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“Lt. Col. Fares al-Bayyoush, the former aviation engineer who now heads the Fursan al-Haq Brigade, acknowledged that his men had fought alongside the Nusra Front because they needed all the help they could get. “Sometimes, he said, that help comes in forms only a jihadi group can provide. He cited the rebel takeover of the northern town of Khan Sheikhoun, saying that the rebels were unable to take out one government position until the Nusra Front sent a suicide bomber to blow it up. In another town nearby, Nusra sent four bombers, including an American citizen. “‘We encourage them actually,’ Mr. Bayyoush said with a laugh. ‘And if they need vehicles, we provide them’.”

The “moderate” rebels also don’t share President Obama’s priority of carrying the fight to the Islamic State militants, reported Hubbard, “ousting Mr. Assad remains their primary goal.” This dilemma of the mixed allegiances of the “moderates” has been apparent for at least the past year. Last September, many of the previously hailed Syrian “moderate” rebels unveiled themselves to be Islamists who repudiated the U.S.-backed political opposition and allied themselves with al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”] In other words, the just-approved congressional action opening the floodgates to hundreds of millions of dollars more in military aid to Syrian “moderates” could actually contribute to al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate gaining control of Syria, which could create a far greater threat to U.S. national security than the consolidation of the Islamic State inside territory of Syria and Iraq.

While the Islamic State brandishes its brutality as a gruesome tactic for driving Western interests out of the Middle East, it has shown no particular interest in taking its battle into the West. By contrast, al-Qaeda follows a conscious strategy of inflicting terrorist attacks on the West as part of a long-term plan to wreck the economies of the United States and Europe. Thus, Obama’s hastily approved strategy for investing more in Syrian “moderates” – if it allows a continued spillover of U.S. military equipment to al-Nusra – could increase the chances of creating a base for international terrorism in Damascus at the heart of the Middle East. That would surely prompt demands for a reintroduction of U.S. ground troops into the region.

There are also obvious alternatives to following such a self-destructive course, although they would require Obama and much of Official Washington to climb down from their collective high horses and deal with such demonized leaders as Syria’s Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, not to mention Iran. A “realist” strategy would seek out a realistic political solution to the Syrian conflict, which would mean accepting the continuation of Assad’s rule, at least for the near term, as part of a coalition government that would offer stronger Sunni representation. This unity government could then focus on eliminating remaining pockets of al-Qaeda and Islamic State resistance before holding new elections across as much of the country as possible.

As part of this strategy to weaken these Islamic extremists, the United States and the European Union would have to crack down on the militants’ funding sources in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, as touchy as that can be with the Saudis holding such influence over the U.S. economy. But Obama could start the process of facing down Saudi blackmail by declassifying the secret section of the 9/11 Report which reportedly describes Saudi financing of al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. I’m told that U.S. intelligence now has a clear picture of which Saudi princes are providing money to Islamist terrorists. So, instead of simply sending drones and warplanes after youthful jihadist warriors, the Obama administration might find it more useful to shut down these funders, perhaps nominating these princes as candidates for the U.S. “capture or kill list.”

To get Assad fully onboard for the necessary concessions to his Sunni opponents, the Russians could prove extremely valuable. According to a source briefed on recent developments, Russian intelligence already has served as a go-between for U.S. intelligence to secure Assad’s acceptance of Obama’s plan to send warplanes into parts of Syrian territory to attack Islamic State targets. The Russians also proved helpful a year ago in getting Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal to defuse a U.S. threat to begin bombing Assad’s military in retaliation for a Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Although Assad denied involvement – and subsequent evidence pointed more toward a provocation by rebel extremists – Putin’s intervention gave Obama a major foreign policy success without a U.S. military strike. That intervention, however, infuriated Syrian rebels who had planned to time a military offensive with the U.S. bombing campaign, hoping to topple Assad’s government and take power in Damascus. America’s influential neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies – along with Israeli officials – were also livid, all eager for another U.S.-backed “regime change” in the Middle East.

