Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the US Patriot missile defense systems would “definitely” be a target for Russia.
This comes shortly after two United States officials and a senior administration official revealed that Pentagon is finalizing plans to send the Patriot missile defense system to Ukraine, which could be announced as soon as this week, US media outlets reported on Tuesday.
The plan needs to be approved by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin before it is sent to President Joe Biden for his signature, with the three officials telling CNN that approval is expected.
For months, Kiev has been calling on Washington to send Patriot missiles, which are highly effective at intercepting ballistic and cruise missiles.
In late November, Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder said the US has no plans “to provide Patriot batteries to Ukraine but again, we’ll continue to have those discussions.” The statement came on the same day that another senior Defense Department official stated that the United States is considering sending Patriot surface-to-air missiles to Ukraine.
Patriot would help secure airspace for NATO in eastern Europe
Should the plan be approved, the Patriot “would be the most effective long-range defensive weapons system sent to the country and officials say it will help secure airspace for NATO nations in eastern Europe,” according to CNN.
It pointed out that “it is not clear how many missile launchers will be sent but a typical Patriot battery includes a radar set that detects and tracks targets, computers, power generating equipment, an engagement control station, and up to eight launchers, each holding four ready-to-fire missiles.”
The media cited officials as saying that “once the plans are finalized, the Patriots are expected to ship quickly in the coming days and Ukrainians will be trained to use them at a US Army base in Grafenwoehr, Germany.”
On that note, the deployment of Patriots and any supporting NATO personnel to Ukraine has received considerable opposition from Moscow, with Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, saying that they would turn into “legitimate targets” for Russian forces.
Current Russian tactics are the absolute opposite of the military theory of concentrated force developed by Napoleon, Pepe Escobar writes.
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.
T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Spare a thought to the Polish farmer snapping pics of a missile wreckage – later indicated to belong to a Ukrainian S-300. So a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII – unleashed via a tawdry plot concocted by Anglo-American “intelligence”.
Such tawdriness was compounded by a ridiculous cover-up: the Ukrainians were firing on Russian missiles from a direction that they could not possibly be coming from. That is: Poland. And then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, sentenced Russia was to blame anyway, because his Kiev vassals were shooting at Russian missiles that should not have been in the air (and they were not).
Call it the Pentagon elevating bald lying into a rather shabby art.
The Anglo-American purpose of this racket was to generate a “world crisis” against Russia. It’s been exposed – this time. That does not mean the usual suspects won’t try it again. Soon.
The main reason is panic. Collective West intel sees how Moscow is finally mobilizing their army – ready to hit the ground next month – while knocking out Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure as a form of Chinese torture.
Those February days of sending only 100,000 troops – and having the DPR and LPR militias plus Wagner commandos and Kadyrov’s Chechens do most of the heavy lifting – are long gone. Overall, Russians and Russophones were facing hordes of Ukrainian military – perhaps as many as 1 million. The “miracle” of it all is that Russians did quite well.
Every military analyst knows the basic rule: an invasion force should number three times the defending force. The Russian Army at the start of the SMO was at a small fraction of that rule. The Russian Armed Forces arguably have a standing army of 1.3 million troops. Surely they could have spared a few tens of thousands more than the initial 100,000. But they did not. It was a political decision.
But now SMO is over: this is CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) territory. A sequence of terrorist attacks – targeting the Nord Streams, the Crimea Bridge, the Black Sea Fleet – finally demonstrated the inevitability of going beyond a mere “military operation”.
And that brings us to Electric War.
Paving the way to a DMZ
The Electric War is being handled essentially as a tactic – leading to the eventual imposition of Russia’s terms in a possible armistice (which neither Anglo-American intel and vassal NATO want).
Even if there was an armistice – widely touted for a few weeks now – that would not end the war. Because the deeper, tacit Russian terms – end of NATO expansion and “indivisibility of security” – were fully spelled out to both Washington and Brussels last December, and subsequently dismissed.
As nothing – conceptually – has changed since then, coupled with the Western weaponization of Ukraine reaching a frenzy, the Putin-era Stavka could not but expand the initial SMO mandate, which remains denazification and demilitarization. Yet now the mandate will have to encompass Kiev and Lviv.
And that starts with the current de-electrification campaign – which goes way beyond the east of the Dnieper and along the Black Sea coast towards Odessa.
That brings us to the key issue of reach and depth of Electric War, in terms of setting up what would be a DMZ – complete with no man’s land – west of the Dnieper to protect Russian areas from NATO artillery, HIMARS and missile attacks.
How deep? 100 km? Not enough. Rather 300 km – as Kiev has already requested artillery with that kind of range.
What’s crucial is that way back in July this was already being extensively discussed in Moscow at the highest Stavka levels.
In an extensive July interview, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov let the cat – diplomatically – out of the bag:
“This process continues, consistently and persistently. It will continue as long as the West, in its impotent rage, desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible, continues to flood Ukraine with more and more long-range weapons. Take the HIMARS. Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov boasts that they have already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This means our geographic objectives will move even further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or whoever replaces him, will control to have weapons that pose a direct threat to our territory or to the republics that have declared their independence and want to determine their own future.”
The implications are clear.
As much as Washington and NATO are even more “desperate to aggravate the situation as much as possible” (and that’s Plan A: there’s no Plan B), geoeconomically the Americans are intensifying the New Great Game: desperation here applies to trying to control energy corridors and setting their price.
Russia remains unfazed – as it continues to invest in Pipelineistan (towards Asia); solidify the multimodal International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with key partners India and Iran; and is setting the price of energy via OPEC+.
A paradise for oligarchic looters
The Straussians/neo-cons and neoliberal-cons permeating the Anglo-American intel/security apparatus – de facto weaponized viruses – won’t relent. They simply cannot afford losing yet another NATO war – and on top of it against “existential threat” Russia.
As the news from the Ukraine battlefields promise to be even grimmer under General Winter, solace at least may be found in the cultural sphere. The Green transition racket, seasoned in a toxic mixed salad with the eugenist Silicon Valley ethos, continues to be a side dish offered with the main course: the Davos “Great Narrative”, former Great Reset, which reared its ugly head, once again, at the G20 in Bali.
That translates as everything going swell as far as the Destruction of Europe project is concerned. De-industrialize and be happy; rainbow-dance to every woke tune on the market; and freeze and burn wood while blessing “renewables” in the altar of European values.
A quick flashback to contextualize where we are is always helpful.
Ukraine was part of Russia for nearly four centuries. The very idea of its independence was invented in Austria during WWI for the purpose of undermining the Russian Army – and that certainly happened. The present “independence” was set up so local Trotskyite oligarchs could loot the nation as a Russia-aligned government was about to move against those oligarchs.
The 2014 Kiev coup was essentially set up by Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski to draw Russia into a new partisan war – as in Afghanistan – and was followed by orders to the Gulf oil haciendas to crash the oil price. Moscow had to protect Russophones in Crimea and Donbass – and that led to more Western sanctions. All of it was a setup.
For 8 years, Moscow refused to send its armies even to Donbass east of the Dnieper (historically part of Mother Russia). The reason: not to be bogged down in another partisan war. The rest of Ukraine, meanwhile, was being looted by oligarchs supported by the West, and plunged into a financial black hole.
The collective West deliberately chose not to finance the black hole. Most of the IMF injections were simply stolen by the oligarchs, and the loot transferred out of the country. These oligarchic looters were of course “protected” by the usual suspects.
It’s always crucial to remember that between 1991 and 1999 the equivalent of the present entire household wealth of Russia was stolen and transferred overseas, mostly to London. Now the same usual suspects are trying to ruin Russia with sanctions, as “new Hitler” Putin stopped the looting.
The difference is that the plan of using Ukraine as just a pawn in their game is not working.
On the ground, what has been going on so far are mostly skirmishes, and a few real battles. But with Moscow massing fresh troops for a winter offensive, the Ukrainian Army may end up completely routed.
Russia didn’t look so bad – considering the effectiveness of its mincing machine artillery strikes against Ukrainian fortified positions, and recent planned retreats or positional warfare, keeping casualties down while smashing Ukrainian withering firepower.
The collective West believes it holds the Ukraine proxy war card. Russia bets on reality, where economic cards are food, energy, resources, resource security and a stable economy.
Meanwhile, as if the energy-suicide EU did not have to face a pyramid of ordeals, they can surely expect to have knocking on their door at least 15 million desperate Ukrainians escaping from villages and cities with zero electrical power.
The railway station in – temporarily occupied – Kherson is a graphic example: people show up constantly to warm up and charge their smartphones. The city has no electricity, no heat, and no water.
Current Russian tactics are the absolute opposite of the military theory of concentrated force developed by Napoleon. That’s why Russia is accumulating serious advantages while “disturbing the dust in a bowl of rose-leaves”.
Have you noticed how every major foreign policy crisis since the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has peeled off another layer of the left into joining the pro-NATO, pro-war camp?
It is now hard to remember that many millions marched in the U.S. and Europe against the attack on Iraq. It sometimes feels like there is no one left who is not cheerleading the next wave of profits for the West’s military-industrial complex (usually referred to as the “defense industry” by those very same profiteers).
Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked or suffering years of austerity, simply to line the pockets of Blackwater, Halliburton, and Raytheon. And all the more so when such a war is sold to them on the basis of a huge deception.
So since then, the U.S. has been repackaging its neocolonialism via proxy wars that are a much easier sell. There have been a succession of them: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela and now Ukraine. Each time, a few more leftists are lured into the camp of the war hawks by the West’s selfless, humanitarian instincts – promoted, of course, through the barrel of a Western-supplied arsenal. That process has reached its nadir with Ukraine.
Greenwald on the interests of the west's military-industrial complex: 'Right at the moment when the market for these weapons disappeared, when the US finally got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, lo and behold there's this new market in Ukraine' https://t.co/s3wVNbkOJN
I recently wrote about the paranoid ravings of celebrity “left-wing” journalist Paul Mason, who now sees the Kremlin’s hand behind any dissension from a full-throttle charge towards a nuclear face-off with Russia.
Behind the scenes, he has been sounding out Western intelligence agencies in a bid to covertly deplatform and demonetize any independent journalists who still dare to wonder whether arming Ukraine to the hilt or recruiting it into NATO – even though it shares a border that Russia views as existentially important – might not be an entirely wise use of taxpayers’ money.
It is not hard to imagine that Mason is representative of the wider thinking of establishment journalists, even those who claim to be on the left.
But I want to take on here a more serious proponent of this kind of ideology than the increasingly preposterous Mason. Because swelling kneejerk support for U.S. imperial wars – as long, of course, as Washington’s role is thinly disguised – is becoming ever more common among leftwing academics too.
Absolutely withering, must-read stuff from mighty @Jonathan_K_Cook on the willing prostration of Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Mason to intelligence services, and abetting of power in targeting independent anti-war journalists Can't wait for part two. https://t.co/XSmcexwChx
The latest cheerleader for the military-industrial complex is Slavoj Zizek, the famed Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual whose work has gained him international prominence. His latest piece – published where else but TheGuardian – is a morass of sloppy thinking, moral evasion and double speak. Which is why I think it is worth deconstructing. It encapsulates all the worst geostrategic misconceptions of Western intellectuals at the moment.
Zizek, who is supposedly an expert on ideology and propaganda, and has even written and starred in a couple of documentaries on the subject, seems now to be utterly blind to his own susceptibility to propaganda.
COD PSYCHOLOGY
He starts, naturally enough, with a straw man: that those opposed to the West’s focus on arming Ukraine rather than using its considerable muscle to force Kyiv and Moscow to the negotiating table are in the wrong. Opposition to dragging out the war for as long as possible, however many Ukrainians and Russians die, with the aim of “weakening Russia”, as US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wants; and opposition to leaving millions of people in poorer parts of the world to be plunged deeper into poverty or to starve is equated by Zizek to “pacifism.”
Playing games with the lives of Ukrainians – and risking nuclear war – simply to 'weaken' Russia is, Chomsky notes, 'morally horrendous. And the people who are standing on a high horse about how we’re upholding principle are moral imbeciles when you think about what’s involved'
“Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of [John Lennon’s song] ‘Imagine’,” writes Zizek. But the only one dwelling in the world of the imaginary is Zizek and those who think like him.
The left’s mantra of “Stop the war!” can’t be reduced to kneejerk pacifism. It derives from a political and moral worldview. It opposes the militarism of competitive, resource-hungry nation-states. It opposes the war industries that not only destroy whole countries but risk global nuclear annihilation in advancing their interests. It opposes the profit motive for a war that has incentivised a global elite to continue investing in planet-wide rape and pillage rather than addressing a looming ecological catastrophe. All of that context is ignored in Zizek’s lengthy essay.
Instead, he prefers to take a detour into cod psychology, telling us that Russian president Vladimir Putin sees himself as Peter the Great. Putin will not be satisfied simply with regaining the parts of Ukraine that historically belonged to Russia and have always provided its navy with its only access to the Black Sea. No, the Russian president is hell-bent on global conquest. And Europe is next – or so Zizek argues.
Even if we naively take the rhetoric of embattled leaders at face value (remember those weapons of mass destruction Iraq’s Saddam Hussein supposedly had?), it is still a major stretch for Zizek to cite one speech by Putin as proof that the Russian leader wants his own version of the Third Reich.
Not least, we must address the glaring cognitive dissonance at the heart of the Western, NATO-inspired discourse on Ukraine, something Zizek refuses to do. How can Russia be so weak it has managed only to subdue small parts of Ukraine at great military cost, while it is at the same time a military superpower poised to take over the whole of Europe?
The US war lobby is so massively bloated that it would be simply astonishing if it didn't have a (usually covert) finger prised into every major conflict zone on the planet – and a strong vested interest in perpetuating those conflicts too pic.twitter.com/XOVCkqx78x
Zizek is horrified by Putin’s conceptual division of the world into those states that are sovereign and those that are colonized. Or as he quotes Putin observing: “Any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”
SOVEREIGN OR COLONIZED?
The famed philosopher reads this as proof that Russia wants as its colonies: “Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states … and ultimately Europe itself”. But if he weren’t so blinded by NATO ideology, he might read Putin’s words in a quite different way. Isn’t Putin simply restating Washington realpolitik? The U.S., through NATO, is the real sovereign in Europe and is pushing its sovereignty ever closer to Russia’s borders.
Putin’s concern about Ukraine being colonized by the U.S. military-industrial complex is essentially the same as U.S. concerns in the 1960s about the Soviet Union filling Cuba with its nuclear missiles. Washington’s concern justified a confrontation that moved the world possibly the closest it has ever come to nuclear annihilation.
