The presence of any sort of US troops in Syria was not authorized by either the elected government in Damascus or by the United Nations.
Though Earnest did not say specifically which forces the US advisers will be aiding, he did refer to a group 45 kilometers outside the IS capital of Raqqa, which the media has been calling ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’ [newspeak for those fighting against the democratically elected government of Syria]
So the US would be bolstering the militiamen in Iraq with Apache gunship support and then firing on those exact same militiamen across the border in Syria in support of the “moderate” rebels battling to oust the Assad regime.
It’s beyond absurd.
On the basis of the evidence before Chilcot, there is little reason to doubt that the Blair government misrepresented the intelligence to parliament and to the British public in order to make the case for an illegal war in which 179 British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died.
The end of international law and diplomacy The end of the Cold War was welcomed as a new era of peace and security in which swords would be transformed into plows, former enemies into friends, and the world would witness a new dawn of universal love, peace and happiness. Of course, none of that happened. What happened is that the […]
‘The War You Don’t See’ (2011) is a powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of ’embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.
The Colin Powell memorandum in preparation for the Crawford summit of April 2002 (yes, that Powell, who has undertaken some considered Pilate handwashing ever since), was more damning than most. It outlined what the British role behind justifying an imminent war with shoddy grounds would look like.
The Iraqi government authorized Russia to target Daesh convoys coming from Syria, a senior Iraqi official said.
The authorization for Russia to target Daesh inside Iraq comes amid security coordination between Iraq, Russia, Iran and Syria.
NATO is desperate. The Pentagon is desperate. Imagine waking up one day in Washington and Brussels just to realize Russia has the ability to electronically jam — detect, trace, disable, destroy — NATO electronics within a 600 km range across Syria (and southern Turkey).
Noting that he was arrested along with a number of ISIL terrorists, the commander said, “The Israeli colonel’s name is Yusi Oulen Shahak and is ranked colonel in Golani Brigade of the Zionist regime’s army with the security and military code of Re34356578765az231434.”
Obama’s shift to regime-change in Syria was motivated not by concern for Syrian lives, but by the recognition that the previous strategy of engagement through pressure had failed to mould Assad into a reliable and ‘stable’ dictator.
Simultaneously, far from vindicating Russia and Iran, this investigation exposes their role in escalating Assad’s state-terrorism to protect their own narrow strategic goals.
Latest Blair revelations should serve as an urgent warning to MPs, especially Labour MPs, who are contemplating voting for war in Syria.
Another reason for Western vexation over Russia’s intervention in Syria is that it is exposing the fraudulence and criminality of the Western powers and their regional client regimes. Russia is conducting operations that are lawful under international law with the full consent of the Syrian government – unlike the US-led coalition which is bombing the country illegally. Vladimir Putin has cogently delineated the all-important legal difference. From the Western viewpoint, this exposure of their depredations is intolerable.
