capabilities in Europe. Additionally, they would get the continental internal market in a key and unequaled geopolitical area of the world. The Anglo-Saxons basically just want to change the tide and win at something-anything, so if Russia cannot be defeated they´ll rape continental Europe first and try to make buddies with whomever later, even Latam or Africa… with investments profits on top. And Australia, as an active part of the AUKUS core may also perform a key role regarding “unfriendly” Asians. And beware: if you care to believe the Anglo-Saxons, between Fort Knox and the Bank of England they both pretty much vault everybody else´s gold, Europe´s included. So be carefully aware of the plenty of food for thought before you. Gold is real money as Lawrence of Arabia learned the hard way, and per Liz Truss – possibly the future Prime Minister of the UK — let´s recall that whoever has the gold would make the rules, their rules.
This unexpected self-inflicted slow-motion demolition of sorts was not what Europe had in mind for itself nor understood to be the price they´ll have to pay for fighting – let alone winning — this NATO provoked Ukraine war.
So, if Europeans do not react soon enough and revert course 180 degrees, Europe will continue vassalized depending ever more upon the US and thus self-hurting itself with “Russian” sanctions, not Russia, allowing for the US and London to eventually come in and pick up the pieces and keeping it all for peanuts as per their plan B. And this would mean that the hot shooting Ukraine war would stop. By the way, Russia could just watch the scene also unable to cover the whole globe and being fed-up of so much unjustified past aggression from the EU. And besides just sick and tired of so much nonsense and wasted opportunities during decades of accommodation to European needs. So with or without sanctions, Russia could simply sell ever-lower amounts of oil & gas & food and other strategic commodities to Europe and other Asian “unfriendlies” which are not that easy to find elsewhere as badly needed regarding quality, quantity, price, type, delivery, etc.
This would happen most probably not because Russia wanted to starve and freeze anybody, but rather because she would have simply found new and much better export clients elsewhere and with whom to relate and grow together in every sense, most probably ever-growing BRICS+ Accordingly, Russia would prefer to take better care of such new business, trade and political partners – with different currencies involved, not dollars nor euros — and leaving aside all the great opportunities missed after decades of Russia behaving as an excellent EU business partner to no avail. So, for whatever reasons and without firing a single shot, Russian sanctions could just impoverish Europe and other “unfriendlies” to the point which US and UK investors could step in and buy it out like vulture funds for pennies on the dollar. This outcome would be welcomed by the US & the UK, of course, the real puppeteers pulling the strings of it all and ready to prey upon the impoverished. So unless “Russian sanctions” are reverted 180 degrees, the US & UK would achieve their carefully planned plan B negatively affecting Europe and other “unfriendlies” for having dismissed Russia as a reliable business associate. So the (supposed) “international community” (ha!) is in for some surprises while three more countries are set to join BRICS+.
Photo-op: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland distributing bread to protesters at the circus her imperial portfolio created, Independence Square, Kiev, Ukraine, Dec. 11, 2013
Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN (photo from archive).
It’s time for the United States to recognize its role in the 2014 “state coup in Ukraine”, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said on Wednesday.
“It’s common knowledge that the US tried to overthrow President of Venezuela. Now waiting for acknowledgement of US pivotal role in illegal Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014 which is an open secret too,” the Russian diplomat wrote on Twitter, commenting on former high-ranking White House official’s remarks about his participation in staging coups abroad, TASS reported.
On Tuesday, John Bolton, a former White House national security adviser, said: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat – not here but you know (in) other places – it takes a lot of work.”
Unrest in the center of Kiev broke out at the end of 2013. Organizers of protests in Kiev’s Independence Square accused then President Viktor Yanukovich of refusing to sign an association agreement with the European Union. A prolonged mass demonstration of protest called Euromaidan began.
The radicals set up a tent camp, seized a number of administrative buildings in the center of Kiev and created so-called “self-defense forces”, which openly clashed with police.
The crisis culminated on February 18-20, 2014 in Kiev, when unidentified snipers repeatedly opened fire both on the protesters and police.
As a result, 80 people were killed and hundreds of others were injured. Twenty of those injured died in hospital later. There were both demonstrators and personnel of the riot police force Berkut among those killed.
Filed under: EU, Russia, Ukraine, USA | Tagged: John Bolton, Maidan coup | Comments Off on Following Bolton’s Remarks, Russia: It’s Time for US to Admit Role in 2014 Ukrainian Coup
‘The Constitution is not a suicide pact’ – but it is nearing that deadly threshold in a number of ways: federal debt, unchecked immigration, but most existentially in a lunatic foreign policy.
In its relations with Russia and China especially, but also with regard to Iran, North Korea, and others, the diplomatic/military/intelligence apparatus in Washington City seems driven to ignite dangerous international conflagrations.
‘NATO officials have thumbed their noses at Putin’s concern with Russia’s security. Trump’s National Security Advisor and neocon warmonger John Bolton encourages more provocation of Russia, which as Putin has made clear will result in war.
‘Clearly as 2021 comes to an end, there is no intelligence to be found anywhere in the Western World as all vie to show how tough they are with Russia.
‘When Putin says Russia has nowhere left to which to retreat, he is telling the idiot West that Russia has reached the extent of its ability to avoid war. “We simply have no room to retreat” means Russia has done all she can do to avoid war and now the Americans must get off Russia’s doorstep.
‘Putin is relying on Biden to show awareness and responsibility and to work for peace by acknowledging Russia’s legitimate security concern. But what if Biden is just a figurehead, and the shots are called by the military/security complex who will go for profits despite the risk that Putin will not back down?
‘What if Washington’s concern is limited to destabilizing Russia in the interest of US hegemony and Russia’s security is precisely what Washington intends to undermine, not secure.
‘ . . .
‘2022 could . . . be the year the Western world comes to an end in nuclear war.’