Both Russia and the U.S. are wedded to the idea of their own “spheres of influence”. It is just that the U.S. sphere now encircles the globe through many hundreds of overseas military bases. By contrast, the West cries to the heavens when Russia secures a single military base in Crimea.
We may not like the sentiments Putin is espousing, but they are not especially his. They are the reality of the framework of modern military power the West was intimately involved in creating. It was our centuries of colonialism – our greed and theft – that divided the world into the sovereign and the colonized. Putin is simply stating that Russia needs to act in ways that ensure it remains sovereign, rather than joining the colonized.
We may disagree with Putin’s perception of the threat posed by NATO, and the need to annex eastern Ukraine, but to pretend his speech means that he aims for world domination is nothing more than the regurgitation of a CIA talking point.
Zizek, of course, intersperses this silliness with more valid observations, like this one: “To insist on full sovereignty in the face of global warming is sheer madness since our very survival hinges on tight global cooperation.” Of course, it is madness. But why is this relevant to Putin and his supposed “imperial ambition”? Is there any major state on the planet – those in Europe, the United States, China, Brazil, Australia – that has avoided this madness, that is seeking genuine “tight global cooperation” to end the threat of climate breakdown.
No, our world is in the grip of terminal delusion, propelled ever closer to the precipice by capitalism’s requirement of endless economic growth on a finite planet. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing great ecological damage, but so are lots of other things – including NATO’s rationalization of ever-expanding military budgets.
It's disturbing how many people are peddling the idea that Nato is a 'defensive alliance'. It *claims* to be defensive. Actually, Nato is a central pillar of the highly lucrative war industries. This may help clarify: https://t.co/SL2MA1ASMh
But Zizek has the bit between his teeth. He now singles out Russia because it is maneuvering to exploit the consequences of global warming, such as new trade routes opened up by a thawing Arctic.
“Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine,” he writes. “In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world.”
But what does he imagine? As we transform the world’s climate and its trade routes, as new parts of the world turn into deserts, as whole populations are forced to make migrations to different regions, does he think only Putin and Russia are jostling to avoid sinking below the rising sea waters. Does he presume the policy hawks in Washington, or their satraps in Europe, have missed all this and are simply putting their feet up? In reality, maneuvering on the international stage – what I have called elsewhere a brutal nation-state version of the children’s party game musical chairs – has been going on for decades.
Ukraine is the latest front in a long-running war for resource control on a dying planet. It is another battleground in the renewed great power game that the U.S. revived by expanding NATO across Eastern Europe in one pincer movement and then bolstered it with its wars and proxy wars across the Middle East. Where was the urge for “tight global cooperation” then? To perceive Ukraine as simply the victim of Putin’s “imperialism” requires turning a blind eye to everything that has occurred since the fall of the Soviet Union three decades ago.
My latest: Western media and politicians want us focusing exclusively on Russia's role in Ukraine so we overlook our own responsibility for making sacrificial victims of the Ukrainian people https://t.co/V0ZpwFFB9A
Zizek gets to the heart of what should matter in his next, throw-away line:
Those who advocate less support for Ukraine and more pressure on it to negotiate, inclusive of accepting painful territorial renunciations, like to repeat that Ukraine simply cannot win the war against Russia. True, but I see exactly in this the greatness of Ukrainian resistance.”
Zizek briefly recognises the reality of Ukraine’s situation – that it cannot win, that Russia has a bigger, better-equipped army – but then deflects to the “greatness” of Ukraine’s defiance. Yes, it is glorious that Ukrainians are ready to die to defend their country’s sovereignty. But that is not the issue we in the West need to consider when Kyiv demands we arm its resistance.
The question of whether Ukrainians can win, or whether they will be slaughtered, is highly pertinent to deciding whether we in the West should help drag out the war, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, to no purpose other than our being able to marvel as spectators at their heroism. Whether Ukrainians can win is also pertinent to the matter of how urgent it is to draw the war to a close so that millions don’t starve in Africa because of the loss of crops, the fall in exports and rocketing fuel prices. And arming a futile, if valiant, Ukrainian struggle against Russia to weaken Moscow must be judged in the context that we risk backing Russia into a geostrategic corner – as we have been doing for more than two decades – from which, we may surmise, Moscow could ultimately decide to extricate itself by resorting to nuclear weapons.
INTELLECTUAL CUL DE SAC
Having propelled himself into an intellectual cul de sac, Zizek switches tack. He suddenly changes the terms of the debate entirely. Having completely ignored the U.S. role in bringing us to this point, he now observes:
Not just Ukraine, Europe itself is becoming the place of the proxy war between [the] U.S. and Russia, which may well end up by a compromise between the two at Europe’s expense. There are only two ways for Europe to step out of this place: to play the game of neutrality – a short-cut to catastrophe – or to become an autonomous agent.”
So, we are in a U.S. proxy war – one played out under the bogus auspices of NATO and its “defensive” expansion – but the solution to this problem for Europe is to gain its “autonomy” by …
Well, from everything Zizek has previously asserted in the piece, it seems such autonomy must be expressed by silently agreeing to the U.S. pumping Ukraine full of weapons to fight Russia in a proxy war that is really about weakening Russia rather than saving Ukraine. Only a world-renowned philosopher could bring us to such an intellectually and morally barren place.
The biggest problem for Zizek, it seems, isn’t the U.S. proxy war or Russian “imperialism”, it is the left’s disillusionment with the military industrial complex: “Their true message to Ukraine is: OK, you are victims of a brutal aggression, but do not rely on our arms because in this way you play into the hands of the industrial-military complex,” he writes.
But the concern here is not that Ukraine is playing into the arms of the war industries. It is that Western populations are being played by their leaders – and intellectuals like Zizek – so that they can be delivered, once again, into the arms of the military-industrial complex. The West’s war industries have precisely no interest in negotiations, which is why they are not taking place. It is also the reason why events over three decades have led us to a Russian invasion of Ukraine that most of Washington’s policy makers warned would happen if the U.S. continued to encroach on Russia’s “sphere of influence”.
Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path.
No-one listened to them and here we are.
Small compilation 🧵 of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.
The left’s message is that we are being conned yet again and that it is long past the time to start a debate. Those debates should have taken place when the U.S. broke its promise not to expand “one inch” beyond Germany. Or when NATO flirted with offering Ukraine membership 14 years ago. Or when the U.S. meddled in the ousting of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014. Or when Kyiv integrated neo-Nazi groups into the Ukrainian army and engaged in a civil war against the Russian parts of its own populace. Or when the U.S. and NATO allowed Kyiv – on the best interpretation – to ignore its obligations under the Minsk agreements with Russia.
None of those debates happened. Which is why a debate in the West is still needed now, at this terribly late stage. Only then might there be a hope that genuine negotiations can take place – before Ukraine is obliterated.
CANNON FODDER
Having exhausted all his hollow preliminary arguments, we get to Zizek’s main beef. With the world polarizing around a sole military superpower, the U.S., and a sole economic superpower, China, Europe and Russia may be forced into each other’s arms in a “Eurasian” block that would swamp European values. For Zizek, that would lead to “fascism”. He writes: “At that point, the European legacy will be lost, and Europe will be de facto divided between an American and a Russian sphere of influence. In short, Europe itself will become the place of a war that seems to have no end.”
Let us set aside whether Europe – all of it, parts of it? – is really a bulwark against fascism, as Zizek assumes. How exactly is Europe to find its power, its sovereignty, in this battle between superpowers? What vehicle is Zizek proposing to guarantee Europe’s autonomy, and how does it differ from the NATO one that is – even Zizek now seems to be conceding – actually just a vassal of the U.S., there to enforce Washington’s global-spanning “sphere of influence” against Russia and China.
Faced with this problem, Zizek quickly retreats into mindless sloganeering: “One cannot be a leftist if one does not unequivocally stand behind Ukraine.” This Bushism – “You are either with us or with the terrorists” – really is as foolish as it sounds.
What does “unequivocal” mean here? Must we “unequivocally stand behind” all of Ukraine’s actions – even should, say, neo-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian military like the Azov Brigade carry out pogroms against the ethnic Russian communities living in Ukraine?
But even more seriously, what does it mean for Europeans to stand “unequivocally” behind Ukraine? Must we approve the supply of U.S. weapons, even though, as Zizek also concedes, Ukraine cannot win the war and is serving primarily as a proxy battleground?
Would “unequivocal support” not require us to pretend that Europe, rather than the U.S., is in charge of NATO policy? Would it not require too that we pretend NATO’s actions are defensive rather intimately tied to advancing the U.S. “sphere of influence” designed to weaken Russia?
And how can our participation in the U.S. ambition to weaken Russia not provoke greater fear in Russia for its future, greater militarism in Moscow, and ensure Europe becomes more of a battleground rather than less of one?
What does “unequivocal” support for Ukraine mean given that Zizek has agreed that the U.S. and Russia are fighting a proxy war, and that Europe is caught in the middle of it? Zizek’s answer is no answer at all. It is nothing more than evasion. It is the rationalization of unprincipled European inaction, of acting as a spectator while the U.S. continues to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder.
MUDDYING THE WATERS
After thoroughly muddying the waters on Ukraine, Zizek briefly seeks safer territory as he winds down his argument. He points out, two decades on, that George W. Bush was similarly a war criminal in invading Iraq, and notes the irony that Julian Assange is being extradited to the U.S. because Wikileaks helped expose those war crimes. To even things up, he makes a counter-demand on “those who oppose Russian invasion” that they fight for Assange’s release – and in doing so implicitly accuses the anti-war movement of supporting Russia’s invasion.
He then plunges straight back into sloganeering in his concluding paragraph: “Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. That’s why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.” Maybe he should try telling that to the thousands of ethnic Russian families mourning their loved ones killed by the civil war that began raging in eastern Ukraine long before Putin launched his invasion and supposedly initiated his campaign for world domination. Those kinds of Ukrainians may beg to differ, as may Russians worried about the safety and future of their ethnic kin in Ukraine.
As with most things in life, there are no easy answers for Ukraine. But Zizek’s warmongering dressed up as European enlightenment and humanitarianism is a particularly wretched example of the current climate of intellectual and moral vacuity. What we need from public thinkers like Zizek is a clear-sighted roadmap for how we move back from the precipice we are rushing, lemming-like, towards. Instead he is urging us on. A lemming leading the lemmings.
US War Secretary Lloyd Austin has met with Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe amid heightened tensions between the two countries over recent remarks regarding the Taipei regime.
US President Joe Biden stoked tensions when he said in May that Washington would defend Taipei if China were to attack the wayward island.
Two days later, China conducted a military drill near the island.
Speaking at the military leaders’ first face-to-face meeting on Friday on the sidelines of the annual Shangri-La Dialog in Singapore, Austin said that the “US remains committed to our longstanding one-China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three US-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances.”
According to a statement from the Pentagon, Austin also warned his Chinese counterpart that Beijing must “refrain from further destabilizing actions toward Taiwan.”
“The Secretary reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability across the Strait, opposition to unilateral changes to the status quo, and called on the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to refrain from further destabilizing actions toward Taiwan,” according to the statement.
A US military official present at the meeting told CNN that Austin warned his Chinese counterpart that the People’s Liberation Army had become increasingly aggressive, unsafe, and unprofessional in the region.
“Secretary Austin also raised concerns about … statements by PLA officials that the Taiwan Strait is not international waters. [People’s Republic of China] officials have said that multiple times to the United States over the last several months and that’s deeply concerning,” the US official said. Austin also asked his Chinese counterpart not to provide any material support to Russia, the official added. In China’s post-meeting press conference, Senior Col. Wu Qian insisted China had not provided Russia with material support. “China did not provide military assistance to Russia. That is for sure.” However, Wu described the meeting, which last nearly an hour, almost twice as long as planned, as having a “good effect.” It was “candid’ but “positive and constructive,” he pointed out. Chinese leaders have repeatedly warned the United States’ officials that Taiwan is an inseparable part of the mainland, and Beijing will not hesitate to start a war over the region.
Maybe it is time the Collective West does something about its educational system.
Watching the performances of Russians and Western officials, one immediately notices that the much-touted and ultra-expensive “education “ provided in the West today is actually not up to par.
The Russian actions in Ukraine revealed a West where leaders remain emotional juveniles who continue to REACT jerkily to Russia’s deft moves. That’s when they are not busy projecting their own values and behavior onto the Russians.
Not only have the Russians vastly outplayed the West militarily, economically, and geopolitically, the actions/reactions of the West have boomeranged mightily to Russia’s advantage. The hyperinflation ravaging the West is just one example.
The exposure of the impotence of the much-touted NATO is also glaring for all to see; the Russians have made a mincemeat of what was touted as the best army in Europe, trained and equipped to NATO’s standards.
It is like every move by the Americans and their vassals in the EU was calculated to benefit the Russians.
This happened because they were ill-taught, and irrational resulting in pure emotional lash outs.
There’s simply no logic behind them.
A good example is how Western sanctions resulted in Russia earning jumbo income from selling less of its oil and gas.
Thank you very much!.
In addition to always being on top of their game, Russian officials always come across as well-educated, well-informed, well-mannered, sophisticated, cultured, and respectful. Western officials, on the other hand, attack the world as haughty, naughty, ill-mannered, ill-educated, uncultured, provincial, and narcissistic imbeciles.
They lack the elementary decorum necessary to engage peers in respectful manners. Ok, superciliousness, fueled by racist arrogance, might partly explain why they behave so, but we cannot discount the possibilities that they simply lack the education, the culture, and the home training required for civilized behavior, especially in encounters with other cultures.
The question needs to be asked how the Collective West ended up with the current gaggle of clowns holding positions of responsibility?
Examples abound aplenty: Just take a look at Sergey Lavrov and compare him with that dwarfish oaf, Anthony Blinken. Please, how did the once great US get to appoint that trashy lightweight idiot supposed to engage with a towering Diplomat of Mr Lavrov’s caliber? Can’t a kindhearted one whisper in his ears how utterly ridiculous he appears and sounds when he issues stupid threats?
And how do we compare the seriously martial Sergei Shoigu with that Raytheon’s Uncle Tom arms merchant, Lloyd Austin?
And we then have the magnificent, confident, articulate, urbane and sophisticated woman Mr Lavrov appointed to speak for his Foreign Ministry. Please, do not take my word for it, just point out a Western official, male or female (forget the other stupid pronouns concocted by Western woke narcissists pumped up with hedonism), who can match Maria Zakharova in confident eloquence?
It didn’t use to be like this. The West was once great. I should know; I studied there.