Putin thus made himself an inviting neocon target. By the end of last September, American neocons were taking aim at Ukraine as a key vulnerability for Putin. A leading neocon, Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the op-ed pages of the neocon Washington Post to identify Ukraine as “the biggest prize” and explain how its targeting could undermine Putin’s political standing inside Russia. “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents,” Gershman wrote. “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.” At the time, Gershman’s NED was funding scores of political and media projects inside Ukraine. What followed in Ukraine had all the earmarks of a U.S. destabilization campaign against Putin’s ally, the elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

Then, with U.S. officialdom and the mainstream U.S. press engaging in an orgy of Cold War-style propaganda, Putin was demonized as a new Hitler expanding territory by force. Anyone who knew the facts recognized that Putin had actually been trying to maintain the status quo, i.e., sustain the Yanukovych government until the next election, and it was the West that had thrown the first punch. But Washington’s new “group think” was that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim lost territory of the Russian empire. President Obama seemed caught off-guard by the Ukraine crisis, but was soon swept up in the West’s Putin/Russia bashing. He joined in the hysteria despite the damage that the Ukraine confrontation was inflicting on Obama’s own hopes of working with Putin to resolve other Middle East problems.

Thus, the initial victory went to the neocons who had astutely recognized that the emerging Putin-Obama collaboration represented a serious threat to their continued plans for “regime change” across the Middle East. Not only had Putin helped Obama head off the military strike on Syria, but Putin assisted in getting Iran to agree to limits on its nuclear program. That meant the neocon desire for more “shock and awe” bombing in Syria and Iran had to be further postponed. The Putin-Obama cooperation might have presented an even greater threat to neocon plans if the two leaders could have teamed up to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally reach a reasonable agreement with the Palestinians. At the center of the neocons’ strategy at least since the mid-1990s has been the idea that “regime change” in Middle East governments hostile to Israel would eventually starve Israel’s close-in enemies, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas, of support and free Israel’s hand to do what it wanted with the Palestinians. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

The Putin-Obama collaboration – if allowed to mature – could have derailed that core neocon strategy and denied Israel the unilateral power to decide the Palestinians’ fate. But the Ukraine crisis – and now the plan to pour a half-billion dollars into the Syrian rebels fighting Assad – have put the neocon strategy back on track. The next question is whether Obama and whatever “realists” remain in Official Washington have the will and the determination to reclaim control of the Middle East policy train and take it in a different direction.

Israel’s new culture minister is Miri Regev, who in 2012 helped incite a violent anti-African riot when she stood before a racist mob and labeled non-Jewish African asylum seekers a “cancer”, a statement that 52 percent of Israeli Jews agreed with. Regev later apologized, not to Africans but to cancer survivors for likening them to Black people.  Israel’s new deputy defense minister is Eli Ben-Dahan, who proudly proclaimed, “[Palestinians] are beasts, they are not human,” and, “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.” Citing a combination of religious text and the writings of far rightwing Israeli figures, Israel’s new deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely asserted Jewish ownership over all of historic Palestine, declaring, “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologize for that.” 

Earlier this month, Moshe Yaalon, who will continue to serve as Israel’s defense minister in Netanyahu’s new governing coalition, threatened to nuke Iran and promised to kill civilians, including children, in any future conflict with Lebanon or Gaza.  Unlike Obama’s hollow threats, this is not empty rhetoric. We saw this incitement play out last summer, from the burning of Muhammad Abu Khudair by Jewish extremists and “death to Arabs” mobs hunting Palestinians in the streets of Jerusalem, to the sadistic conduct and eliminationist chauvinism exhibited by Israel’s military in Gaza. With Israeli Jewish society submerged in anti-Palestinian racism from the top down, the Obama administration has guaranteed Israel’s capacity to carry out its most destructive ambitions. 

While such a scrap between AIPAC and the administration is not without precedent, it has been over two decades since the last bare-knuckles fight. In fact, longtime Washington insiders can only recall two other cases in the past 40 years in which the organization took on the president. Significantly to this battle, neither instance ended with a clear win for the pro-Israel lobby. Such standoffs remain so sensitive that few involved are willing to discuss publicly the dramas of past decades.

But despite the vitriol of that fight, it still falls short of the battle shaping up in Washington today. The AWACS sale was, when push came to shove, a weapons transfer meant to solidify the US-Saudi alliance; it did not hold the same status for the Reagan administration as the landmark Iran deal, which many see as a legacy project of the Obama administration.