Is it any wonder why so many countries in the world now despise the US?
But this could not be further from the traditional Southern approach to foreign policy.
US Senator Fulbright of Arkansas gave expression to it in some remarks of his during the Vietnam War:
‘If America has a service to perform in the world and I believe it has it is in large part the service of its own example. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest. This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said: “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” . . .
‘There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world. We have the opportunity to set an example of generous understanding in our relations with China, of practical cooperation for peace in our relations with Russia, of reliable and respectful partnership in our relations with Western Europe, of material helpfulness without moral presumption in our relations with the developing nations, of abstention from the temptations of hegemony in our relations with Latin America, and of the all-around advantages of minding one’s own business in our relations with everybody. Most of all, we have the opportunity to serve as an example of democracy to the world by the way in which we run our own society; America, in the words of John Quincy Adams, should be “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” …
‘If we can bring ourselves so to act, we will have overcome the dangers of the arrogance of power. It will involve, no doubt, the loss of certain glories, but that seems a price worth paying for the probable rewards, which are the happiness of America and the peace of the world.’
US foreign policy for the last several decades bears little resemblance to the Southern ideal of prudent restraint and peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with other countries. Southrons need to ask themselves just how they are benefiting from the policies being promoted by both Republicans and Democrats:
From sanctions that impoverish the innocent populations of various countries;
From drone strikes that kill hundreds of non-combatants;
From non-governmental organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy that serve as front groups for the CIA causing revolutions in northern Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, etc.;
From the promotion of the LGBT ideology in socially conservative countries like Uganda and Poland where Christianity still has some hold on the public consciousness;
From bellicose language from scalawags like Sens Cotton and Wicker who never miss a chance to stoke war fever with other countries.
Southerners do not benefit one iota from any of that. Yet because of the Yankee propaganda pumped into the South through school textbooks, talk radio, the Heritage Foundation, etc., that the US is the City on a Hill, the indispensable nation chosen and anointed by God to rule the world, she does not object too loudly (if at all) and actually serves in numbers disproportionately higher than her percentage of the total population in the US military.
Prospects for reforming Washington do not look too good. Typically, anyone who tries is either killed (like JFK) or beaten into submission (like Trump). The best option for the South is to leave Washington and its Deep State bureaucrats to their own devices and to develop a foreign policy that serves the people of Dixieland and represents her tradition-friendly culture, one that is not in service to the cartels of Big Ag, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, and so on.
The insanity that has gripped Washington, one that does not rule out a first-strike using nuclear weapons, is a danger to the South in the most basic sense of that word – a threat to life itself.
The South needs to separate herself from Washington’s madness, expel lunatics like Sen Wicker from office, and send out diplomats who exude both Southern friendliness and trustworthiness, but also hard resolve, to the countries of the world, whether friendly or unfriendly to us at the moment, to cultivate productive relationships, to secure us from the ill-will that the Yankee mindset has attracted to all 50 States. Whether it is countries with a Southern diaspora like Brazil or a more isolated, insular place like Japan, the South would be far better off with a President, diplomats, etc., who truly reflect the best of Southern culture. They with their humility and common sense would hopefully be able to gain back the goodwill of many of those whom Yankee arrogance has alienated, allowing Southerners to live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and honesty (I Timothy 2:2).
There will be an endless stream of news stories about the 2022 federal elections in the months ahead. But rather than marching dutifully to the polls in November, wouldn’t it make more sense to channel that fervor in a different, more productive direction – for the State Legislatures of the South to hold special sessions in their chambers, hold a vote of no confidence in the federal government, and begin negotiations with that entity so the South will be able to free herself from the fanatical Deep State ‘reign of witches’ permanently?
The breakup is already underway, though it is going so slowly that few seem to recognize it. A few recent examples:
US Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has suggested a ‘national divorce’ of the States;
Gov DeSantis of Florida has reinstituted the Florida State Guard that would operate completely independently of the federal government;
Gov Abbott of Texas has recently told the Texas National Guard that he, not Pres Biden, is their commander-in-chief;
Gov Newsom of California has made it known that he will make his State a safe haven for abortion providers should the federal Supreme Court overturn Roe v Wade.
This kind of absurd, contradictory, ‘disunited union’ cannot last, nor should it. Better for the South and for any other sane section of the US to get out now before the madmen in Washington start a nuclear war that will get them incinerated in a retaliatory strike.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says Iran is stronger than ever as the country marks the 32nd anniversary of the passing away of its revolutionary founder Imam Khomeini.
“I start the discussion from here that among the revolutionary systems and establishments that have been formed in the last one or two centuries, I do not know of any system that has been predicted as much as the Islamic Republic to collapse,” the Leader said Friday in a televised address.
“From the first day of the revolution, the ill-wishers and those who could not digest and tolerate this great phenomenon, both inside and outside the country, said that the Islamic Republic would not last for another two months, six months or a year,” the Leader said.
“It was one or two years ago when the esteemed Americans said the same thing and a high-ranking American official stated that the Islamic Republic would not see its 40th anniversary. I do not remember so many predictions of decay and collapse to have been made about any other system,” he added.
Ayatollah Khamenei was apparently referring to former US national security advisor John Bolton’s infamous prediction while addressing a terrorist MKO convention in Paris in 2017.
At the conference Bolton said, “The outcome of the president’s policy review should be to determine that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution will not last until its 40th birthday. And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran.”
“But, thank God, the revolution and the system of Imam Khomeini not only did not collapse and did not stop, but became stronger day by day,” Ayatollah Khamenei said Friday.
“It did not surrender, did not give up and rather showed its independence day by day. It achieved great success and overcame obstacles.”
The Leader said despite many successive political, security, economic obstacles created for Iran, “the Islamic Republic today is more developed than 40 years ago and is ahead in all respects by the grace of God.”