Even as a student I noticed that there’s something terribly wrong with the type of education western institutions dish out to students starting in the late 1980s. It is quite noticeable, even to an undergraduate like myself, that there is a TOTAL disconnection between what is being taught at the universities and what transpires in REAL LIFE.
Take what is called Economics as an example. A degree, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc), is awarded to students who successfully complete the four-year program.
Any honest person will know that there’s absolutely nothing scientific in the potpourri of jargon western economists continue to string together to dazzle the gullible.
Meaningless figures and data are churned out to bamboozle people into believing that producing “services” is somehow superior to having mineral resources and a strong manufacturing base. The magicians, who masquerade as economists in the West, successfully cast spells that made people accept fancifully-printed papers, that are backed by nothing, in lieu of gold, diamond, cocoa, coal, titanium, and other real products.
These types of deliberate falsehoods and concoctions explain why Western economies are based on illusions and delusions as the Great V Putin exposed in recent encounters with the Collective West.
Arrogant and totally ignorant Westerners had no idea what the Russians had in stock for them when they started their stupid sanctions which they believed would destroy the Russian economy.
A little knowledge of history, geography, geopolitics, and geoeconomics should have informed the West that a country (the largest in the world) that is not only self-sufficient in food production, but produces almost all the metals required by all of the major industries and, in addition, is the world’s leading energy (oil and gas) producer, is not one to trifle or pick a fight with.
Most especially, not by a bunch of self-worshipping, resource-less, parasitical inconsequential nonentities like the EU states, who suffer from excessive self-regard.
There is little doubt the arrogance of the Collective West is fueled by ignorance which is a result of the poor quality of the education produced by the ideological institutions the West call universities, which have been transformed from places of rigorous learning into ones that produce only selfish, self-centered, narcissistic, hedonistic ideologues who are incapable of any thought beyond the ME!
Education reflects the mental attitude of the people. A society that recognizes neither wrong nor right, truth or falsehood cannot produce upright people who are capable of subjecting their thoughts and actions to deep reflections and applying the necessary breaks to curb their animalistic impulses.
Right from infancy, Westerners are brought up to regard everything as relative and to mix up rhetoric with actions.
Children in nurseries are told tales about the cow jumping over the moon. They are later introduced to the fable of a Santa Claus who deliver gifts through the chimney (let’s not mention the gross racism inherent in the Dutch version of that silly ‘tradition’). From here the westerner is told only tales about how his superior race brought the light of civilization to the rest of the world. Never mind the fact that half of the human drama passed before a European appeared on the scene. And never mind the documented fact that Europeans extinguished the light of civilization wherever they went. Let’s not even consider the absurdity of vandals and rapacious conquerors claiming to be civilizers! What civilization did Europe bring to the Americas? What superior knowledge, apart from that of guns, did the British bring to the Benin Kingdom?
A system of education that teaches everything about personal freedom but remains silent on responsibilities, basic values, and respect for elders and institutions cannot but produce self-seeking, self-affirming narcissistic individuals who will regard any suggestion or notion of rights of others as personal assaults.
Basically, McFaul told us that the west exists in a real world where the telling of lies is the normal thing! Per his profile, McFaul is a professor in one of the top universities in the US. What type of minds will a man like McFaul produce?
Societies reflect the people that live in them. Western societies produced rugged individualistic-minded people who, in turn, find it difficult to cope with an international arena where the game is to give and take. Despite the fact that they proclaim their superiority over the rest of us, Western societies are incapable of operating on a level playing field. They cannot compete unless the cards are stacked in their favor. If they deny it, they simply should abandon their sense of entitlement and join the rest of humanity in playing by the rules agreed upon by the comity of nations.
Just take a good look at the current crop of Western leaders. The senile mannequin Biden has been a professional politician like for forever and a half. Macron is an investment banker, essentially one who conjures money from thin air, or what are derivatives, futures, etc?
The one in Germany, Scholz, is a lawyer. We all know that lawyers are born liars who make money by manipulating facts and telling barefaced lies. A great pity that we did not listen to Shakespeare and kill all the lawyers!
That lying, cheating, racist, boorish, unscrupulous, drunken addict like Boris Johnson became the leader of a former Great Britain shall forever remain one of the greatest mysteries of our time. It shall also go down as one of the worst things the British did to themselves.
Please, don’t get me wrong, I shed no tears for the inhabitants of that Island of iniquities.
Sadly, for them, the Collective West used to have very solid leaders. No matter how much one disagrees with them or hated their ideology, one cannot but respect Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, and George Bush sr.
These men and women were true statesmen, prepared to defend their national interests while recognizing the need not to negate the interests of their peer actors in the global geopolitical arena.
Both Reagan and Thatcher were extreme ideologues, but they still both recognized that they cannot wish the USSR (Russia) away without destabilizing the global security architecture. They acted accordingly.
Alas, today, there’s not a single leader in the West with either the intellectual depth or the cultural sophistication to handle complex geopolitical issues.
Examples:
At his first meeting with Chinese officials, the arrogant but amateurish US Secretary of State was promptly shot down by a Chinese official who told him point-blank: “The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”
In their encounter, Russia’s FM Lavrov publicly humiliated the queen that poses as the UK’s FM, Truss, by exposing her shallowness and ignorance of basic geography.
With leaders such as these, it is little wonder that the west continues to self-destruct with the speed that few people thought possible.
First, western officials’ lack of simple courtesy, manners, and etiquette is quite stunning.
In many cultures, bullies are considered uncultured philistines and are promptly dispensed with. Even at the height of their war with Iraq we witnessed how US Secretary James Addison Baker continued to extend diplomatic and personal courtesies to his Iraqi counterpart, Tarik Aziz.
Puffed up with insane arrogance, the West rushed to impose thousands of sanctions on Russia. The belief was that the sanctions would cripple Russia and make it forgo the pursuits of its national interests.
So many things are terribly wrong with this assumption and it can only be the product of utterly stupid brains. Just a few: How could anyone in their right mind think that the Russians would have failed to consider ALL possibilities before they decided to confront the west in an existential struggle?
Forget about the Ukraine, Russian officials told whoever would listen that the Ukraine is just a sideshow; upending western domination is the ultimate goal. The Russians simply had enough of bullying and they planned to put an end to it.
Russians are world champions in both mathematics and chess playing, one must be utterly daft to even think that a Judoka like V Putin will go into battle without adequate preparations and preparedness.
Three months later, not only did Russia shrug off all the touted “sanctions from hell,’ but its economy is back on track, steady income are streaming into its treasury, and its currency, the Ruble, has emerged as the best currency in the world!
Instead of the Ruble turning into rubble as the dimwit Biden promised, Russians today worry more about the strength of their currency.
So, how did the West get it so spectacularly wrong?
It’s education, stupid.
While other societies stepped up on the teachings of mathematics and science, the West focused its attention on WOKISM.
The teaching of new pronouns became more important to a people that have become over-obsessed with their genitalias. Not even children were spared in the degenerate obsession to sexualize everything.
The west abandoned the teaching of history. So, people grew up not knowing anything about their past. Years of obscenely grotesque overconsumption produced inert citizens who became too decadent for their own good.
The consequences of these long years of easy living (off the back of foreign resources) are people who deluded themselves that their easy living was made possible by some immutable law of nature.
Westerners forgot that the institutions and the unfair international economic setups which guarantee them to live like exceptionalists were created by crafty, highly-educated, and far-seeing men and women who managed to collar the best advantages for the West.
Example: We saw how spectacularly the Euro has nosedived since V Putin asked Europeans to pay for his gas in his currency.
Not only have the ill-thought sanctions boomeranged badly on the sanctioneers, but the west has also ended up financing Russia’s military campaign in the Ukraine.
More sanctions from hell, please!
Fẹmi Akọmọlafẹ is a writer and a published author. He is a member of the Ghana Association of Writers.
A detailed look into the deliveries of US armaments and weapons shipments to Ukraine.
The US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine
Introduction
The U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that the U.S. wants Russia’s military capability weakened so that it cannot carry out another invasion (April 25, 2022). So the U.S. is arming Ukraine against Russia.
The Biden administration sees the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to be vital to the Ukrainians’ ability to hold off Moscow’s invasion. But the risk is that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places.
The decision of the given short-term needs of Ukrainian forces for more arms and ammunition will lead to the long-term risk of weapons ending up on the black market or in the wrong hands was accepted.
Usually, the U.S. military has a great concern about the end-user of the US made weapons and equipment. They have specialized teams to track these weapons and equipment in almost all countries (except North Korea).
This strict rule does not much apply in the case of Ukraine, where there is a great risk. This conscious risk is up to the Biden administration to take.
1- The goal
The goal now is what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called a “weakened” Russia, one that won’t be able in the future to “do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
But first, the supplies of weaponry, notably long-range artillery, have to be delivered, and the Ukrainians have to be trained to use new Western systems, a process that is underway but will take time.
The United States and its allies are speeding up the deliveries. But transferring them from Eastern Europe into Ukraine is going to require an unprecedented logistical effort at a time when the main supply lines are increasingly being targeted by Russian missiles.
Figure 3: S-300 missile
Figure 1: Javelin missile
Figure 2: Stinger missile
Figure 3: S-300 missile
Figure 1: Javelin missile
Figure 2: Stinger missile
Figure 3: S-300 missile
2- The Russian Threat
U.S. Officials are less concerned that the weapons may fall into the hands of the Russians.
A source familiar with the US intelligence said that it does not appear that Russia has been actively attacking western weapons shipments entering Ukraine – although it is unclear exactly why especially since the US has intelligence information that the Russians want to and have discussed doing so both publicly and privately.
There are a number of theories for why the shipments have so far been spared, including that Russian forces simply can’t find them – the weapons and equipment are being sent over in unmarked vehicles and often transported at night.
It could also be that the Russian forces are running out of munitions and don’t want to waste them targeting random trucks unless they can be certain they are part of an arms convoy.
The US has few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and other weaponry it has sent across the border into Ukraine, a blind spot that’s due in large part to the lack of US military on the ground in the country – and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems now pouring across the border.
Both current US officials and defense analysts say that the risk is in the long term, because some of those weapons may wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm.
US intelligence sources have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, they have almost zero. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”
In making the decision to send billions of dollars of weapons and equipment into Ukraine, the Biden administration factored in the risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places.
4- The American politics
The Biden administration is giving new, heavier weapons to Ukraine because the US military is not on the ground, and the US and NATO are heavily reliant on information provided by Ukraine’s government.
Ukraine has an incentive to give only information that will strengthen its case for more aid, more arms, and more diplomatic assistance.
Top of Form
The US and western officials have offered detailed accounts of what the West knows about the status of Russian forces inside Ukraine: how many casualties they’ve taken, their remaining combat power, their weapons stocks, what kinds of munitions they are using, and where.
But when it comes to Ukrainian forces, officials acknowledge that the West – including the US – has some information gaps. Western estimates of Ukrainian casualties are also not accurate, according to some sources familiar with US and western intelligence. “It’s hard to track with nobody on the ground”.
5- The risk
Recently, the US agreed to provide Kyiv with the types of high-power capabilities some Biden administration officials viewed as too much of an escalation risk, including 11 Mi-17 helicopters, 18 155 mm Howitzer cannons, and 300 more Switchblade drones.
a- Where weapons are used
The U.S. Defense Department couldn’t track the weapons sent for particular units, according to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby.
Trucks loaded with pallets of arms provided by the Defense Department are picked up by Ukrainian armed forces – primarily in Poland – and then driven into Ukraine, “then it’s up to the Ukrainians to determine where they go and how they’re allocated inside their country.”
b- Monitoring Tools
A congressional source said that while the US is not on the ground in Ukraine, It has tools to learn what’s happening, noting that the US has extensive use of satellite imagery and both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries appear to be using commercial communications equipment.
The US military views the information it’s receiving from Ukraine as generally reliable because the US has trained and equipped the Ukrainian military for years, developing strong relationships. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some blind spots, such as on issues like the operational status of Ukraine’s S-300s.
Conclusion
Finally, the western supply to Ukraine is certainly the largest supply to a partner country in a conflict. The Biden administration and NATO countries say they are providing weapons to Ukraine based on what the Ukrainian forces say they need, whether it’s portable systems like Javelin and Stinger missiles or the Slovakian S-300 air defense system.
Javelin and Stinger missiles and rifles and ammunition are naturally harder to track than larger systems like the S-300. Although Javelins have serial numbers, there is little way to track their transfer and use.
The biggest danger surrounding the flood of weapons being funneled into Ukraine is what happens to them when the war ends. Such a risk is part of any consideration to send weapons overseas.
For years, the US sent arms into Afghanistan, first to arm the “mujahidin” in their fight against the Soviet army, then to arm Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban.
Some weapons ended up on the black market including anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, the same kind the US is now providing to Ukraine. Some US officials feared that they could be used by the Taliban against the United States.
Other weapons have ended up arming US adversaries. Much of what the US left behind to help Afghan forces became part of the Taliban arsenal after the collapse of the Afghan government and military. The problem is not unique to Afghanistan. Weapons sold to other countries found their way into the hands of terrorists. The risk of a similar scenario happening in Ukraine also exists.
In the Defense Department, there are raising concerns about the end-use monitoring of weapons being sent to Ukraine.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
For now, the goal for Ukraine and its NATO allies should be to contain the Russian offensive within southeastern Ukraine, push Putin’s forces back where possible – and make this war too painful for Russia to continue indefinitely’.
The war in Ukraine has unfolded, but not in the way western commentary foresaw
Are we seeing an inflection point in the conflict over Ukraine, which growing numbers of US lawmakers tell us is, in truth, a US ‘war’ on Russia? What the latter means however, is not clear, but it sounds like the early laying down of a narrative for possible military escalation. But is military escalation still feasible?
It is perhaps too early to claim strategic ‘inflection’ — but what does seem to be happening is that mis-matched timelines are grinding out their ineluctable and harsh realities.
At the very outset of the Russian operations, Biden authorised emergency spending, and of US military trainers on the spot providing intelligence and tactical targeting guidance to help the Ukrainian army destroy Russian forces. The Ukrainians get it all — every twitch in Russian operational deployment is handed immediately to Russia’s enemies.
Concomitantly, as a contribution to info-war, military experts appeared across western MSM to herald an imminent “Ukrainian victory” based on the country’s allegedly ‘spectacular battlefield successes’ and Russia’s ‘extraordinary incompetence’. The US and British rush to judgement partly reflected a real failure on their part to recognise that Russia was mounting a soft, slow and steady campaign of manoeuvre — because simply that is not ‘how we in the West do things’.