This is the first time, Washington old-timers agree, that the self-imposed stakes have been quite so high for the administration. Neither side is likely to retreat, setting the stage for the history-making clash. Only the coming two months will tell whether this showdown will end any differently than the previous ones – or how deep the bad blood will run before it’s done.

Throughout her time as Senator and Secretary of State, Clinton supported the aggressive foreign policy prescriptions of the neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist allies. In each of these cases, the neocons and liberal hawks were dominating Official Washington’s debate and it would have taken some political courage to stand in their way. Hillary Clinton never did.The enduring mystery with Hillary Clinton is whether she is a true neocon or whether she simply judges that embracing neocon positions is the “safest” course for her career – that by parroting the neocon “group think” she can win praise from the national-security elite and that big donors who favor a hard-line strategy for the Middle East will reward her with campaign contributions.Whatever the case, Clinton has carefully curried favor with key neocons, including consulting with Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neocon Project for the New American Century, and promoting his wife, Victoria Nuland, making her the State Department spokesperson and putting her on track to become Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs. In that post, Nuland orchestrated “regime change” in Ukraine, which like other neocon targets has descended into bloody chaos, but this adventure also has precipitated a dangerous showdown with nuclear-armed Russia.

Of course, one of the reasons Obama lobbied allies against joining the bank is that he knew that a Republican Congress would itself reject Washington’s accession. The same Republican Congress has steadfastly refused to ratify a long-pending governance reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that would give Beijing and some other middle-income countries a somewhat bigger voice in the two western-dominated Bretton-Woods institutions (even without diluting the U.S. voting power on their boards). And, yes, this is the same Republican Congress that invited Netanyahu to speak to it, that approves virtually any appropriation desired by Israel, and that is trying its utmost to derail a multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran largely at Bibi’s behest.

Like most small countries, Israel practices realpolitik. Despite claims by AIPAC, neoconservatives, and many Christian Zionists that Israel is our “closest ally” in the Middle East, if not the world, and that its “values” are identical to our own, in fact, it pursues its own interests abroad with little regard for Republican (or anyone else’s) sensibilities. As we have reported before, it is also providing support to al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, but no Republican that I know of has raised the slightest objection. Indeed, in their devotion to Netanyahu and his Likud Party, no doubt well lubricated by the millions of dollars in campaign and other political contributions offered by Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, and other Republican Jewish Coalition donors, most Republican lawmakers appear perfectly comfortable with Israel’s Middle East policies, including continued settlement-building and expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the de facto blockade against Gaza, and demands that Israel be recognized as a Jewish State. These actions and others serve not only to radicalize the Palestinians and other Arabs but also make it more difficult for the United States and its military to gain goodwill and operate effectively throughout the region, as then-CentCom Commander Gen. David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee shortly after Netanyahu became prime minister. Indeed, no one has undermined U.S. credibility in the region and beyond over the past six years as much as Bibi himself.

The new challenges facing the White House plan come as a growing number of Democrats are breaking with the administration over its handling of a range of international crises. Several Iran hawks in the Senate Democratic Caucus signed onto a bill calling on the White House to send any nuclear deal with Iran for immediate congressional approval. They were working to gather enough Democratic support to override a threatened presidential veto, but the plan has stalled temporarily over a partisan procedural squabble. Influential Democrats like Dick Durbin of Illinois have joined a push calling on the White House to toughen sanctions against Russia while arming Ukraine in the fight against Russian-backed rebels.

And on ISIL, Democrats say the president needs to swallow changes to his proposed draft to win backing from his own party, even if doing so could turn off even more Republicans. “No,” said New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, when asked whether he would support the president’s proposal. “I think we have to do a better job of defining what is ‘no enduring offensive combat troops.’ That is a critical element. I think if we can get past that element of it, other elements could fall into place. But we need to do a better job of that — otherwise, many members feel that is the equivalent of a blank check.”

It’s unclear how aggressive the president will be, but senior administration officials have indicated they would not play a heavy hand in the negotiations on Capitol Hill, at least at the onset of the debate. A White House spokesperson said, “We remain open to reasonable adjustments that are consistent with the president’s policy and that can garner bipartisan support. However, it is ultimately up to Congress to pass a new authorization.”