“The question arises, what is the secret of this permanence? Why did the Islamic Republic not face the fate of other revolutions in spite of all this hostility? Here I announce that the glorious and proud secret of this system is two words: the Republic and Islam. The existence created from these two words has every right to remain permanent, because it includes both people and Islam.”
Every year on the anniversary of the passing away, a commemoration ceremony is held at Imam Khomeini’s mausoleum in southern Tehran, with large crowds of mourners attending.
Like last year, authorities scrapped the ceremony and other events across the country this year to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Nevertheless, people in different cities attended local events by observing social distancing, to pay tribute to the late Imam.
Ayatollah Khamenei said Imam Khomeini’s outstanding initiative was that he created and introduced the idea of the Islamic Republic and then realized it.
“The great work of our esteemed Imam was to create this idea and theory of the Islamic Republic and to introduce it into the field of various political theories, in which there were various Eastern and Western political theories,” the Leader said, adding Imam Khomeini then took action and put his theory into practice.
“The Imam had many initiatives but the Islamic Republic is the most important initiative of the Imam,” the Leader said. “This is the same religious democracy that was recognized as the Islamic Republic.”
Addressing the youth, Ayatollah Khamenei said, “You, the youth, who have not experienced the pre-Revolution era, it is hard for you to feel that era.”
He recollected that people played no role at all in their destiny, especially during the dark tyranny of the Pahlavi dynasty.
“The Imam brought the people to the field with a leaping movement. The nation believed in itself and the Imam used the great capacity of the nation’s ability and will, and with his leadership and guidance, he was able to take it to a stage where he could do great things,” he added.
There was a time, the Leader continued, when the Islamic Republic was a sapling, and now it is a robust tree which cannot be uprooted by any storm.
Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini, better known as Imam Khomeini, passed away on June 3, 1989 at the age of 87.
Plot to divide nation, eradicate religious democracy
Ayatollah Khamenei called Iran’s religious democracy a “divine gift”, but warned of plots by the enemies to undermine it.
“Thank God, after the departure of the Imam, the Iranian nation preserved this divine gift and this religious democracy,” he said.
“The enemies of Iran, who made all kinds of efforts to separate the people and make them lose belief in religious democracy, had their plot thwarted and every time they tried a new way they faced the steel barrier of the Iranian people,” the Leader said.
“It is the same today. The enemies are lying in ambush to drive a wedge between the people and the Islamic system, but they are facing the steel barrier of the Iranian people. They plotted both security and intellectual invasion, all of which failed.”
Ayatollah Khamenei said there are some people inside Iran, who either knowingly or unknowingly repeat the claims of the enemies.
“The idea that democracy does not go hand in hand with religion is also the claim of the enemies. Of course, some may say this out of negligence. They should know that this is the talk of the enemy and the enemy wants to eradicate Islam… It is a great mistake if we alienate democracy from Islamic thought and spirit.”
Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:
Zarif made the remarks in a Thursday tweet, comparing Netanyahu’s fate to that of other major anti-Iran figures in the US, who were the Israeli PM’s close allies in his plots against Tehran, including former US President Donald Trump, his former national security advisor John Bolton, and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
“Netanyahu has joined the disgraceful journey of his anti-Iran co-conspirators—Bolton, Trump and Pompeo—into the dustbin of history,” Iran’s foreign minister said.
Zarif asserted that Iran continues to stand tall, pointing out that the same fate has been repeated for Iranians’ ill-wishers over several millennia, adding, “Time to change course.”
According to a statement by the UN General Assembly, as of January 13, 2021, ten member states were subject to the provisions of Article 19 of the Charter, namely Iran, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Libya, Niger, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, South Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Under Article 19 of the Charter of the United Nations, members whose arrears equal or exceed the amount of their contributions due for two preceding full years lose their voting rights.
The Charter also gives the General Assembly the authority to decide “that the failure to pay is due to conditions beyond the control of the member,” and in that case a country can continue to vote.
The top Iranian diplomat also published his previous letter to Guterres, in which he conveyed Iran’s “strong dismay” over his announcement, saying the decision is “fundamentally flawed, entirely unacceptable and completely unjustified” due to Washington’s illegal sanctions on Iran.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is fully committed to fulfill[ing] its financial obligations to the United Nations and will continue to make every effort to settle the arrears in the payment of its financial contribution to the UN and other international organizations as soon as the underlying imposed conditions, i.e. the US unlawful unilateral coercive measures, is removed,” Zarif’s letter read.
Zarif’s tweet came after earlier in the day, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the country’s payment of its UN membership dues has been made possible through a South Korean bank and the debt will be paid soon.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has always promptly acted to pay its membership dues to the United Nations, and the problem that arose last year was due to the blocking of the payment route by the United States,” Khatibzadeh told IRNA.
He said the United Nations Secretariat is completely aware of the details of the issue, which he said was not Iran’s fault whatsoever.
According to Khatibzadeh, in negotiations with the UN Treasury, Iran had proposed to transfer the money from its financial resources in South Korea, and it was decided that the Treasury try to remove barriers to the money transfer and pursue acquiring a permit from OFAC (the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control) for the transfer.
“The permit was recently issued and the way for withdrawing the membership dues from Iran’s account in the [South] Korean bank and transferring it to the UN account in Seoul has been paved, and this payment will be made soon,” he added.
The ruling NATO junta at the UN held its monthly chemical weapons lying meeting against Syria, on 6 April. The rabid hyenas once again vomited up and then ate each others’ emesis, though even they are becoming bored with their nonsense. The US ambassador did not bother to post a self-aggrandizing tweet, UK issued a blurb without statement, and the High Representative on Disarmament apparently also had better things to do than to issue a tweet on her statement to the UNSC. Colonialist France — which has never forgiven the Levantine republic for ejecting its occupiers, seventy-five years ago on 17 April — did issue an arrogant and menacing statement based on the NATO klansmen’s chemical weapons lies against the SAR.