However, much of it almost certainly reflected an uncritical 100% reliance on Ukrainian sources, and on wishful thinking. After the enormous eight-year investment in the training and equipping of the quarter-million Ukrainian army to NATO standards, the latter surely would prevail (they imagined) against a mere 140,000 Russians. The desire to erase the humiliation of the twenty year NATO training programme in Afghanistan – that unravelled in eleven days – almost certainly contributed to the western gung ho rhetoric: ‘Vindication at last’.
In the last few days, US Defence Secretary Austin called General Shoigu (the first call, since the start of operations that Shoigu has accepted to take). Austin asked for an immediate ceasefire. Shoigu however, declined the request.
At about the same moment, Chancellor Scholz called President Putin (and had a long discussion). Scholz also wanted an immediate ceasefire, but his focus was more on agreeing some swap, by which the besieged Avozstal fighters could withdraw from the underground Avozstal tunnels.
The western efforts to secure release of these fighters has been at the forefront of initiatives over the last week. Scholz also raised his hopes for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine issue, but Putin was no more yielding than was Shoigu. (Interestingly, Scholz also, according to the read-out, broached the coming global food emergency in his call).
Europe has painted itself into a corner on its political initiatives. The obvious retort to Europe’s plea to Putin is: Go and persuade Zelensky. But Europe has unreservedly pinned itself to Zelensky alone determining the terms of any ceasefire — and he says he will not yield anything to Russia, and will only speak with Putin without any framework agreed in advance.
Nonetheless, here we have two Western leaders suing for a cessation of military action.
The war in Ukraine has unfolded, but not in the way western commentary foresaw. Ukrainian forces look shattered and exhausted. Supplies and reinforcements are not reaching the Ukrainian troops who now are largely unable to move, or re-deploy away from fixed defensive positions along the Slovyansk-Severodonetsk–Donetsk lines. And these lines are looking vulnerable to collapse.
Confronted with the unambiguous failure of assistance to rescue Ukrainian forces from certain destruction, the Biden administration is pivoting its narrative: the New York Times is saying that Russian forces have advanced to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk, [which] if confirmed makes it more probable that Russia could entirely control Donbas. And the Washington Post reports that Biden wants now to pivot to Asia, ‘after the Ukraine war marked a rallying moment for the geo-political West. It triggered a new steely approach by Europeans to confront Russia and spurred the imminent expansion of NATO.
And David Ignatius, a bell weather for Washington shifts, also reports: ‘The world will eventually celebrate a final Ukrainian victory and the expulsion of the last Russian invader. But that could be years, even decades, away. We aren’t going to see a peace treaty signed any time soon. For a long while, Ukraine is likely to be a partially divided country. For now, the goal for Ukraine and its NATO allies should be to contain the Russian offensive within southeastern Ukraine, push Putin’s forces back where possible – and make this war too painful for Russia to continue indefinitely’.
Scholtz’s telecon too, suggests that the EU is waking up to the merciless reality of timelines in the sphere of sanctions. Instead of being able to trigger an almost instantaneous collapse of the Russian economy, the latter is doing okay — quite okay, despite sanctions. It looks as if it is the EU’s plans rather, for an oil embargo, that are rapidly unravelling. And instead of a quick win (again as confidently forecast by the experts), the EU now faces the long grinding down of its economy, through energy, food and inflationary crises.
It does sound like Biden is talking-the-talk of a ‘pivot’, having ‘got the reality’. The rushing through of the $40 billion package may well represent a consolation prize (slush fund) for the Military Industrial Complex and for certain allies in Ukraine to be rewarded, but the question is, will Washington subsequently walk-the-walk?
An escalation through Poland seizing its ‘historic lands’ in Ukraine (the western part), could be used to present the American people with a war that Americans do not want, but cannot easily stop. Such Polish intervention would please Neo-con currents in the US and UK, though the expected follow-through for this current would be far from smooth sailing, if pursued.
Conflict involving Russians and Poles in any form would likely trigger a call for the NATO council to meet, and to address Article V of the NATO Treaty that provides for support from all members, should a NATO member (in this case Poland) be attacked.
Note however, that such support is not automatic. In the case of Turkey having shot down a Russian fighter jet, Turkey attempted to frame any Russian retribution as an Article V event — however NATO member states disagreed, arguing that Turkey was the author of its own misfortune, and that it would have to deal with the consequences alone.
War with Russia is precisely what the Pentagon and most NATO members do not want. This is a strong card in the Russian hand.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
The ironclad fictional “narrative” imposed all across NATOstan is that Ukraine is “winning”.
So why would weapons peddler retrofitted as Pentagon head Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin literally beg since late February to have his phone calls answered by Russian Defense Minister Shoigu, only to have his wish finally granted?
It’s now confirmed by one of my top intel sources. The call was a direct consequence of panic. The United States Government (USG) by all means wants to scotch the detailed Russian investigation – and accumulation of evidence – on the US bioweapon labs in Ukraine, as I outlined in a previous column.
This phone call happened exactly after an official Russian statement to the UN Security Council on May 13: we will use articles 5 and 6 of the Convention on the Prohibition of Bioweapons to investigate the Pentagon’s biological “experiments” in Ukraine.
That was reiterated by Under Secretary-General of the UN in charge of disarmament, Thomas Markram, even as all ambassadors of NATO member countries predictably denied the collected evidence as “Russian disinformation”.
Shoigu cold see the call coming eons away. Reuters, merely quoting the proverbial “Pentagon official”, spun that the allegedly one-hour-long call led to nothing. Nonsense. Austin, according to the Americans, demanded a “ceasefire” – which must have originated a Siberian cat smirk on Shoigu’s face.
Shoigu knows exactly which way the wind is blowing on the ground – for Ukrainian Armed Forces and UkroNazis alike. It’s not only the Azovstal debacle – and Kiev’s all-around army breakdown.
After the fall of Popasnaya – the crucial, most fortified Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass – the Russians and Donetsk/Luhansk forces have breached defenses along four different vectors to north, northwest, west and south. What’s left of the Ukrainian front is crumbling – fast, with a massive cauldron subdivided in a maze of mini-cauldrons: a military disaster the USG cannot possibly spin.
Now, in parallel, we can also expect full exposure – on overdrive – of the Pentagon bioweapons racket. The only “offer you can’t refuse” left to the USG would be to present something tangible to the Russians to avoid a full investigation.
That’s not gonna happen. Moscow is fully aware that going public with illegal work on banned biological weapons is an existential threat to the US Deep State. Especially when documents seized by the Russians show that Big Pharma – via Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and Gilead – was involved in several “experiments”. Fully exposing the whole maze, from the start, was one of Putin’s stated objectives.
More “military-technical measures”?
Three days after the UN presentation, the board of the Russian Foreign Ministry held a special session to discuss “the radically changed geopolitical realities that have developed as a result of the hybrid war against our country unleashed by the West – under the pretext of the situation in Ukraine – unprecedented in scale and ferocity, including the revival in Europe of a racist worldview in the form of cave Russophobia, an open course for the ‘abolition’ of Russia and everything Russian.”
So it’s no wonder “the aggressive revisionist course of the West requires a radical revision of Russia’s relations with unfriendly states.”
We should expect “a new edition of the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation” coming out soon.
This new Foreign Policy Concept will elaborate on what Foreign Minister Lavrov once again stressed at a meeting honoring the 30th Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy: the US has declared an all-round Hybrid War on Russia. The only thing lacking, as it stands, is a formal declaration of war.
Beyond the disinformation fog veiling the application of Finland and Sweden – call them the Dumb and Dumber Nordics – to join NATO, what really matters is another instance of declaration of war: the prospect of missiles with nuclear warheads stationed really close to Russian borders. Moscow already warned the Finns and Swedes, politely, that this would be dealt with it via “military-technical measures”. That’s exactly what Washington – and NATO minions – were told would happen before the start of Operation Z.
And of course this goes much deeper, involving Romania and Poland as well. Bucharest already has Aegis Ashore missile launchers capable of sending Tomahawks with nuclear warheads at Russia, while Warsaw is receiving the same systems. To cut to the chase, if there’s no de-escalation, they will all eventually end up receiving Mr. Khinzal’s hypersonic business card.
NATO member Turkey, meanwhile, plays a deft game, issuing its own list of demands before even considering the Nordics’ gamble. Ankara wants no more sanctions on its purchase of S-400s and on top if be re-included in the F-35 program. It will be fascinating to watch what His Master’s Voice will come up with to seduce the Sultan. The Nordics engaged in a self-correcting “clear unequivocal stance” against the PKK and the PYD is clearly not enough for the Sultan, who relished muddying the waters even more as he stressed that buying Russian energy is a “strategic” issue for Turkey.
Counteracting financial Shock’n Awe
By now it’s evidently clear that open-ended Operation Z targets unipolar Hegemon power, the infinite expansion of vassalized NATO, and the world’s financial architecture – an intertwined combo that largely transcends the Ukraine battleground.
Serial Western sanctions package hysteria ended up triggering Russia’s so far quite successful counter-financial moves. Hybrid War is being fought predominantly in the economic/financial battleground – and the pain dial for the collective West will only go up: inflation, higher commodity prices, breakdown of supply chains, exploding cost of living, impoverishment of the middle classes, and unfortunately for great swathes of the Global South, outright poverty and starvation.
In the near future, as insider evidence surfaces, a convincing case will be made that the Russian leadership even gamed the Western financial gamble/ blatant robbery of over $300 billion in Russian reserves.
This implies that already years ago – let’s say, at least from 2016, based on analyses by Sergey Glazyev – the Kremlin knew this would inevitably happen. As trust remains a rigid foundation of a monetary system, the Russian leadership may have calculated that the Americans and their vassals, driven by blind Russophobia, would play all their cards at once when push came to shove – utterly demolishing global trust on “their” system.
Because of Russia’s infinite natural resources, the Kremlin may have factored that the nation would eventually survive the financial Shock’n Awe – and even profit from it (ruble appreciation included). The reward is just too sweet: opening the way to The Doomed Dollar – without having to ask Mr. Sarmat to present his nuclear business card.
Russia could even entertain the hypothesis of getting a mighty return on those stolen funds. A great deal of Western assets – totaling as much as $500 billion – may be nationalized if the Kremlin so chooses.
So Russia is winning not only militarily but also to a large extent geopolitically – 88% of the planet does not align with NATOstan hysteria – and of course in the economic/financial sphere.
This in fact is the key Hybrid War battleground where the collective West is being checkmated. One of the next key steps will be an expanded BRICS coordinating their dollar-bypassing strategy.
None of the above should overshadow the still to be measured interconnected repercussions of the mass surrender of Azov neo-Nazis at UkroNazistan Central in Azovstal.
The mythical Western “narrative” about freedom-fighting heroes imposed since February by NATOstan media collapsed with a single blow. Cue to the thunderous silence all over the Western infowar front, where no mutts even attempted to sing that crappy, “winning” Eurovision song.
What happened, in essence, is that the creme de la creme of NATO-trained neo-Nazis, “advised” by top Western experts, weaponized to death, entrenched in deep concrete anti-nuclear bunkers in the bowels of Azovstal, was either pulverized or forced to surrender like cornered rats.
Novorossiya as a game-changer
The Russian General Staff will be adjusting their tactics for the major follow-up in Donbass – as the best Russian analysts and war correspondents incessantly debate. They will have to face an inescapable problem: as much as the Russian methodically grind down the – disaggregated – Ukrainian Army in Donbass, a new NATO army is being trained and weaponized in western Ukraine.
So there is a real danger that depending on the ultimate long-term aims of Operation Z – which are only shared by the Russian military leadership – Moscow runs the risk of encountering, in a few months, a mobile and better weaponized incarnation of the demoralized army it is now destroying. And this is exactly what the Americans mean by “weakening” Russia.
As it stands, there are several reasons why a new Novorossiya reality may turn out to be a positive game-changer for Russia. Among them:
The economic/logistics complex from Kharkov to Odessa – along Donetsk, Luhansk, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Nikolaev – is intimately linked with Russian industry.
By controlling the Sea of Azov – already a de facto “Russian lake” – and subsequently the Black Sea, Russia will have total control of export routes for the region’s world-class grain production. Extra bonus: total exclusion of NATO.
All of the above suggests a concerted drive for the development of an integrated agro-heavy industry complex – with the extra bonus of serious tourism potential.
Under this scenario, a remaining Kiev-Lviv rump Ukraine, not incorporated to Russia, and of course not rebuilt, would be at best subjected to a no-fly zone plus selected artillery/missile/drone strikes in case NATO continues to entertain funny ideas.
This would be a logical conclusion for a Special Military Operation focused on precision strikes and a deliberate emphasis on sparing civilian lives and infrastructure while methodically disabling the Ukrainian military/logistics spectrum. All of that takes time. Yet Russia may have all the time in the world, as we all keep listening to the sound of the collective West spiraling down.
The only antidote to propaganda dementia is served by sparse voices of reason, which happen to be Russian, thus silenced and/or dismissed.
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
Especially since the onset of GWOT (Global War on Terror) at the start of the millennium, no one ever lost money betting against the toxic combo of hubris, arrogance and ignorance serially deployed by the Empire of Chaos and Lies.
What passes for “analysis” in the vast intellectual no-fly zone known as U.S. Think Tankland includes wishful thinking babble such as Beijing “believing” that Moscow would play a supporting role in the Chinese century just to see Russia, now, in the geopolitical driver’s seat.
This is a fitting example not only of outright Russophobic/Sinophobic paranoia about the emergence of peer competitors in Eurasia – the primeval Anglo-American nightmare – but also crass ignorance about the finer points of the complex Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.
As Operation Z methodically hits Phase 2, the Americans – with a vengeance – have also embarked on their symmetrical Phase 2, which de facto translates as an outright escalation towards Totalen Krieg, from shades of hybrid to incandescent, everything of course by proxy. Notorious Raytheon weapons peddler reconverted into Pentagon head, Lloyd Austin, gave away the game in Kiev:
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
So this is it: the Empire wants to annihilate Russia. Cue to War Inc.’s frenzy of limitless weapon cargos descending on Ukraine, the overwhelming majority on the road to be duly eviscerated by Russian precision strikes. The Americans are sharing intel 24/7 with Kiev not only on Donbass and Crimea but also Russian territory. Totalen Krieg proceeds in parallel to the engineered controlled demolition of the EU’s economy, with the European Commission merrily acting as a sort of P.R. arm of NATO.
Amidst the propaganda dementia cum acute cognitive dissonance overdrive across the whole NATOstan sphere, the only antidote is served by sparse voices of reason, which happen to be Russian, thus silenced and/or dismissed. The West ignores them at their own collective peril.
