Tag: ISIS

Say hello to my cruise missiles

The New Great Game in Eurasia advanced in leaps and bounds last week after Russia fired 26 cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea against 11 ISIS/ISIL/Daesh targets across Syria, destroying all of them. These naval strikes were the first known operational use of state-of-the-art SSN-30A Kalibr cruise missiles.

All it took for the Pentagon was a backward look over the shoulder at the flight path of those Kalibr missiles – capable of striking targets 1,500 km away. Talk about a crisp, clear, succinct message from Moscow to the Pentagon and NATO. Wanna mess with us, boy? With your big, bulging aircraft carriers, maybe?

KALIBRating the foe: strategic implications of the Russian cruise missiles’ launch

This initial real-world use of long-range LACMs by Russia has significant strategic importance, because the carriers of such systems (surface vessels and submarines), stationed elsewhere in the ocean, can minimize the potential use of nuclear weapons and offensive antiballistic systems by those states that still consider the Russian Federation to be their “biggest potential enemy,” an “aggressor state,” and an “annexing state.” These high-impact weapons systems could be used for preemptive or retaliatory strikes with both nuclear or non-nuclear warheads.

US Must Call Off Dogs of War in Syria

US President Barack Obama and his top diplomat John Kerry have repeatedly insisted that Assad must stand down in any eventual political outcome. In other words, the Americans want regime change by hook or by crook against what is, as Putin has clearly stated, the “legitimate government of Syria” – and a long-time strategic ally of Russia to boot.

US, Russia & Syria: The Problem With Faking It

The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up.

This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight against ISIL.

British MPs want to defend al Qaeda in Syria, “enforce no fly zone” even if UN vetoes

The “fifty Labour MPs” threatening to vote for military action in Syria, if they exist beyond the Guardian’s imagination, are still living in the Blair days. Back then, while the US empire was riding high, “New Labour” grew used to being handsomely rewarded for supporting genocidal war crimes. It was the kewl way to be. It got them shed loads of cash, seats at the high table, and total immunity from recrimination or justice.

Tell Washington to Get Lost

The question that the supine Western media should be asking the NATO chief and his Washington superiors is this: if you can so clearly quantify and delineate the IS and Al Qaeda bases, then why has the US-led coalition evidently been wasting 12 months bombing empty desert spaces instead of degrading and defeating these groups, as vowed by US President Barack Obama over a year ago?

ISIS & the psycho-nightmare of US Middle East “policy”

The US are trying to salvage the remnants of their comic-book Syrian narrative, hiding behind the transparent diversionary claim the Russians are bombing “non-ISIS rebels”, hoping, forlornly no one will be smart enough to realise this essentially means “al Qaeda/al Nusra”, and amounts to an admission the US is working with the group they used to claim were the embodiment of evil.

Oliver Stone: America is world’s greatest threat, not ISIS

According to Stone, the U.S. government’s destabilizing role actually goes back much further than ISIS. His new series pinpoints moments of American intrusion in the region as far back as the 1930s and follows it all the way to the CIA-backed Iranian coup in 1953, support for Afghanistan-based, anti-Soviet Union militants in the 1980s, George H.W. Bush’s Iraq invasion of 1990, and present-day efforts in Iran, Syria, and other countries.

West’s Proxy Jihadist Terror Network Uncovered in Yemen

Islamist groups are being activated and supplied by the Western-backed Saudi coalition to help prosecute the counterinsurgency war against the rebels. The rebel Popular Committees are calling for a pluralist democratic government in Yemen, which would mark a dramatic change from decades of Western and Saudi-backed dictatorships in the country.

50 Spies Say ISIS Intelligence Was Cooked

The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.

The Usual Warmongers

It is very reminiscent of the entirely fake narrative of a (non-existent) tank column sweeping down to massacre every civilian in Benghazi, to halt which we had to murder, by bombing, many thousands of civilians in Sirte, several hundred miles away and containing no tank columns.