UK’s tweet once again showed Great Britain’s support of al Qaeda in Syria. The Ltamenah chemical weapons lies came from terrorists of whom the OPCW FFM investigators were too terrified to actually investigate, so the team basically took the savages at their word, having “assessed the credibility of the allegations based on information collected from open sources and information received from several non-governmental organizations (NGOs).” In Khan Sheikhoun, the primary source of the lies came from the Brit illegal in Idlib, the fake doctor whose medical license in his home country was permanently revoked, and the place where the terrorists were too terrifying for the fake FFM to do any physical inspecting, as admitted in the OPCW report of 19 May 2017.
Regarding Douma, the Brits continue to lie that chemical weapons were used, and continue to lie that Syria — which immediately invited the OPCW investigators to come and investigate, but they first were inexplicably detained in Belgium — and Russia had blocked entry, after the team belatedly arrived. Though the criminal OPCW reports on the teams non-inspections of Ltamenah and Khan Sheikhoun were published in a timely fashion, it took almost a year for the once noble, and subsequently corrupted by NATO klansmen to jerry-rig a report that could barely concoct a meaningless conclusion that “the objects from which the samples were taken at both locations had been in contact with one or more substances containing reactive chlorine.” [2.6]. Syria News has provided massive evidence provided by the savages’ own videos and photographs, that al Qaeda’s Jaish al Islam faction, with the assistance of its humanitarian benefactors kidnapped dozens of civilians, especially woman and their children, slaughtered most of them, engaged in acts of necrophilia with their corpses, and terrorized children taken from their moms, stripped some half-naked and turned power hoses on them in a fake hospital setting on a chilly night.
The FFM team could not enter Douma until almost a week after arrival due to the high security risk to the team, which included the presence of unexploded ordinance, explosives and sleeper cells still suspected of being active in Douma. On 18 April, during a reconnaissance visit to two sites of interest, the security detail was confronted by a hostile crowd and came under small arms fire and a hand-grenade explosion. The incident reportedly resulted in two fatalities and one injury. — 2.2 Summary, 106 pp OPCW report on Douma, 1 March 2019
The once-noble OPCW showed its turn to corruption when it ejected Jose Bustani per the dictate of neocon Dick Cheney, via his errand boy neocon, John Bolton, who threatened the lives of Bustani’s children. Since October 2020, this organization has shown its revulsion to integrity by ending open, civilized, discourse to its Twitter account.
OPCW only permits comments by its designated elites; the serfs who pay for the now phony watchdog group are excluded from civilized discourse.
The devastating photo posted by La France looks like it could be Libya after NATO obliterated it, or al Raqqa after the fascist coalition of war criminals led by the US bombed it, though it also could be CGI, as it is not found in a reverse image check of 46.7 billion images on the web.
In her second consecutive monthly address on the never-ending Syria files dedicated to the never-ending implementation of UNSCR 2118 (2013), Zakamitsu sallied for against the difficulties regarding COVID being in the way, reported on previously unreported September 2020 samples having been analyzed with cryptically unexpected results to which the UNSC chemical weapons gathering is not yet privy. Due course has also not yet arrived as, per the UN press release, she made no mention of the collected November 2020 samplings.
At the 4 March chemical weapons propaganda party.
In meticulously diplomatic language, First Deputy Permanent Representative Dmitry Polyanskiy told the Council of the upcoming, unprecedented plot by the NATO klan to illicitly remove Syria from the CWC at the upcoming Conference. Such an attempt to “incapacitate” Syria at the OPCW is a breach of the OPCW noble Charter and is based on the “illegitimate” IIT which “defied the principles of investigation, including the so-called ‘chain of custody.’” What Representative Polyanskiy diplomatically did not say is that the removal of the SAR from its membership to the CWC would facilitate new false flag chemical attacks by various al Qaeda terrorist factions, many of which have been thwarted over the recent period (here,here, here, here, here.)
#Polyanskiy: If #Syria’s opponents (who at the same time oppose real eradication of CW at its entire territory) achieve their goal, we will be living through very hard times, promising no good to the #OPCW and the international cooperation in this & many other areas. @mfa_russiahttps://t.co/oONwDW64Un
— Russia at the United Nations (@RussiaUN) April 7, 2021
Though POTUS’ and ambassadors may change, the chemical weapons lies at the SC are constant. Tweet from 5 October 2020.
His Excellency Bassam Sabbagh reaffirmed that Syria has never used chemical weapons, that it willingly ascended to the CWC, that it gave full accounting of its stockpile, and continues to work closely with the OPCW and the High Representative. He decried the ongoing politicization by ‘some members’ [NATO klan bullies who have hijacked the UN], the omission of any mention of the Courage Foundation of 11 March, which forcefully condemned the unscientific OPCW reports on the Douma ”chemical weapons” attack, as culled from the mass murderers and NGOs with charitable status, conveniently aligned with State Department and other NATO countries anti-Syria propaganda (
The seemingly long silence at the beginning of the Syrian ambassador’s statement is actually short, and likely part of the ongoing subtle sabotage of the Syrian Mission to the UN, which includes such things as getting stuck with the worst simultaneous translators on the planet, and introducers choking on the pronunciations of Syria, Arab, Syrian Arab Republic.
While in search of a criminal lie tweeted about Douma and the OPCW investigative team (not found), the author stumbled into a lengthy lying statement by the UK to the OPCW, issued two days after UK, France, and the US bombed Syria on behalf of al Qaeda kidnappers, mass-murderers, and necrophiliacs of Douma. The Couture Beauty Diamond Lipstick wearing pig lied about a chemical weapons attack, lied that breaching the Geneva Agreements was “humanitarian intervention.” The Couture-wearing pig flagrantly flaunted the use of open source — i.e., mass murderers and necrophiliacs of various al Qaeda factions – as ‘evidence’ of his war criminal lies.