Patrushev goes Triple-X unplugged
Let’s start with President Putin’s speech to the Council of Legislators in St. Petersburg celebrating the Day of Russian Parliamentarism.
Putin demonstrated how a hardly new “geopolitical weapon” relying on “Russophobia and neo-Nazis”, coupled with efforts of “economic strangulation”, not only failed to smother Russia, but impregnated in the collective unconscious the feeling this an existential conflict: a “Second Great Patriotic War”.
With off the charts hysteria across the spectrum, a message for an Empire that still refuses to listen, and doesn’t even understand the meaning of “indivisibility of security”, had to be inevitable:
“I would like to emphasize once again that if someone intends to interfere in the events taking place from the outside and creates threats of a strategic nature unacceptable to Russia, they should know that our retaliatory strikes will be lightning fast. We have all the tools for this. Such as no one can boast of now. And we won’t brag. We will use them if necessary. And I want everyone to know about it – we have made all the decisions on this matter.”
Translation: non-stop provocations may lead Mr. Kinzhal, Mr. Zircon and Mr. Sarmat to be forced to present their business cards in select Western latitudes, even without an official invitation.
Arguably for the first time since the start of Operation Z, Putin made a distinction between military operations in Donbass and the rest of Ukraine. This directly relates to the integration in progress of Kherson, Zaporozhye and Kharkov, and implies the Russian Armed Forces will keep going and going, establishing sovereignty not only in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics but also over Kherson, Zaporozhye, and further on down the road from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea, all the way to establishing full control of Nikolaev and Odessa.
The formula is crystal clear: “Russia cannot allow the creation of anti-Russian territories around the country.”
Now let’s move to an extremely detailed interview by Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, where Patrushev sort of went triple-X unplugged.
The key take away may be here: “The collapse of the American-centric world is a reality in which one must live and build an optimal line of behavior.” Russia’s “optimal line of behavior” – much to the wrath of the universalist and unilateralist hegemon – features “sovereignty, cultural and spiritual identity and historical memory.”
Patrushev shows how “tragic scenarios of world crises, both in past years and today, are imposed by Washington in its desire to consolidate its hegemony, resisting the collapse of the unipolar world.” The U.S. goes no holds barred “to ensure that other centers of the multipolar world do not even dare to raise their heads, and our country not only dared, but publicly declared that it would not play by the imposed rules.”
Patrushev could not but stress how War Inc. is literally making a killing in Ukraine: “The American and European military-industrial complex is jubilant, because thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, it has no respite from order. It is not surprising that, unlike Russia, which is interested in the speedy completion of a special military operation and minimizing losses on all sides, the West is determined to delay it at least to the last Ukrainian.”
And that mirrors the psyche of American elites: “You are talking about a country whose elite is not able to appreciate other people’s lives. Americans are used to walking on scorched earth. Since World War II, entire cities have been razed to the ground by bombing, including nuclear bombing. They flooded the Vietnamese jungle with poison, bombed the Serbs with radioactive munitions, burned Iraqis alive with white phosphorus, helped terrorists poison Syrians with chlorine (…) As history shows, NATO has also never been a defensive alliance, only an offensive one.”
Previously, in an interview with the delightfully named The Great Game show on Russian TV, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had once again detailed how the Americans “no longer insist on the implementation of international law, but on respect for the ‘rules-based world order’. These ‘rules’ are not deciphered in any way. They say that now there are few rules. For us, they don’t exist at all. There is international law. We respect it, as does the UN Charter. The key provision, the main principle is the sovereign equality of states. The U.S. flagrantly violates its obligations under the UN Charter when it promotes its ‘rules’”.
Lavrov had to stress, once again, that the current incandescent situation may be compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis: “In those years, there was a channel of communication that both leaders trusted. Now there is no such channel. No one is trying to create it.”
The Empire of Lies, in its current state, does not do diplomacy.
The pace of the game in the new chessboard
In a subtle reference to the work of Sergei Glazyev, as the Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union explained in our recent interview, Patrushev hit the heart of the current geoeconomic game, with Russia now actively moving towards a gold standard: “Experts are working on a project proposed by the scientific community to create a two-circuit monetary and financial system. In particular, it is proposed to determine the value of the ruble, which should be secured by both gold and a group of goods that are currency values, to put the ruble exchange rate in line with real purchasing power parity.”
That was inevitable after the outright theft of over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves. It may have taken a few days for Moscow to be fully certified it was facing Totalen Krieg. The corollary is that the collective West has lost any power to influence Russian decisions. The pace of the game in the new chessboard is being set by Russia.
Earlier in the week, in his meeting with the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, Putin went as far as stating that he’d be more than willing to negotiate – with only a few conditions: Ukrainian neutrality and autonomy status for Donbass. Yet now everyone knows it’s too late. For a Washington in Totalen Krieg mode negotiation is anathema – and that has been the case since the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine meeting in Istanbul in late March.
So far, on Operation Z, the Russian Armed forces have used only 12% of its soldiers,10% of its fighter jets, 7% of its tanks, 5% of its missiles, and 4% of its artillery. The pain dial is set to go substantially up – and with the total liberation of Mariupol and the resolution one way or another of the Donbass cauldron there is nothing the hysteria/propaganda/weaponizing combo deployed by the collective West can do to alter facts on the ground.
That includes desperate gambits such as the one uncovered by SVR – Russian foreign intel, which very rarely makes mistakes. SVR found out that the Empire of Lies/War Inc. axis is pushing not only for a de facto Polish invasion to annex Western Ukraine, under the banner of “historical reunification”, but also for a joint Romanian/Ukrainian invasion of Moldova/Transnistria, with Romanian “peacekeepers” already piling up near the Moldova border.
Washington, as the SVR maintains, has been plotting the Polish gambit for over a month now. It would “lead from behind” (remember Libya?), “encouraging” a “group of countries” to occupy Western Ukraine.
So partition is already on the cards. Were that ever to materialize, it will be fascinating to bet on which locations Mr. Sarmat would be inclined to distribute his business card.
Moscow imposed sanctions on US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and dozens of other top officials, banning them from entering Russia in response to the Biden administration’s “extremely Russophobic policy.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry announced the sanctions on Tuesday, in response to the US sanctions against Russia and its top officials.
The move to introduce the sanctions, which also targeted War Secretary Lloyd Austin, “is the consequence of the extremely Russophobic policy pursued by the current US administration,” the ministry said in a statement.
Among the targeted individuals were Biden’s son Hunter, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, CIA chief William Burns, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
The Russian ministry warned that Moscow would soon announce additional sanctions against a range of other “Russophobic” US officials, military officers, lawmakers, businessmen, and media personalities.
But it said that the door remained open for official contacts with the targeted individuals “if they meet our national interests.”
“We do not refuse to maintain formal relations if they meet our national interests, and if necessary, we will solve problems arising from the status of persons who appear on the black list in order to organize high-level contacts,” the ministry said in a statement.
In response to Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, Washington banned Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov from entering the United States. The US and its European allies also adopted sanctions that have largely cut Russia off financially from the rest of the world.
On Tuesday, the US State Department announced more sanctions on Russia. It published a list of 11 individuals it said operated in the defense sector of the Russian Federation, including Viktor Zolotov, the commander-in-chief of Russia’s National Guard, and Alexander Mikheev, the director-general of Rosoboronexport, a state-controlled company trading in weapons.
The state department also threatened to “impose severe costs” on Russian military leaders in response to “widespread human suffering and casualties, including the deaths of innocent civilians” in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said last week that Washington “has declared economic war on Russia” after Biden announced a ban on Russian oil and other energy imports to “cut the main artery” of Russia’s economy.
There is something of the theater of absurd in American and European posturing. But it’s far from funny. It’s menacingly deranged.
The United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this week performed impressive, albeit pathetic, mental gymnastics. In a press conference, the Pentagon chief called on Russia to be more transparent about troop movements “on the border with Ukraine”. In others words, on Russian soil.
Meanwhile, the absurd hypocrisy sees U.S. and NATO forces brazenly escalating their offensive presence on Russia’s borders, especially in the Black Sea region.
Here’s an Associated Press clip on the Pentagon press conference: “American officials are unsure why Russian President Vladimir Putin is building up military forces near the border with eastern Ukraine but view it as another example of troubling military moves that demand Moscow’s explanation, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday.”
The report quotes Austin as saying: “We’ll continue to call on Russia to act responsibly and be more transparent on the buildup of the forces around on the border of Ukraine… We’re not sure exactly what Mr Putin is up to.”
This dubious talent for mind-bending mental gymnastics and double-think is shared with other members of the Biden administration. Last week, America’s top diplomat Antony Blinken claimed that Russia was about to invade Ukraine yet at the same time the U.S. Secretary of State confessed similar ignorance about what “Putin is up to”.
How is it possible to engage in meaningful dialogue with such vacuous people who are supposed to be government leaders – and leaders too of the self-declared world’s most powerful, most brilliant nation? No undue offense intended, but it would probably be more productive to engage in a dialogue with the bewildering characters from Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot.
Russia has repeatedly dismissed all claims about it threatening Ukraine or any other country with invasion. Moscow also disputes “unreliable” information touted by the Biden administration and Western media of troop buildup near Ukraine on its western flank. Western media reports have relied on dodgy commercial satellite data purporting to show Russian military maneuvers. It is contemptible that senior U.S. government figures are basing grave allegations against Russia on such ropy sources. That in itself speaks volumes about the deterioration in Washington’s diplomatic professionalism and political intelligence.
Secondly, the salient fact being missed in all the hullabaloo is this: Russian troops and equipment are on Russia’s sovereign territory. It is the height of absurdity for U.S. officials to demand that Russia “explain” and be “more transparent” about its own national defenses. That speaks of a hyper-arrogance among American politicians that are deforming their ability to think reasonably.
There is an analogy here with the outcry this week over Russia’s successful missile test against a Soviet-era satellite in orbit. The Biden administration condemned Russia for creating “space junk” and weaponizing space while ignoring the fact that the U.S. previously carried out the same kind of missile strike and, arguably has been trying to weaponize space since the Reagan administration’s “star wars” program during the 1980s.
In any case, the U.S. charges of Russia’s military buildup on its own territory are made all the more ridiculous when we consider the actual increase in NATO forces in Ukraine and the Black Sea region – right on Russia’s western doorstep.
In a major speech this week delivered at the Russian foreign ministry, President Putin noted again how Western powers have continually failed to register Moscow’s national security concerns over the expansion of NATO forces along Russia’s borders. He described this inability for cognition of what should be an obvious grievance as “very peculiar”.
The Kremlin has suggested that the increasing NATO offensive presence near Russia’s borders is not due to stupidity, but rather is aimed at provoking a conflict. Russia is strenuously resisting the danger of an armed confrontation, and yet the provocations continue.
Nearly two weeks ago, William Burns, the head of the CIA made a high-profile visit to Moscow during which he held discussions with senior Kremlin figures, including President Putin. We can safely assume that Burns was told in no uncertain terms that the buildup of U.S. and NATO forces near Russia’s territory is a red line that will presage a response from Russia.
But these red lines continue to be skirted by Washington and its NATO allies.
More perplexing, too, are the moves by the U.S.-backed Kiev regime to escalate the conflict in Ukraine against the ethnic Russian population in the separatist Donbas region. The ultranationalist regime has been waging a low-intensity war against the Donbas since the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. The Americans and other NATO powers are increasing weapon supplies and military trainers to the regime, emboldening it to repudiate any peaceful settlement of the eight-year conflict.
Only last month, Pentagon chief Austin was in Kiev where he recklessly endorsed the joining of the NATO bloc by Ukraine. That is in spite of numerous warnings from Moscow that such a move would be an unacceptable destabilization.
The stepped-up war drills by NATO in the Black Sea region are inevitably leading the Kiev regime to resile from legally binding commitments to the Minsk Peace accord of 2015 – brokered by Russia, Germany and France. The release this week of diplomatic communications by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov clearly demonstrates that Germany and France are complicit in turning a blind eye to the Kiev regime’s systematic violation of the Minsk deal.
In this context, Russia is justifiably deeply wary of a confrontation exploding out of the tinderbox conditions in Ukraine and the Black Sea. Given the Russian nation’s tragic history of suffering from past military invasions, it is entirely understandable and indeed vitally prudent that the country’s formidable defenses are on high alert.
It is not for Russia to explain its troops. It is for the United States and its NATO partners to account for their wanton aggression and to desist.
There is something of the theater of absurd in American and European posturing. But it’s far from funny. It’s menacingly deranged.
Biden, like presidents before him, is caught in the trap between an extremist-dominated Israel and the all-powerful domestic Israel Lobby.
Donald Trump, who was elected President of the United States in 2016, may have won due to voters attracted by his pledge to end many of the “stupid” wars that the American military was involved in worldwide. In the event, however, he ended no wars in spite of several attempts to withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria, and almost started new conflicts with cruise missile attacks and the assassination of an Iranian general. Trump was consistently outmaneuvered by his “experts” on the National Security Council and at the Pentagon, who insisted that it was too early to disengage from the Middle East and Central Asia, that America’s own national security would be threatened.
Trump did not have either the experience or the grit necessary to override his generals and national security team, so he deferred to their judgement. And as has been well documented he was under constant pressure to do Israel’s bidding in the region, which mandated a continued substantial US military presence to protect the Jewish state and to provide cover for the regular attacks staged by the Israelis against several of their neighbors. Motivated by the substantial political donations coming from multi-billionaires like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Trump conceded more to Israel than any previous president, recognizing Jerusalem as the country’s capital as well as Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights while also giving the green light to settlement expansion and eventual incorporation of all of the occupied West Bank into Greater Israel.
President Joe Biden has already indicated that he will if anything out-do Trump when it comes to favoring America’s persistent “ally” and “best friend” in the Middle East. Biden, who has declared himself to be a “Zionist,” is responding to the same lobbying and media power that Israel’s friends are able to assert over any US national government. In addition, his own Democratic Party in Congress is also the home of most of the federal government’s genuine Zionists, namely the numerous mostly Jewish legislators who have long dedicated themselves to advancing Israeli interests. Finally, Biden has chosen to surround himself with large numbers of Jewish appointed officials as his foreign policy and national security team, many of whom have close and enduring personal ties to Israel, to include service in the Israeli Army.
