Washington wants regime change and it’s not going to stop until Assad is gone. That means there’s going to be a war, a war that will pit the United States against Syria, Iran and Russia.
Has anyone in Washington even thought about what that might mean?
In spite of the erased and ruined lives in millions, the ruins of Iraq, of much of Baghdad “the Paris of the 9thcentury”, of many of historical gems that have survived assaults over millennia but not Bush and Blair, it seems likely Chilcot’s Inquiry, if it eventually appears, will prove another dead end.
Above all else, what has been proved by the bitter experience made by Greek workers with Syriza is that it is impossible to defend anything—jobs, wages, essential social services—without breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic and political life. It demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class against the major corporations and banks and their government.
The Labour leadership campaign of Jeremy Corbyn will be remembered for several notable reasons, not least the descent of the UK’s corporate media into unremitting farce, with the Guardian in its role as vanguard of the ‘liberal left’ decisively leading the pack.
As one reads through the hundreds of articles mentioning the four Labour candidates, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that serious, much less harsh, criticism of the New Labour triumverate is not on the agenda. It just becomes obvious that there are no forces within the Guardian willing to support such a focus.
Befitting his own campaign for a new, healthy and open politics, Corbyn can only but welcome more critical scrutiny of a media that’s urged people to support ‘sensible’ New Labourism, kept readers in step with ‘neoliberal reality’ and waged such a campaign of hostility towards Corbyn himself. And remember, this is not just the right wing press, it’s the Guardian, Independent and others claiming to be serious about progressive change.
There’s going to be US boots on the ground in Syria. You can bet on it. While it’s okay to deploy the jihadi cannon fodder to lead the charge and “soften up” the enemy; eventually, you have to send in the A Team to seal the deal. That means special forces, a countrywide no-fly zone, forward operating bases, and a ginned-up propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the sheeple that Syria must be destroyed in order to defend US national security. All of this will unfold in Phase 2 of the Syria war fiasco which is about to intensify by many orders of magnitude.
The ideas and vision that Jeremy Corbyn represents, for so long buried beneath a ton weight of Thatcherite ideology, have risen from their slumber and are now part of the mainstream political discourse again, breathed new life by thousands of young people who demand a real and humane alternative to the thin gruel that passes for reality today.
People’s quantitative easing is instead a highly directed process where the debt that is repurchased has been deliberately created and issued either by a green investment bank or by local authorities, health trusts and other such agencies for the specific purpose of funding new investment in the economy at the time when big business and financial markets are completely failing to deliver the scale of investment that is needed to get the UK working again and to restore our financial prosperity.
Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (ISIS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining ISIS’ black market oil sales.
The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a gruelling farce. For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
Like some mysterious figure who suddenly arrives in a Hollywood Western film, Jeremy has turned up in the wind-blown, parched town and taken on the oppressors. I am sure his bold initiative will be rewarded. Indeed, in the growth of a more confident left, it already has.