Quite disturbing was his blanket statement that “The World Health Organization has reported that 500 patients, seen by its partners in Syria, had symptoms consistent with chemical weapons exposure.” While the WHO was ”deeply alarmed by reports of the suspected use of toxic chemicals in Douma city,” its actual statement does not say that, but does open up a can of maggots involving its unnamed Health Clusterpartners, given that the reports all came from kidnappers and killers:
According to reports from Health Cluster partners, during the shelling of Douma on Saturday, an estimated 500 patients presented to health facilities exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals. In particular, there were signs of severe irritation of mucous membranes, respiratory failure and disruption to central nervous systems of those exposed.
The WHO also made the outrageous claims that “[m]ore than 70 people sheltering in basements have reportedly died, with 43 of those deaths related to symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals. Two health facilities were also reportedly affected by these attacks.”
The subsequent outrage demanded by WHO Deputy Director-General Peter Salama, “at these horrifying reports and images from Douma” should be directed to the criminally insane savages who slaughtered dozens, dumped them like garbage, next to empty dog food bowls and rusting bicycles, dumped them in a way that even persons forced to stand jammed like human sardines could not have possibly fallen when murdered, corpses shown as rearranged for more emotional impact, murdered children whose bodies have been stripped half naked, photographed with useless ambu bags nearby, EKG electrodes wrongly positioned, something unidentifiable placed between the legs of a murdered, half-naked child,non-existent hospitals where kidnapped children separated from their moms, were emotionally terrorized and physically abused.
Only idiots or degenerates who touch themselves watching murder porn videos could possibly see hospitals where none exist, or human beings slaughtered to give the NATO war criminals the excuse to murder more Syrians, would lie that these obscene photographs are evidence of civilians who died from a chemical weapons attack. Infamia.
Let us also finally put to rest the horror of perverts smearing shaving cream and other concoctions onto the faces of corpses — many in varying states of decomposition — so that the rabid hyenas can claim the “foaming at the mouth” reputedly caused by chemical toxins. “Foaming — or frothing — at the mouth” is a simplified way to describe pleural effusion, and the body’s attempt to excrete excessive fluid in the lungs, caused by a variety of diseases and disorders, including an acute episode of congestive heart failure (CHF). The excretion may look like small bubbles on the lips, which do not have the drama of shaving cream applied by perverts.
Look on these terrible works by the criminally psychotic, and despair, but do not dare to suggest these heinous atrocities perpetrated against Syrian human beings are anything other than mass slaughter for the unfettered rabid dogs of war.
A top adviser at the Pentagon said Iran hawks, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security advisor John Bolton, have been taking money and getting rich from the ‘Israeli’ lobby.
Washington’s support for Tel Aviv is the result of the ‘Israeli’ lobby money, said retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who was appointed this week as senior adviser to newly installed acting War Secretary Christopher Miller, in two media appearances back in 2012 and 2019.
“You have to look at the people that donate to those individuals,” he said in a September 2019 interview when asked if Bolton and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham wanted war with Iran.
“Bolton has become very, very rich and is in the position he’s in because of his unconditional support for the ‘Israeli’ lobby. He is their man on the ground, in the White House. The same thing is largely true for Pompeo, he has aspirations to be president. He has his hands out for money from the ‘Israeli’ lobby, the Saudis and others,” he added.
In another interview in 2012, Macgregor stressed that the ‘Israel’ lobby in the United States has “enormous influence” on Congress and that it wanted to instigate “military strikes” with Iran.
“I think the American ‘Israeli’ Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] and it’s subordinate elements or affiliated elements that represent enormous quantities of money over many years have cultivated an enormous influence in power in Congress,” he told Russia’s state media network RT.
“I think you’ve got a lot of people on the Hill who fall into two categories. One category that is interested in money and wants to be re-elected, and they don’t want to run the risk of the various lobbies that are pushing military action against Iran to contribute money to their opponents.”
AIPAC is known for being the main architect of US policies throughout the Middle East, and has been criticized repeatedly for wielding disproportionate influence in Congress.
The US State Department declined to comment on behalf of Pompeo in response to Macgregor’s remarks.
Bolton, however, reacted to the disclosure through a spokesman, saying, “I don’t respond to anti-Semites.”
This is while his financial disclosures show he earned thousands of dollars for speaking to pro-‘Israel’ groups prior to his appointment as the White House national security adviser in 2018.
A tell-all book by Donald Trump’s niece will be published two weeks ahead of schedule and will argue that the president suffered “child abuse” in the early years of his life.
Publisher Simon & Schuster, which last week was released from a temporary restraining order won by the president’s brother, cited “high demand and extraordinary interest” as it brought publication forward on Monday.
The company also released an image of the back cover of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump.
“Today,” the text began, “Donald is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses or take in and synthesize information.”
Mary Trump, a trained clinical psychologist, also writes about the president’s upbringing by a mother who was ill and a father, the property developer Fred Trump, who remained committed to his job, to whom “love meant nothing” and who “expected obedience, that was all”.
“Child abuse is, in some sense, a matter of ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’,” Mary Trump writes, adding: “Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.”
In a statement released by the publisher, Mary Trump said: “In addition to the first-hand accounts I can give as my father’s daughter and my uncle’s only niece, I have the perspective of a trained clinical psychologist. Too Much and Never Enough is the story of the most visible and powerful family in the world. And I am the only Trump who is willing to tell it.”
Mary Trump is still subject to a temporary restraining order imposed by a judge in New York state supreme court. In her appeal, she claims a 2001 non-disclosure agreement arising from litigation over a family will was based on fraudulent financial information. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.