The new Secretary of Defense, former Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin has recently returned from a trip to Israel, where he confirmed one’s worst fears about the direction the Biden Administration is moving in. It was a first visit to Israel by a Biden Administration cabinet member. Austin met with his counterpart Benny Gantz and also with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both of whom warned him that Israel considered renewal of any nuclear arms limitation agreement with Iran to be a threat, only delaying development of a weapon. As Bibi expressed it, “Iran has never given up its quest for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. I will never allow Iran to obtain the nuclear capability to carry out its genocidal goal of eliminating Israel.”
Austin responded by the usual two-step avoiding Israel’s expressed concerns, which might be considered a threat of an Israeli veto on Biden’s attempt to revert to the original 2015 JCPOA multilateral pact. He said that the Biden administration would continue to guarantee Israel’s “qualitative military edge” as an element in America’s “strong commitment to Israel and the Israeli people,” adding that “our bilateral relationship with Israel in particular is central to regional stability and security in the Middle East. During our meeting I reaffirmed to Minister Gantz our commitment to Israel is enduring and it is ironclad.”
Wrong answer general. The foreign policy of any country should be based on actual interests, not on political donations and effective lobbying, still less on what one reads in the Zionist mainstream media in the US. Netanyahu has stated that the Iran agreement is “fatally flawed” and has said recently that “History has taught us that deals like this, with extremist regimes like this, are worth nothing.” Israel, which uniquely has a secret nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is one of the world’s leading violators of attempts to limit nuclear proliferation. It is also destabilizing to the entire Middle East region, an apartheid state – not a democracy – and its government is widely regarded as right-wing extremist. That Netanyahu should feel somehow empowered to talk down to the Iranians, and to the US, remains a mystery.
Beyond what goes on between Washington and Jerusalem, the real center of power, the Israel Lobby, consists of a large number of separate organizations that act collectively to advance Israeli interests. There is considerable corruption in the process, with cooperative congressmen being rewarded while those who resist are targeted for replacement. Much of the legwork on subverting Capitol Hill and the White House is done by foundations, which often pretend to be educational to obtain tax exempt status. “Experts” from the various pro-Israel groups are then seeded into the decision-making process of the federal government, serving as gatekeepers to prevent consideration of any legislation that might be objected to by Netanyahu.
One of the most active lobbying groups is the so-called Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) which is in fact closely tied to and takes direction from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. FDD is particularly focused on going to war with Iran and whenever there are discussions on Iran policy on Capitol Hill one can be sure that an FDD expert will be present and active.
And if you really want to know why America’s foreign policy has been so self-destructive, it has recently been learned that FDD was actually able to insert one of its employees into the National Security Council under Donald Trump. According to a report on Bloomberg, Richard Goldberg, an outspoken anti-Iran hawk and former associate of John Bolton, is leaving the council and would be returning “to [the Foundation for Defense of Democracies], which continued to pay his salary during his time on the National Security Council.”
The NSC exists to provide the president with the best possible intelligence and analysis available for dealing with problem areas, something that Goldberg, due to his conflict of interest, would have been unlikely to provide, particularly as he was still on the FDD payroll and was also being given generous travel expenses while working for the government. Whether he was also being paid by the NSC, which is referred to as “double dipping,” is not known. In any event, there is something very wrong about the appointment of a paid partisan who seeks war with a particular country to a vital national security position where objectivity is an imperative. Ned Price, former special assistant to President Obama on national security, commented “…we now know a White House point person on Iran policy was receiving a salary from and remained employed by an organization that has put forward some of the most extreme and dangerous pro-regime change policies.”
So Biden, like presidents before him, is caught in the trap between an extremist-dominated Israel itself and its demonic prime minister on one side and the all-powerful domestic Israel Lobby on the other. Unfortunately, one cannot expect the United States to get out from under the Israeli thumb no matter whom is elected president.
[ Editor’s Note: Is this Biden reinventing Trump’s unipolar power dominance via a two step Biden unipolar power move in Asia with allies in tow, so they are available for cannon fodder use when deemed necessary to keep US trade fluctuations down?
What is important in this Biden plan story is to take a broad overview. By pulling allies into a coalition, he is positioning them for bullet magnets in case of hostilities. So one has to ask, why would they want this exposure when they can just be trade friendly countries with China and sit on the sidelines during a war?
China has no real invasion capability at this point, and has been spending its military money on a defensive navy as protection against the massive US navy firepower. It is also building a strong retaliatory defense as a first strike deterrent. If you want to talk about a threat, that is an undeniable one.
Within this context, to call China’s Navy expansion a threat is just hoaxing the American people to support an aggressive policy by the US to move into a first strike decapitation capability to threaten China.
As for why our own government would want to create a Neo Cold war against someone, the answer is the usual one. The uber wealth interests, who have their hooks deep inside our government, can see themselves making a shit load of military funding money ‘confronting China’, and also Russia, if the peacetime economy is looking dim for them.
NATO is doing a similar move pushing up to the Russian border via Ukraine. Then we have the US wanting the EU to be more dependent on US energy, not for their own security, but so we can have that advantage over them in a time of need.
And, there is the not discussed item that for Biden’s much hyped infrastructure spending to create high paying jobs here, US products based on such will be much less marketable overseas.
Biden needs a cover to always have sanctions put on China so Americans can’t buy Chinese, even if it is better, because sanctions run up the costs.
Economists have always warned that such contrived market moves fail in the long run.
But for countries with a huge military and unlimited borrowing power, which the super rich love, a slow peacetime trade market can always be replaced by a profitable war time market in a jiffy. Think false flag. You just have to press the right buttons… Jim W. Dean ]
First published … March 25, 2021
While the recently held QUAD summit-meeting did not mention China directly, there is little gainsaying that the basic thrust of the group is against China.
Although there are internal disagreements on whether to tackle China through military means or otherwise, or whether to keep this grouping strictly anti-China or not, the Biden administration has no doubts.
For them, the QUAD is a ‘Asia Pivot 2.0.’ and that the very survival of the US in Asia & the Pacific depends on selling a ‘China threat’ and subsequently placing itself as the primary bulwark against it; hence, the hurriedly done arrangements to hold QUAD’s first ever summit level meeting.
In other words, at the heart of Biden’s “China Strategy” is the imperative of rebuilding ties with allies in Asia & the Pacific, especially those frustrated by Trump’s policies, and then assembling a grand anti-China coalition.
Therefore, while the QUAD summit did not mention China as the rival, the so-called “The Spirit of the QUAD” is more than categorically specific about establishing a US led regime of rules governing Asia & the Pacific.
“The spirit” is about making the QUAD “strive for a region that is free, open, inclusive, healthy, anchored by democratic values, and unconstrained by coercion.” As such, while the summit did not mention China, it still addressed China directly. Indeed, this was more about making China “hear.”
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently told a US Congress House Foreign Affairs Committee that
“the more China hears not just our opprobrium, but a course of opprobrium from around the world the better the chance that we’ll get some changes. We have a number of steps we have taken, or can take, going forward to include for those directly responsible for acts of genocide, gross human rights violations – sanctions, visa restrictions, etc.”
Again, while the QUAD summit was not overtly anti-China, the Biden administration’s follow up visits to Asia & the Pacific are very much focused on building and cementing anti-China alliance.
For instance, the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Saturday March 13 that he was traveling to Asia to boost military cooperation with American allies and foster “credible deterrence” against China, adding that “China is our pacing threat” and that “Our goal is to make sure that we have the capabilities and the operational plans and concepts to be able to offer credible deterrence to China or anybody else who would want to take on the US”
Criticising the Trump administration’s ambivalent policies that concerned themselves with ‘trade war’ and ‘deal making’, Austin said while the US competitive edge has eroded, “We still maintain the edge and we’re going to increase the edge going forward.”
The key to increasing the edge is through alliances. It is the alliances that, as Austin emphasised, “give us a lot more capability and so one of the big things the Secretary of State and I want to do, is begin to strengthen those alliances — great alliances, great partnerships to begin with.” This will be the key to furthering US interests in Asia & the Pacific against China.
Accordingly, Austin’s visits to Japan and South Korea are most likely to focus on repairing the damaged done to their ties by the Trump administration.
While Japanese officials are sure to seek assurances from Austin that the US military would come to Japan’s aid in the event of a conflict with China over the Senkaku Islands, his time in Seoul is expected to be consumed with the question of whether to resume regular large-scale military exercises with South Korea, which Trump had abruptly cancelled.
Already, the two countries have reached a cost-sharing agreement for stationing American troops in South Korea, a presence that Trump had also threatened to end.
Austin’s full-scale visit to Asia & the Pacific also includes India, another QUAD member and a country at its lowest point in relations with China in decades after deadly clashes last year. Austin’s visit, therefore, will be particularly focused on utilizing the existing tensions between India & China to the US’ advantage.
The US, as it stands, cannot let these opportunities un-utilized; for, such opportunities allow them [the US ] to inject themselves in conflict zones in ways that, instead of de-escalating tensions, serve US interests first and foremost. If the US needs India as an ally against China, it needs to convince the Modi regime that India’s survival against China demands partnership with the US.
Again, the fact that the Trump administration stood virtually aloof in the last year India-China border skirmishes did a great deal of damage to India’s belief about the extent to which it could rely on the US. Austin’s mission will be, first and foremost, focused on rebuilding India’s belief and assuring the Indian government of the inevitability of the US support for their survival against China.
There is little gainsaying that the core focus of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is China. This is evident not only from the first ever summit level meeting of the QUAD, but also from Lloyd Austin’s first ever overseas mission as the Pentagon Chief.
What it shows is that the Biden administration, which is still less than two months into the presidency, is in no hurry to change of the course of tense relations with Chain set by the Trump administration.
In fact, the Biden administration is not only building on the same tensions, but is also utilizing its relatively more “responsible”, more “democratic” and more “stable and predictable” outlook as compared to the previous administration to woo their somewhat estranged allies into a sort of “global coalition” that Mike Pompeo had sought, and failed, to build and lead.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Washington Post journalist might be killed for his “invaluable inside information” after a meeting with an investigator of World Trade Center victims’ families
At the moment of his lightning-fast appointment the day after the inauguration of American President Joseph Biden in the White House, the Director of US National Intelligence, Avril Haines had announced the imminent declassification of the dossier on the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Those anxiously awaiting this moment were a little disappointed because the report revealed by the ODNI (Office Director of National Intelligence), the command station for all intelligence agencies from the CIA to the NSA of the Pentagon, did nothing but reiterate – with the fragile official nature of a correspondence by a partisan intelligence – what is already partly known to all the media in relation to the alleged role of “instigator” of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the brutal killing of the famous Arab commentator of the Washington Post.
Khashoggi, a distant relative of the royal family, disappeared in October 2018 after entering the Saudi Consulate General in Istanbul. Riyadh initially denied knowing of his fate but later admitted that the journalist had been brutally murdered inside the diplomatic office, denying any involvement of members of the royal family in the murder that he called a “rogue operation. “.
Washington Post columnist Jamal Kashoggi murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul
In fact, the journalist had entered the Consulate of his country in Istanbul on the morning of 2 October 2018 to obtain the documents to marry his Turkish girlfriend, Hatice Cengiz, who had remained outside waiting for him in vain. He was in fact killed and his body torn to pieces to make all traces disappear.
«We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi – read on Intelligence paper – We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decisionmaking in the Kingdom since 2017, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi. Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization».
THE ROLE OF THE ROYAL GUARD RAPID INTERVENTION FORCE
«At the time of the Khashoggi murder, the Crown Prince probably fostered an environment in which aides were afraid that failure to complete assigned tasks might result in him firing or arresting them. This suggests that the aides were unlikely to question Muhammad bin Salman’s orders or undertake sensitive actions without his consent» adds the US intelligence report which navigates the sphere of assumptions before revealing any circumstantial elements.
«The IS-member Saudi team that arrived in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 included officials who worked for, or were associated with, the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) at the Royal Court. At the time of the operation, CSMARC was led by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser of Muhammad bin Salman, who claimed publicly in mid-2018 that he did not make decisions without the Crown Prince’s approval» the ODNI document reports.
«The team also included seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s elite personal protective detail, known as the Rapid Intervention Force (RIF). The RIF-a subset of the Saudi Royal Guard-exists to defend the Crown Prince, answers only to him, and had directly participated in earlier dissident suppression operations in the Kingdom and abroad at the Crown Prince’s direction. We judge that members of the RIF would not have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without Muhammad bin Salman’s approval».
The document desecreated by US intelligence on Khasoggi’s assassination – click on image for pdf
The document concludes with a list of Saudis who would have had a role in this “pre-planned” action but it is not known “how far in advance” adds the office headed by Avril Haines before exposing another fundamental random element «We have high confidence that the following individuals participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit in or responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi on behalf of Muhammad bin Salman. We do not know whether these individuals knew in advance that the operation would result in Khashoggi’s death».
NO SANCTIONS FOR THE CROWN PRINCE
The information gathered by the “NIO (National Intelligence Officer) for Near East” and by the powerful counter-espionage of the Central Intelligence Agency, however, did not know – or wanted – to reveal the probable motive for the murder, at the time hypothesized by two interesting journalistic investigations that did not they were highly regarded by the US secret services because they risked reopening a sore wound.
Both the Australian Herald Sun and the American Florida Bulldog, in fact, highlighted too many things Kashoggi knew about the role of the Saudis in the 9/11 attacks as the probable cause of the crime.
Before seeing why this track is at least likely and supported by significant clues, let’s analyze the immediate consequences of the ODNI dossier. The document expresses “a high conviction” about the responsibilities of the individuals involved in the journalist’s death.
US President Joe Biden on Friday said that “significant changes” to policies between the US and Saudi Arabia will be announced as early as Monday. “I spoke to the king yesterday, not the prince. I made it clear to him that the rules are changing and that we will announce significant changes,” Biden told Univision in an interview. “We will hold them accountable for human rights violations and make sure that […] if they want to deal with us, they will have to deal with it in a way that deals with human rights violations.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
In practice, however, Saudi prince Mohamed bin Salman will not be hit by US sanctions. Politico reports this, citing sources from the US administration. The US Treasury is preparing to impose sanctions on Saudi general Ahmed al-Asiri, former deputy head of the intelligence services in Riyadh, for the Khashoggi assassination. Sanctions also for the Saudi Rapid Intervention Force involved in the murder.
The US State Department launches the so-called ‘Khashoggi policy’ or ‘Khashoggi ban’ to punish all people who, acting in the name of a government, are thought to have directly participated or participate in activities against “serious and extraterritorial” dissidents . The Bloomberg agency reports. The US administration has already identified 76 people who could be sanctioned with the withdrawal or restriction of visas.
