It appears clearly that Washington’s enraged neoconservatives around Victoria Nuland in the State Department and Defense Secretary Ash Carter have made the best contribution to bringing China and Russia together in an unprecedented manner. They managed this impressive feat by imposing financial and economic sanctions on Russia and threatening China’s sea lanes, fostering terrorism in Xinjiang and advancing the military “Asia Pivot” as well as the TPP that deliberately excludes China.
What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?
Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?
For five years now, the enemies of Syria have been pushing their luck trying to engage the USA and NATO directly in fighting the Syrian Army but to no avail. The so-called East Ghouta chemical attack massacre was framed on the Syrian Army in a desperate attempt to get a UNSC resolution akin to the one made against the government of Libya a couple of years earlier, but this time Russia vetoed the decision.
So implementing a ceasefire is the UN’s top priority as it is Washington’s. But why would Putin agree to a ceasefire now just when the Russian-led coalition is making great strides on the battlefield, the war’s momentum has shifted in his favor, and the jihadist militias appear to be on the ropes?
As for the British public – now hardened by US and British drone attacks to state sponsored killings – the Litvinenko affair is for them simply a real life James Bond story. It has if anything enhanced their cynical but nonetheless real respect for Putin and Russia as a man and a country not to be trifled with.
Faking history is a form of burning books. Where books are officially burned, people follow. It’s already happened— on 2 May 2014 in the Hall of Trade Unions in Odessa set on fire by Kiev-junta-related neo-Nazi thugs. Over one hundred people died, including women and children. This was real history and real terrorism happening. The media ignored it.
There are many disturbing signs that the West is creating conditions in the Middle East and Asia that could produce a wider war, most likely a new Cold War, containing, as well, menacing risks of World War III. The reckless confrontation with Russia along its borders, reinforced by provocative weapons deployments in several NATO countries and the promotion of governing regimes hostile to Russia in such countries as Ukraine and Georgia seems to exhibit Cold War nostalgia, and is certainly not the way to preserve peace.
Russia’s military intervention to help its Arab ally at the end of September has been the seminal event of the year. After three months of sustained Russian aerial operations in support of the Syrian Arab Army against an array of foreign-backed mercenaries, there is an unmistakable sense that the «terrorist backbone has been broken», as Russian President Vladimir Putin recently put it.
In this U.S.-centered worldview, China and Russia loom as the great potential adversaries – defined as independent power centers from the United States as they create the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to NATO, and the AIIB as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank tandem. The very name, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, implies that transportation systems and other infrastructure will be financed by governments, not relinquished into private hands to become rent-extracting opportunities financed by U.S.-centered bank credit to turn the rent into a flow of interest payments.
If the US-led CDO were really committed to fighting ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, they would be working side by side with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), not bombing it or trying to stall it.
And they would be actively trying to shut down the key Turkey-Syria crossroads – the Jarablus corridor which is in fact a 24/7 Jihadi Highway.
Would you be willing to defend your country against a foreign invasion? That’s all Putin is doing in Syria. He’s just preempting the tidal wave of jihadis that’ll be coming his way once the current fracas is over. He figures it’s better to exterminate these US-backed maniacs in Syria now than face them in Chechnya, St Petersburg and Moscow sometime in the future. Can you blame him? […]
Unless Erdogan has lost his mind, Washington is behind the shootdown, and the reason is Washington’s desperation to decode the new Russian technology that gives Russian forces total control over a battlefield, whether on land, sea, or air.