The president’s niece has expressed opposition to his political career via social media and was a key source for New York Times reporting on Trump family tax affairs which won a Pulitzer prize.
A Supreme Court ruling on whether Trump must release tax and financial records is eagerly awaited and expected as soon as this week.
Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Ted Boutrous, Mary Trump’s lawyer, accused Trump of mounting “an orchestrated campaign against freedom of speech and freedom of the press”. Lawsuits against books are intended to have a “chilling effect”, he said.
The White House sought to block a book by John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, but were denied by a federal judge. The Room Where It Happened sold nearly 800,000 copies in its first week in stores.
Trump’s brother Robert Trump, a businessman, filed the suit against Mary Trump. He is represented by Charles Harder, an attorney who has worked for the president.
Harder has said he will seek the “maximum remedies available” for Mary Trump’s “truly reprehensible” actions. He has also called the New York Times’ reporting on Trump family tax affairs “100% false, and highly defamatory”.
In a statement to the New York Times last month, Robert Trump slammed his niece for what he called an “attempt to sensationalize and mischaracterize our family relationship … for her own financial gain”.
“I and the rest of my entire family,” he said, “are so proud of my wonderful brother, the president.”
Trump’s other surviving siblings are Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired judge, and Elizabeth Trump Grau, a retired banker. Mary Trump’s father was Fred Trump Jr, who died in 1981.
‘Israel’ is responsible for the explosion that took place at Iran’s Natanz nuclear site on July 2nd, by means of a “powerful bomb”, The New York Times [NYT] reported, citing an unnamed source described as a Middle East intelligence official.
According to the NYT source, the incident is not connected with other explosions that took place in Iran earlier, in particular a blast near Tehran’s Parchin military complex, which some reports have suggested is a missile production facility.
Relatively, former US national security adviser John Bolton questioned whether the recent explosions could have been connected and represented “a precursor of a larger attack”.
The NYT also cited a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC], who confirmed the explosive at the Natanz site, adding that investigators “have considered the possibility” that “a cruise missile or a drone” was used to attack Natanz, but saw a bomb scenario as more likely.
“The episode will probably accelerate plans to move more of Iran’s most sensitive facilities underground”, the IRGC member reportedly said.
The damage caused by the incident was described by Spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Behrouz Kamalvandi, as “significant”, noting that it could slow the development of cutting-edge uranium enriching centrifuges.
The cause of the incident has not yet been officially confirmed, but some reports suggest that Iran’s Supreme National Security Council [SNSC] has determined the reason behind the episode, and the facts will be announced “at a proper time”.
Iran also announced plans to replace the damaged Natanz site with a larger building with more advanced equipment.
Responding to unconfirmed media reports that suggest Tel Aviv’s involvement, Zionist war minister Benny Gantz stated that “not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us”, however he repeated that “nuclear Iran is a threat to the world and the region”.
Iran has consistently stated that it does not aim to develop a nuclear weapon, outlining that the goals of the country’s nuclear program are exclusively peaceful.
Former US national security adviser John Bolton on Thursday said ‘Israelis’ should be worried about US President Donald Trump winning a second term in office.
Bolton excoriated his ex-boss as detached from reality, saying Trump could shift policies and try to foster ties in a second term with Iran, as he did with North Korea.
Bolton said in a video conference interview with ‘Israeli’ Channel 13 that Trump had been eager “to have a meeting with the Iranian leadership… to talk about getting a new nuclear deal with Iran.”
“Just as Kim Jong Un played Trump along in the Korea context, I worry that in a second term the Iranians might be able to do the same,” Bolton said.
Bolton said that while he was ambassador to the UN under former US president George W. Bush, he believed Bush when the president said he wouldn’t allow Iran to get nuclear weapons.
Now, when asked whether he believes Trump vows to rein in Iran, Bolton said: “I don’t know.”
“I think [Trump] has his own definition of what amounts to honesty,” Bolton said. “He certainly has a lot of different versions of facts. They tend to come and go as they suit him. I found that very frustrating, I think foreign leaders find it frustrating. I’d rather have somebody more grounded in reality as president.”
Ph.D., Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
June 25, 2020
John Bolton’s new memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” which came out two days ago in spite of White House attempts to block it, is the standard kiss and tell that senior American politicians and officials tend to write to make money for their retirement. There should be no question but that Bolton has done his best to cast the president in as bad a light as possible, which is easily done considering that communicating by twitter and through insults leaves a lot of room for second guessing about motive and intentions.
As required by law, Bolton’s book was reviewed for classified information starting in December, and when the process was finished it was started all over again, making clear that the tit for tat over the contents was essentially political and unrelated to national security. Having failed to stop the publication, the Trump Justice Department will now move to take away Bolton’s earnings from the book, a tactic that originated back in the 1970s with CIA whistleblower Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval.” Critics of the security review process have noted that when a book says nice things about the government it is rarely interfered with no matter what classified information it might reveal, while a work that is unfriendly can expect to be hammered and delayed by the state secrets bureaucracy.
Why Donald Trump hired leading neoconservative John Bolton in the first place remains somewhat of a mystery, but the most plausible theory is that the number one GOP donor Sheldon Adelson demanded it. Adelson regards Bolton as something of a protégé and was particularly taken by Bolton’s enthusiasm for attacking Iran, something that the Las Vegas casino magnate and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu both passionately desired.
After months of an apparently difficult tenure as National Security Advisor, John Bolton was finally fired from the White House on September 10, 2019, but the post mortem on why it took so long to remove him continued for some time afterwards, with the punditry and media trying to understand exactly what happened and why. Perhaps the most complete explanation for what occurred came from President Donald Trump himself shortly after the fact. He said, in some impromptu comments, that his national security advisor had “…made some very big mistakes when he talked about the Libyan model for Kim Jong Un. That was not a good statement to make. You just take a look at what happened with Gadhafi. That was not a good statement to make. And it set us back.”