“The government of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia completely rejects the negative, false and unacceptable assessment contained in the report concerning the kingdom’s leadership, and notes that the report contained inaccurate information and conclusions,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit “expressed his support for the statement by the Saudi Foreign Ministry refuting the conclusions of the US intelligence report, underlining that the latter is not a judicial or international body and that the related to human rights should not be politicized ”.
STOP OF AMERICAN WEAPONS FOR SAUDI ARABIA
In just a month since his inauguration, this is the second time that President Biden has targeted the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Previously it had in fact suspended the sale of arms to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi (UAE capital) in relation to the embargo on Yemen, often violated by suppliers such as the American war coropration Raytheon through subcontracts such as the one to the German Rehinmetall which used the branch factory. Italian (in Sardinia) to honor supplies with various escamtoge recently blocked by the government of Rome right after the Biden provision.
However, it should be remembered that the “Abrahamic Agreements” on the normalization of relations between the Persian Gulf countries with Israel will allow Tel Aviv to become an intermediary in the arms business.
Israeli ministers approved $ 9 billion worth of arms purchases with the United States on Sunday, the New Arab reported. The sizeable deal includes the purchase of Chinook helicopters, F-35 warplanes and aerial refueling tankers, as well as a large amount of bombs and ammunition, ”Middle East Monitor wrote on 14 February.
A few days later Biden tweeted: “I spoke today with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and affirmed the firm commitment of the United States to the security of our ally Israel. Our teams are in constant contact to strengthen US-Israel strategic cooperation on all regional security issues, including Iran”. About a week later the POTUS (President of the United States) ordered the US Air Force F-35s to bomb Iranian militias in Syria that have been haunted by Israeli Defense Forces missiles for years.
It should also not be forgotten that Raytheon had an exceptional American consultant until a few weeks ago: General Lloyd Austin, former commander of various missions in the Middle East who discharged from the US army in 2016, appointed by Biden.
And it is important to remember that during the previous administration of President Barack Obama (of which Biden himself was deputy) the Pentagon and the CIA Mom project supplied Raytheon missiles to the Syrian jihadist factions, with the excuse that they were rebels against the Bashar Al Assad regime. in the attempt of regime change planned by the Central Intelligence Agency itself since his father Haziz ruled in 1983, as confirmed by a document declassified by the USA and published exclusively by Gospa News.
As revealed by the SETA dossier, another study unveiled in Europe by our web media, 21 groups suspected of being linked to Islamic terrorism were in fact given supplies of the deadly BGM-71 TOW anti-tank rockets (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided – launched from a tube, optically tracked, remote guided), designed by Hughes Aircraft in the 1960s, but currently manufactured by Raytheon.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the precious sale of American bombs to Saudi Arabia will be able to continue through other channels: not only Israel but also the United Kingdom, already protagonist of a colossal business in the Arms Lobby with the Muslim Brotherhood, as we will see in others. reportage.
This is why the truth is always hidden behind a veil of diplomatic hypocrisy as in the case of the murder of the Muslim journalist of the Washington Post.
THE JOURNALIST OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERS
When I was looking for updated information on the September 11 2001 massacre to write a synthetic report aimed at highlighting the international complicity behind the attacks attributed to Al Qaeda, I came across some precious articles that correlated the attack on the Twin World Trade Center Towers with the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
The question is so complex and obscured by misdirections that I do not claim to spread absolute certainties. But the reportages to which I will refer confirm each other and the reliability of one of them is indirectly confirmed by the authoritativeness of a journalist who made various scoops by interviewing some of the American senators who supported not only the thesis of an international intrigue behind the massacre plot but they blamed Saudi Arabia without any hesitation.
In the Australian newspaper Herald Sun, investigative reporter Andrew Bolt already on October 16, 2018 analyzed the complex figure of Kashoggi, suspected of being an Arab secret agent, before becoming a champion of human rights as a columnist for the Washington Post of Jeff Bezos, founder and owner of Amazon but also an exemplary figure of that financial Deep State transversal to Republicans and Democrats, supported by international Freemasonry and military intelligence.
«In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post» Bolt adds perhaps forgetting those who argue that this Islamic political-religious organization would have been created by Western Freemasonry to more effectively control the Middle East through the historical allies of Turkey and Qatar where in fact the Muslim Brotherhood are more influential as highlighted in the reportage Weapons Lobby 4.
Herald Sun then recalls the murdered reporter’s connection with «Yasin Aktay — a former MP for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) — whom Khashoggi told his fiancée to call if he did not emerge from the consulate. The AKP is, in effect, the Turkish branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. His most trusted friend, then, was an adviser to President Erdogan, who is fast becoming known as the most vicious persecutor of journalists on earth. Khashoggi never meaningfully criticised Erdogan. So we ought not to see this as the assassination of a liberal reformer».
Heavy words especially because they refer to a man killed and then dismembered to hide his remains. But which are in perfect harmony with the theory reported in a serial dossier by Irina Tsukerman, a lawyer specializing in human rights and national security in New York, an analyst on geopolitics and on US foreign policy on American and Israeli publications such as Begin- Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (Besa).
«In the wake of Qassem Soleimani’s killing by the US, Iran’s significant role in 9/11 briefly gained currency. What remains completely obscured, however, are the Saudi Islamists hiding in plain sight, who are trading on their past associations with Western intelligence to pursue the same agenda they had pre-9/11. Saudi Islamists have both an ideological and a financial interest in seeing the kingdom’s modernizing Vision2030 fail».
Precisely for this reason we must first verify and carefully analyze the correlations on the World Trade Center massacre mentioned by Tsukerman who, by calling into question the Iranian Shiite Muslim confession, sworn enemy of the radical Sunni-Salafis such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabis, already smell of obvious and gigantic misdirection. To confirm the bias of Tsukerman’s dossier, his three reports are no longer traceable on Besa (but we have screenshots).
KHASHOGGI, FRIEND OF BIN LADEN AND SPY IN RIYADH AND LONDON
But one sentence is instead interesting because it is linked to the Australian article: «Much of what everyone thinks they know about the reform efforts of King Salman and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) is actually disinformation produced by these “dissidents.” They include former Saudi intel and Muslim Brotherhood members like Jamal Khashoggi, who wanted Saudi Arabia to become more, not less, like the Islamic state envisioned by Khashoggi’s friend Osama bin Laden».
Let’s close this Israeli parenthesis and return to the Herald Sun which continues the analysis: «Khashoggi and his fellow travellers believe in imposing Islamic rule by engaging in the democratic process… This matters because, although bin Salman has rejected Wahhabism — to the delight of the West — he continues to view the Muslim Brotherhood as the main threat most likely to derail his vision for a new Saudi Arabia. Most of the Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia who have been imprisoned over the past two years — Khashoggi’s friends — have historic ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Khashoggi had therefore emerged as a de facto leader of the Saudi branch. Due to his profile and influence, he was the biggest political threat to bin Salman’s rule outside of the royal family».
Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden
«He had befriended Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan and Sudan while championing his jihad against the Soviets in dispatches. At that same time, he was employed by the Saudi intelligence services to try to persuade bin Laden to make peace with the Saudi royal family. The result? Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi who had the beef on the royals’ intimate dealing with al Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. That would have been crucial if he had escalated his campaign to undermine the crown prince» .
«Like the Saudi royals, Khashoggi dissociated himself from bin Laden after 9/11 (which Khashoggi and I watched unfold together in the Arab News office in Jeddah). But he then teamed up as an adviser to the Saudi ambassador to London and then Washington, Prince Turki Al Faisal» adds Andrew Bolt.
Finally, the Australian journalist recalls that «The latter had been Saudi intelligence chief from 1977 until just ten days before the 9/11 attacks, when he inexplicably resigned. Once again, by working alongside Prince Turki during the latter’s ambassadorial stints, as he had while reporting on bin Laden, Khashoggi mixed with British, US and Saudi intelligence officials. In short, he was uniquely able to acquire invaluable inside information».
ELIMINATED THE WHISTLEBLOWER ON 11 SEPTEMBER
Following the thesis of the Australian reporter who demonstrates that he knew the murdered colleague well, one therefore wonders what he wanted to do with that privileged information … Let’s try to respond with an analysis of human psychology first and then a journalistic investigation. As it turns out, Jamal had really fallen in love with his Turkish girlfriend, Hatice Cengiz, so much so that he was willing to challenge the dangers of which he was well aware in order to go to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to collect the documents necessary for the marriage.
It is therefore evident that in order to guarantee a peaceful future for himself and above all for his wife, he may have first made some attempts to mediate a sort of “immunity” from Riyadh and then instead tried to free his conscience about 9/11 by making the secrets public. in his possession in order to frustrate a possible attack against himself.
If I venture into this logical speculation it is only because I have carefully read the article published in the Florida Bulldog by the American investigative journalist Dan Christensen, who became famous for his interviews on the international conspiracy behind the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York.
The attacks resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people (including all 19 hijackers) and the injury of over 6,000 others. The death toll also included 265 on the four hijacked planes (of which there were no survivors), 2,606 in the World Trade Center and surrounding area, and 125 in the Pentagon.
«““Khashoggi was killed not because he was a dissident, but because of his contact with us,” said James Kreindler, a prominent New York attorney who represents thousands of 9/11 family members and survivors who are suing Saudi Arabia. A month after Saudi-born Khashoggi was allegedly killed and dismembered by a Saudi hit team on Oct. 2, 2018, the U.S. intelligence community disclosed intercepts of communications with Khashoggi’s phone to others. One exchange was with Khalid bin Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed’s younger brother who was then serving as the Saudi ambassador to the US» reported Florida Bulldog.
The Washington Post reported on the alleged conversation between KBS telling Kashoggi to go and collect documents at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul for his planned wedding assuring him that “it would be safe to do so.” The revelation was part of the CIA dossier that today accuses Mohamed Bin Salman but a few hours later the Saudi ambassador denied the call.
“As we told the Washington Post the last contact I had with Mr. Khashoggi was via text on Oct 26 2017. I never talked to him by phone and certainly never suggested he go to Turkey for any reason. I ask the government to release any information regarding this claim,” Khalid wrote on Twitter on Nov. 16, 2018” Khalid wrote on Twitter on Nov. 16, 2018.
MYSTERIOUS MEETING BETWEEN KASHOGGI AND THE INVESTIGATOR
According to attorney Kreindler, October 26, 2017 was also the day Khashoggi met with a 9/11 family investigator in Washington.
«“Khashoggi was part of the intelligence community and we knew he knew a lot about the Saudi government’s involvement in 9/11. He was connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and to [former Saudi Crown Prince] Muhammad bin Nayef, and that’s the reason our investigator went to speak with him,” said Kreindler. “She said would you come to New York and talk to my boss? He said yes”» wrote Christensen. Then he reports the personal considerations of the lawyer of the World Trade Center victims.
“I’m sure that as soon as she left, he called KBS [Khalid bin Salman] and said, ‘Look, the 9/11 lawyers are on to me. They know that I know what you guys did and I didn’t give ‘em anything, but you’re holding my kid in Saudi Arabia and if you harm him I will.’ So my belief is that Khashoggi was killed not because he was a dissident, there are lots of dissidents, but because he was holding this ax over the Saudis’ heads.” told the lawyer.
According to Kreindler, however, it was a preliminary meeting in which Kashoggi, in voluntary exile from Saudi Arabia since September 2017 due to a “climate of fear and intimidation, did not provide any useful information.
The Florida Bulldog article ends by reminding that “there are still other reasons why the kingdom may have wanted Khashoggi’s death. In early 2018 Khashoggi would be involved in creating a defense group called Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) for a counter-narrative to the skeptics of the Arab Spring, initiated by the Obama-Biden administration.
REPORTER UNDER STOCK FOR THE WTC INVESTIGATION
Journalist Christensen had already highlighted the alleged responsibilities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by participating in a sensational interview by Matthew Ogden with former Senator Bob Graham in Naples, Florida, on November 11, 2014. Senator Graham was co-president of the joint Congressional 9/11 inquiry.
«The subject of the interview is the urgency of declassifying the redacted 28 pages of the Congressional Joint Inquiry’s report to expose the role of Saudi Arabia in financing not only the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, but also continuing to finance ISIS and related terrorist organizations today». This was also highlighted by Gospa News in relation to the bombing of the Churches of Sri Lanka in Easter 2019 and in reference to the use of death row inmates in the war in Yemen, witnessed by an exclusive document that proves the links of intelligence of Riyadh by sending militiamen to Al Qaeda even after the attacks on the Twin Towers.
«Investigative reporter Dan Christensen of the Broward Bulldog, as well as Miami-based first amendment attorney Tom Julin also participated in the interview. Christensen and Julin have been instrumental in combating persistent stonewalling by the Federal Bureau of Investigations in pursuing crucial leads pertaining to connections between a prominent Saudi family and a cell of 9/11 hijackers in Sarasota, Florida prior to the 9/11 attacks».
It was highlighted years ago by an article by LaRouchePAC, the communication project of the enterprising Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Junior, a US politician and activist of the Democrats who passed away in 2019, who for years opposed the Deep State by proposing himself as a candidate in the presidential primary multiple times, even when he ended up in jail for some quirky tax violations uncovered by the FBI that he had accused of cover-ups for the World Trade Center tragedy.
AGGRESSIVE DECEPTION AT THE CONGRESS
In the same reportage was reported a public statement released by the same Senator Graham who launched heavy accusations for the international conspiracy and the consequent misdirection which he defined as an “aggressive deception” at the United States Congress and the public in relation to the attacks.
“The connection is a direct one. Not only has Saudi Arabia been promoting this extreme form of religion, but it also has been the principal financier, first of Al Qaeda, then of the various Al Qaeda franchises around the world—specifically the ones in Somalia and Yemen— and now the support of ISIS…I believe that had the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 been disclosed by the release of the 28 pages, and by the declassification of other information as to the Saudi role and support of the 9/11 hijackers, that it would have made it much more difficult for Saudi Arabia to have continued that pattern of behavior, and I think [we] would have had a good chance of reining in the activity that today Canada, the United States and other countries either are or are considering going to war with.” stated Graham on October,9,2014.
Bush, Cheney Bandar and Rice on the White House balcony on September 13, 2001 – source LaRouchePac
«It’s not a secret that the Saudi Royal family is very close to the Bushes. In fact, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., whose role in 9/11 is highly questionable, is known to many as “Bandar Bush.” Perhaps the Bush Administration blocked the release of the 28 pages to defend the KSA, whom they view as a close family friend, a business partner, and political ally» is the conclusion of LaRouchePAC who in another reportage shows the photo of former US President George W. Bush jr, Vice President Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and Saudi Prince Bandar on the balcony of the White House on September 13, 2001. Two days after the Holocaust of the Twin Towers.