Incredible as it may seem, Trump had a point in that Bolton was clearly suggesting that North Korea get rid of its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic benefits, but it was the wrong example to pick as Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi gave up his weapons and was then ousted and brutally killed in a rebel uprising that was supported by Washington. The Bolton analogy, which may have been deliberate attempt to sabotage any rapprochement, made impossible any agreement between Kim and Trump as Kim received the message loud and clear that he might suffer the same fate.
Subsequently, Bolton might have been behind media leaks that scuttled Trump’s plan to meet with Taliban representatives and that also, acting on behalf of Israel, undercut a presidential suggestion that he might meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Trump summed up his disagreements with Bolton by saying that the National Security Advisor “wasn’t getting along” with other administration officials, adding that “Frankly he wanted to do things — not necessarily tougher than me. John’s known as a tough guy. He’s so tough he got us into Iraq. That’s tough. But he’s somebody that I actually had a very good relationship with, but he wasn’t getting along with people in the administration who I consider very important. And you know John wasn’t in line with what we were doing. And actually in some cases he thought it was too tough, what we were doing. Mr. Tough Guy.”
Trump’s final comment on Bolton was that “I’m sure he’ll do whatever he can do to spin it his way,” a throw-away line that pretty much predicted the writing of the book. Bolton has many supporters among hardliners in the GOP and the media as well as among democracy promoting progressive Trump haters and it will be interesting to see what damage can be inflicted on the president’s reelection campaign.
Pre-publication reviews have focused on the takeaways from the book. The most damaging claim appears to be that Donald Trump asked the Chinese government to buy more agricultural products from the U.S. to help American farmers, which the president described as a key constituency for his reelection. Bolton claims that Trump specifically asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy American soybeans and other farm commodities and, as a possible quid pro quo, Trump intervened to reduce some financial penalties imposed on the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE for evading sanctions on Iran and North Korea.
Also concerning China, Bolton asserts that the president encouraged Xi to continue building concentration camps for the Muslim Uighurs, a religious and ethnic minority largely concentrated in the country’s Xinjiang region. The context of the alleged comment is not clear, nor is it easy to imagine how the subject even came up, so the claim might be regarded as exaggerated or even apocryphal. Bolton was not even present when the alleged conversation took place and only learned of it second hand.
Other claims made by Bolton include that Trump didn’t know that Britain was a nuclear power and that Finland is not part of Russia. The book also describes in some detail how Trump spent most of his time in White House intelligence briefings presenting his own views instead of listening to what analysts from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offices had to say.
That Donald Trump was a poor student and is an intellectual lightweight has been noted by many observers. Combining that with his essential lack of curiosity about the world and its peoples means that he does not know much about foreigners and the places they live in. But it is both condescending and somewhat of a cheap trick by Bolton to pillory him for his ignorance.
The media’s vision of the most damaging charge, that Trump colluded with the Chinese, is, quite frankly ridiculous. Buying American agricultural products is in the interest of both farmers and the U.S. economy. Reducing penalties on a major Chinese company as a sweetener and to mitigate bilateral tensions is called diplomacy. Of course, anything a president does with a foreign country will potentially have an impact when reelection time rolls along, but it would be difficult to suggest that Trump did anything wrong.
The Bolton book has also been critiqued by some, including the New York Times, as the exposure of “a president who sees his office as an instrument to advance his own personal and political interests over those of the nation.” Bolton writes how “Throughout my West Wing tenure, Trump wanted to do what he wanted to do, based on what he knew and what he saw as his own best personal interests… I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”
Trump is, to be sure, a man who has subordinated the dignity of the office he holds to personal ambition, but he differs more in the pervasiveness of his actions than in the substance. Many other presidents have made many of the same calculations as Trump though they have been more restrained and careful about expressing them.
Finally, a number of editors who have read review copies of the book have observed how badly written and organized it is. If anyone is looking for a real indictment of Donald Trump and all his works, they will not find it in the Bolton book. Apart from the new information it provides, which seems little enough, it would appear to be a waste of $20 to possibly enrich an author who has been promoting and saying “more please” to America’s wars for the past 20 years.
Former US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened,” is stirring some controversy, regarding US President Donald Trump’s views and conduct in regard to Syria.
In the book, Bolton describes himself as a sort of “fireman” who puts out fires caused by an erratic and irrational president in the lead up to the withdrawal of US troops from northeast Syria in October 2019.
“It is difficult beyond description to pursue a complex policy in a contentious part of the world when the policy is subject to instant modification based on the boss’s perception of how inaccurate and often-already-outdated information is reported by writers who don’t have the Administration’s best interests at heart in the first place,” Bolton describes in chapter seven. “It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine, not the West Wing of the White House.”
In Bolton’s own story, he is the architect of a policy strategy that tried, and ultimately failed, to maintain the US as a key player in Syria.
Bolton, for his own part, also viewed the US alliance with the SDF as a “strategic partnership” and little more.
“Why we were affiliated with one terrorist group in order to destroy another stemmed from Obama’s failure to see Iran was a much more serious threat, now and in the future. Many parties to this conflict opposed ISIS […] Tehran, however, unlike Obama, was also focusing on the next way, the one after ISIS was defeated,” he wrote.
“It was complicated, but what was not complicated was the strong sense of loyalty to Kurds who had fought with us against ISIS, and fear that abandoning them was not only disloyal but would have severely adverse consequences for any future effort to recruit allies who might later be seen as expendable,” Bolton added.
Notably, Bolton explained that former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, a “warrior-scholar” was quite poor at debates, and in negotiations between Trump and his aides he had little success.