The 28-page document was then declassified in the following years (we will soon make a summary report of the contents), demonstrating the close links between exponents financed by the Saudi government and the Al Qaeda terrorists who planned the attack by the kamikaze hijackers. But relations between the US and Saudi Arabia did not change one iota and the 9/11 investigation remained shrouded in the dust of the collapse of the two towers and building 6 imploded without ever having been reached as if there had been the reported explosion. by many experts. That dust forms a thicker and thicker blanket on the truth.
Today another US Intelligence dossier arrives, unveiled on the political indication of the new president Joe Biden who accuses Bin Mohamed Salman of the brutal murder of Jamal Kashoggi but, just like then, nothing happens between Washington and Riyadh … It is perhaps specious remember that former Republican President Bush junior made a fundamental endorsement for Biden’s victory in the hot 2020 election campaign that pitted him against outgoing President Donald Trump?
A small reaction to the horrendous execution of the Muslim Washington Post journalist took place in Europe. Reporters Without Borders announced that it had filed a complaint in Germany for crimes against humanity against the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed ben Salman, for his “responsibility” in the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and in the incarceration of a thirty of his colleagues. Presented on Monday to the Attorney General of the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe “for his jurisdiction” on major international crimes “, the complaint” concerns the widespread and systematic persecution of journalists in Saudi Arabia “, reads an RSF statement.
AUTHOR DETAILSFabio Giuseppe Carlo CarisioDirector , Gospa NewsFabio is Director and Editor of Gospa News; a Christian Information Journal. Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio, born on 24/2/1967 in Borgosesia, started working as a reporter since he was only 19 years old in the alpine area of Valsesia, Piedmont, his birth region in Italy. After studying literature and history at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he became deputy director of a local newspaper and specialized in judicial reporting. For about 15 years he is a correspondent from Northern Italy for the Italian newspapers Libero and Il Giornale, also writing important revelations on the Ustica massacre, a report on Freemasonry and organized crime. With independent investigations he collaborates with Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in important investigations that conclude with the arrest of Camorra entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians. In July 2018 he found the counter-information webmedia Gospa News focused on geopolitics, terrorism, Middle East and military intelligence. He is a correspondent from Italy for the French news site Reseau International. He worked since many years for the magazine Art & Wine as art critic and curator http://www.art-wine.eu/https://www.gospanews.net/redazione@gospanews.net
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier and its Carrier Strike Group have entered the Mediterranean Sea.
This makes it, currently, the closest aircraft carrier to the Middle East. It has been quite a while since the US hasn’t had one of its super warships deployed in or near the Persian Gulf.
Starting in the spring of 2019, the U.S. Navy has been publicly ordered to keep a near-constant presence in the region, as if this were something new.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that a global posture review is taking place, and it would be reconsidered whether a carrier was even needed in the region. Still, the Mediterranean Sea is quite nearby, and the removal of the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) from the Persian Gulf was a political move.
It’s Lloyd Austin’s dream to have a CSG in every hotspot in the world, but resources don’t allow for that.
Still, the US has the amphibious warship USS Makin Island (LHD-8) in the Persian Gulf with a detachment of F-35B fighter jets, so it still has a hefty presence. Further, it is without a doubt possible for the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its CSG to operate without issue in the Middle East, be it Syria, Iraq or elsewhere, from its current place of deployment.
In Syria itself, as the primary US competitor, alongside Iran, Russian forces are preparing to set up a permanent military base near the city of Palmyra in the Badia Desert. This is not yet confirmed, but according to satellite photos it has a helipad as a runway.
This base is likely planned to support the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) further in their push against both ISIS and Turkish proxies.
On March 9th, the SAA carried out heavy shelling on the positions of Turkish proxies in the village of Jabal Al-Zawiya, in southern Idlib.
Separately, Pro-Turkey opposition factions reportedly thwarted an attempt by the SAA to advance on the Qalaat front in the northern countryside of Latakia. Attacks are frequently repelled in Twitter posts, but nowhere else, demonstrating that the propaganda wing of the Turkish proxies is quite active.
In the days leading up to this, the SAA has been preparing for a large push in the province of Aleppo.
This is likely an attempt to form a uniform front, which can exert equal pressure along the frontline and thin the enemy’s forces to provide opportunity for a breach.
Turkey and its proxies are sure to offer heavy resistance to any advance by the SAA, but so far it appears that this may not be enough.
The second month of 2021 began with preparations by Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) for new round of hostilities.
Kata’ib Hezbollah received short and medium range rockets through Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Kata’ib Hezbollah is a key member of the PMU, actively participates in the fight against ISIS since the emergence of the group in Iraq, and is a vocal supporter of the current attempts to oust the US presence from Iraq.
At the same time, the PMU are subject to more and more frequent ISIS attacks in recent days. As the terrorists appear to be popping up all around. On January 31st, the PMU said they repelled an ISIS attack in the region of Jurf al-Sakhar in the province of Babil.
These apparent appearances by ISIS members coincide with reports by pro-Iranian sources blaming the US for airlifting them. On January 31st, in an interview with the al-Maloumeh news website, Sabah al-Akili claimed that the US military airlifts ISIS units into areas behind PMU positions in the Jurf al-Sakhar region.
So far, US President Joe Biden’s policy for the Middle East is incredibly unsurprising. Any potential withdrawals appear to be nothing more than a pipe dream. The first-ever African American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw was being reconsidered. Not only that, but it is likely that the deployments need to be increased.
Attacks on US supply convoys have become commonplace, all of them being blamed on the PMU. However, responsibility for the most recent attack was assumed by the Qasim Al-Jabbarin group, which does not declare its affiliation with the PMU.
With the US still leading the way for NATO in the entire region, any exit also from Afghanistan becomes more fiction than reality. This will, in turn, lead to increased Taliban activity, since the peace deal is not being honored.
US troops remaining in Syria is also indisputable, judging by the deployments that have recently taken place.
The responses to these refusals to withdraw will lead to more frequent attacks and accusations from the Axis of Resistance. The answer from the Iran-led group will be not only against the US presence, but also against its allies in the face of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s Houthis are responsible for dealing with Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabian fighter jets continue their attacks on reported Houthi targets, but mostly civilians. The ceasefire in al-Hudaydah is not being honored. Despite the Kingdom’s best efforts, the Houthis still have the upper hand in the conflict. On January 28th, at least 150 members of the Saudi-backed forces switched sides and went over to the Ansar Allah movement (the formal name of the Houthis). Additionally, drone attacks are more frequent. The Kingdom reported that it repelled several attacks, but such reports were not as common until recently.
That is when Iran deployed brand-new loitering munitions to the Houthis, and a new group made its appearance to target Riyadh’s ambitions on the Arab Peninsula.
Tensions in the Middle East continue deepening. The advent of reports of the airlifting of terrorists is something that’s been rare since the Obama-era. It appears that the region is once again subject to this known and proven method of “diplomatic intervention.”
Seven years after being launched by President Xi Jinping, first in Astana and then in Jakarta, the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly drive the American plutocratic oligarchy completely nuts.
The relentless paranoia about the Chinese “threat” has much to do with the exit ramp offered by Beijing to a Global South permanently indebted to IMF/World Bank exploitation.
In the old order, politico-military elites were routinely bribed in exchange for unfettered corporate access to their nations’ resources, coupled with go-go privatization schemes and outright austerity (“structural adjustment”).
This went on for decades until BRI became the new game in town in terms of infrastructure building – offering an alternative to the imperial footprint.
The Chinese model allows all manner of parallel taxes, sales, rents, leases – and profits. This means extra sources of income for host governments – with an important corollary: freedom from the hardcore neoliberal diktats of IMF/World Bank. This is what is at the heart of the notorious Chinese “win-win”.
Moreover, BRI’s overall strategic focus on infrastructure development not only across Eurasia but also Africa encompasses a major geopolitical game-changer. BRI is positioning vast swathes of the Global South to become completely independent from the Western-imposed debt trap. For scores of nations, this is a matter of national interest. In this sense BRI should be regarded as the ultimate post-colonialist mechanism.
BRI in fact bristles with Sun Tzu simplicity applied to geoeconomics. Never interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake – in this case enslaving the Global South via perpetual debt. Then use his own weapons – in this case financial “help” – to destabilize his preeminence.
Hit the road with the Mongols
None of the above, of course, is bound to serenade the paranoid volcano, which will keep spitting out a 24/7 deluge of red alerts deriding BRI as “poorly defined, badly mismanaged and visibly failing”. “Visibly”, of course, only for the exceptionalists.
Predictably, the paranoid volcano feeds on a toxic mix of arrogance and crass ignorance of Chinese history and culture.
Xue Li, director of the Department of International Strategy at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has shown how “after the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed in 2013, China’s diplomacy has changed from maintaining a low profile to becoming more proactive in global affairs. But the policy of ‘partnership rather than alliance’ has not changed, and it is unlikely to change in the future. The indisputable fact is that the system of alliance diplomacy preferred by Western countries is the choice of a few countries in the world, and most countries choose non-aligned diplomacy. Besides, the vast majority of them are developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.”
Atlanticists are desperate because the “system of alliance diplomacy” is on the wane. The overwhelming majority of the Global South is now being reconfigured as a newly energized Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – as if Beijing had found a way to revive the Spirit of Bandung in 1955.
Chinese scholars are fond of quoting a 13th century imperial handbook, according to which policy changes should be “beneficial for the people”. If they only benefit corrupt officials, the result is luan (“chaos”). Thus the 21st century Chinese emphasis on pragmatic policy instead of ideology.
Rivaling informed parallels with the Tang and Ming dynasties, it’s actually the Yuan dynasty that offers a fascinating introduction to the inner workings of BRI.
So let’s go for a short trip back to the 13th century, when Genghis Khan’s immense empire was replaced by four khanates.
We had the Khanate of the Great Khan – which turned into the Yuan dynasty – ruling over China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea and Manchuria.
We had the Ilkhanate, founded by Hulagu (the conqueror of Baghdad) ruling Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, parts of Anatolia and the Caucasus.
We had the Golden Horde ruling the northwestern Eurasian steppe, from eastern Hungary to Siberia, and most of all the Russian principalities.
And we had the Chaghadaid Khanate (named after Genghis Khan’s second son) ruling Central Asia, from eastern Xinjiang to Uzbekistan, until Tamerlane’s rise to power in 1370.
This era saw an enormous acceleration of trade along the Mongol Silk Roads.
All these Mongol-controlled governments privileged local and international commerce. That translated into a boom in markets, taxes, profits – and prestige. The khanates competed to get the best trading minds. They laid out the necessary infrastructure for transcontinental travel (13th century BRI, anyone?) And they opened the way for multiple East-West, trans-civilizational exchanges.
When the Mongols conquered the Song in southern China they even expanded overland Silk Roads trade into Maritime Silk Roads. The Yuan dynasty was now controlling China’s powerful southern ports. So when there was any kind of turbulence overland, trade switched to the seas.
The key axes were through the Indian Ocean, between south China and India, and between India and the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea.
Cargo was traveling overland to Iran, Iraq, Anatolia and Europe; by sea, through Egypt and the Mediterranean, to Europe; and from Aden to east Africa.
A slave trade maritime route between the Golden Horde’s ports on the Black Sea and Egypt – run by Muslim, Italian and Byzantine traders – was also in effect. The Black Sea ports transited luxury merchandise arriving overland from the East. And caravans traveled inland from the Indian coast during dangerous monsoon seasons.
This frantic commercial activity was the proto-BRI, which reached its apex in the 1320s and 1330s all the way to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 in parallel to the Black Death in Europe and the Middle East. The key point: all the overland and maritime roads were interlinked. 21st century BRI planners benefit from a long historical memory.
“Nothing will fundamentally change”
Now compare this wealth of trade and cultural interchange with the pedestrian, provincial, anti-BRI and overall anti-China paranoia in the US. What we get is the State Dept. under exiting Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo issuing a paltry diatribe on the “China challenge”. Or the US Navy recommissioning the First Fleet, probably to be based in Perth, to “have an Indo-Pac footprint” and thus maintain “maritime dominance in an era of great power competition”.
More ominously, here is a summary of the humongous, 4,517-page, $740.5 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2021, just approved by the House by 335 to 78 (Trump threatened to veto it).
This is about funding for the Pentagon next year – to be supervised in theory by the new Raytheon General, Lloyd Austin, the last “commanding General” of the US in Iraq who run CENTCOM from 2013 to 2016 and then retired for some juicy revolving door gigs such as the board of Raytheon and crucially, the board of ultra-toxic air, water, soil polluter Nucor.
Austin is a revolving door character who supported the war on Iraq, the destruction of Libya, and supervised the training of Syrian “moderate rebels” – a.k.a. recycled al-Qaeda – who killed countless Syrian civilians.
The NDAA, predictably, is heavy on “tools to deter China”.
That will include:
1. A so-called “Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), code for containment of China in the Indo-Pacific by boosting the Quad.
2. Massive counter-intel operations.
3. An offensive against “debt diplomacy”. That’s nonsense: BRI deals are voluntary, on a win-win basis, and open to renegotiation. Global South nations privilege them because loans are low-interest and long-term.
4. Restructuring global supply chains which lead to the US. Good luck with that. Sanctions on China will remain in place.
5. Across the board pressure forcing nations not to use Huawei 5G.
6. Reinforcing Hong Kong and Taiwan as Trojan Horses to destabilize China.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has already set the tone: “Beijing intends to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically”. Be afraid, very much afraid of the evil Chinese Communist Party, “the greatest threat to democracy and freedom worldwide since World War II”.
There you go: Xi is the new Hitler.
So nothing will fundamentally change after January 2021 – as officially promised by Biden-Harris: it’s gonna be Hybrid War on China all over again, deployed all over the spectrum, as Beijing has perfectly understood.
So what? China’s industrial production will continue to grow while in the US it will continue to decline. There will be more breakthroughs by Chinese scientists such as the photonic quantum computing – which performed 2.6 billion years of computation in 4 minutes. And the 13th century Yuan dynasty spirit will keep inspiring BRI.
Filed under: USA | Tagged: America's Dirty Wars, Biden, Lloyd Austin | Comments Off on What to Know About Lloyd Austin: Biden’s First Pick for US War Department
Blog Stats
2,182,954 hits
The rapid Zionist colonisation of Palestine
The Story of Palestine
What I saw in the West Bank
Quranic view on Russia and The Eastern Orthodox Christianity
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