“All these negotiations about our role in Syria were complicated by Trump’s constant desire to call Assad on US hostages, which Pompeo and I thought undesirable. Fortunately, Syria saved Trump from himself, refusing even to talk to Pompeo about them.”
And when US President Donald Trump was told this by Pompeo, he angrily retorted:
“You tell [them] he will get hit hard if they don’t give us our hostages back, so fucking hard. You tell him that. We want them back within one week of today, or they will never forget how hard we’ll hit them.”
That, fortunately, according to Bolton took the Trump-Assad call off the table, but no actions on striking Syria regarding these hostages were ever carried out.
There’s very little information about US hostages in Syria, some of them were being held by ISIS, back around 2014.
The 2014 rescue mission in Syria was an American led effort to locate and rescue hostages being held by ISIS forces.
Plans to rescue the hostages were accelerated after the execution of journalist James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Kayla Mueller by ISIS militants. A total of 14 hostages were held hostage by the ISIS at an undisclosed location. No soldiers were killed, and none of the hostages were found.
Currently, as of May 2020, the CIA pledged to ramp up efforts to learn where Austin Tice, a former Marine is located, allegedly somewhere in Syria.
Back in 2019, the Washington Post also reported that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must release all US hostages.
“There are “around half a dozen” American citizens missing in Syria and suspected to be held by the Assad regime, according to a senior administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. One is journalist Austin Tice, missing since 2012; the U.S. government has said publicly it believes the Assad regime is holding Tice. The other known cases are Syrian Americans, none of whom the regime has acknowledged detaining, the official said.”
“There are a number of Syrian American dual citizens that went missing in regime-held areas that the U.S. government is tracking and we are engaging with diplomatic partners in an effort to secure their safe return from Syria,” the official said.”
Based on an interview held in the White House last Friday, June 19, the U.S. website Axios reported:
“Asked whether he would meet with Maduro,” Trump said, “I would maybe think about that…. Maduro would like to meet. And I’m never opposed to meetings — you know, rarely opposed to meetings. I always say, you lose very little with meetings. But at this moment, I’ve turned them down.”
The context of what may appear to be a sudden reversal in Trump’s Venezuelan policy is to be found in John Bolton’s recently released memoir on life under Trump, The Room Where It Happened. According to Bolton (cited by Axios), after throwing the full diplomatic weight of the U.S. government behind Juan Guaidó, Trump’s private feelings about his protégé were ambivalent:
“He thought Guaidó was ‘weak,’ as opposed to Maduro, who was ‘strong.’”
“By spring [of 2019], Trump was calling Guaidó the ‘Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela,’ [Democratic Party candidate for the 2016 presidential elections won by Hilary Clinton] hardly the sort of compliment an ally of the United States should expect.”
In the Trump lexicon, the honorific applied to O’Rourke generally means “loser,” a term to deprecate political opponents. It may be that this tentative reaching out to Maduro, as opposed to hanging on to what was appearing even in Trump’s eyes as a lost cause, has its roots in previous discussions among Trump’s Cabinet.
Any eventual contact between Trump and Maduro is an ongoing but controversial story emerging from U.S. corporate media, the White House and perhaps Bolton. In fact, only one day after Trump seemed to have opened the door to discussing with Maduro, he tweeted on June 22.
“I would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power!“
However, “meeting” and “discussing” is still in the news. Moreover, the fact remains, following the latest divulgations cited above, that Trump is evaluating “discussion” from a position of weakness. As Trumps has admitted, his anointed “president“ is a complete failure to date.
The situation in Canada is different. Action can be taken now as there is nothing to wait for. The Trudeau government plays a leading role in carrying forward Trump regime-change policy through the right-wing Lima group, with its avowed intention of overthrowing Maduro and installing Guaidó.
The time is ripe, because on June 17 the Trudeau government suffered a humiliating defeat in its high profile bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. In the spotlight during the weeks leading up to the vote, we saw just how close Trudeau’s relationship is to Trump. In fact, many Canadians viewed it as subservience. This evaluation even found its way into some corporate editorials on the defeat. Also under scrutiny in the UNSC debacle was the Trudeau government’s lack of respect for international law and UN resolutions.
In a word, since June 17, Trudeau does not have either an international or domestic mandate to conduct foreign policy as he has carried out since winning office. Along with other grassroots organizations and personalities, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institutewas instrumental in pushing for the NO vote and creating domestic support to back up the international appeals.
If Trudeau would like to make up for his past errors and show the world there is indeed a difference between the U.S. and Canada, and that we do not perhaps stand behind every Trump move, what better opportunity that to build on Trump’s short-lived opening to Maduro? Why should Trudeau not declare that, unlike Trump, he would like to have fair and open discussions with Maduro, as anyone who believes in an “international rules-based order” should do? Surely it would take courage to do so. But this is far closer to “Canadian values” than what Trudeau has been repeating over the last few weeks. Such a courageous stand would also constitute a rebuttal of Trump’s heavy-handed, dictatorial methods. Since the vote on the 17th, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, encouraged by its and others’ success in breaking through the usual mainstream media blackout, is following up on what many see as a mandate from the grassroots. It is calling for a popular discussion and consultations on foreign policy in these terms:
“Dear PM Trudeau,
Time to Fundamentally Reassess Canadian Foreign Policy
One of the 10 subjects raised is:
Why is Canada involved in efforts to oust Venezuela’s UN-recognized government, a clear violation of the principle of non-intervention in other country’s internal affairs?”
Trudeau has admitted that he has to take stock of a foreign policy that has been so soundly rejected by United Nations’ member states. By revising its failed and harmful policy toward the Venezuelan people, it would contribute to a much-needed atmosphere of discussion and consultation on Canada’s outdated and unpopular foreign policy.
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UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 