There is little margin for error on the committee, given that it is split between 10 Republicans and nine Democrats. On the Republican side, two senators who are likely running for president and have opposite foreign policy views — Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida — will be difficult to court no matter how the proposal is structured. And the nine Democrats on the committee each have strong reservations about the president’s proposal, arguing it’s too broad in scope.

“If the Vietnam War taught us anything, and if the president’s interpretation of the 2001 authorization has taught us anything, it’s that Congress better be pretty specific on our authorization,” Cardin said. “The hearings and meetings we’ve had raised as many questions as they have answered,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I appreciate the president has done something unprecedented — he’s proposed restrictions on his authority — but it’s likely got to change for me to support it.”

The real question is this: if concern over suppression of political rights is not the real reason the U.S. is imposing new sanctions on Venezuela (perish the thought!), what is? Among the most insightful commentators on U.S. policy in Latin America is Mark Weisbrot of Just Foreign Policy. Read his excellent article for Al Jazeera on the recent Obama decree on Venezuela. In essence, Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates, and this simply cannot be permitted (such countries are always at the top of the U.S. government and media list of Countries To Be Demonized). Beyond that, the popularity of Chavez and the relative improvement of Venezuela’s poor under his redistributionist policies petrifies neoliberal institutions for its ability to serve as an example; just as the Cuban economy was choked by decades of U.S. sanctions and then held up by the U.S. as a failure of Communism, subverting the Venezuelan economy is crucial to destroying this success. As Weisbrot notes, every country in the hemisphere except for the U.S. and Canada have united to oppose U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) issued a statement in February in response to the prior round of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela that “reiterates its strong repudiation of the application of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law.” This week, the chief of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) issued a statement announcing that “UNASUR rejects any external or internal attempt at interference that seeks to disrupt the democratic process in Venezuela.” Weisbrot compares Obama’s decree this week on Venezuela to President Reagan’s quite similar 1985 decree that Nicaragua was a national security threat to the U.S., and notes: “The Obama administration is more isolated today in Latin America than even George W. Bush’s administration was.”

If Obama and supporters want the government of Venezuela to be punished and/or toppled because they refuse to comply with U.S. dictates, they should at least be honest about their beliefs so that their true character can be seen. Pretending that any of this has to do with the U.S. Government’s anger over suppression of political opponents — when their closest allies are the world champions at that — should be too insulting of everyone’s intelligence to even be an option.

Washington’s lies are catching up with Obama. German chancellor Merkel is Washington’s complete whore, but German industry is telling Washington’s whore that they value their business with Russia more than they value suffering in behalf of Washington’s empire. French businessmen are asking Hollande what he proposes to do with their unemployed workers if Holland goes along with Washington. Italian businesses are reminding that government, to the extent that Italy has one, that uncouth Americans have no tastes and that sanctions on Russia mean a hit to Italy’s most famous and best recognized economic sector–high style luxury products. Dissent with Washington and Washington’s two-bit puppet rulers in Europe is spreading. The latest poll in Germany reveals that three-quarters of Germany’s population rejectpermanent NATO bases in Poland and the Baltic states. The former Czechoslovakia, currently Slovakia and the Czech Republic, although NATO members, have rejected NATO and American troops and bases on their territory. Recently, the Polish foreign minister said that pleasing Washington required giving free oral sex for nothing in return.

Thus, America’s two largest business organizations, important sources of political campaign contributions, have finally added their voice to the voices of German, French, and Italian business. Everyone, except the brainwashed American public, knows that the “crisis in Ukraine” is entirely the work of Washington. European and American businesses are asking: “why should our profits and our workers take hits in behalf of Washington’s propaganda against Russia.” Obama has no answer. Perhaps his neocon scum, Victoria Nuland, Samantha Powers, and Susan Rice can come up with an answer. Obama can look to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard to explain why millions of Americans and Europeans should suffer in order that Washington’s theft of Ukraine is not endangered.

Today no one anywhere in the world believes the US government except the brain dead Americans who read and listen to the “mainstream media.” Washington’s propaganda dominates the minds of Americans, but produces laughter and scorn everywhere else. The poor US economic outlook has brought America’s two largest business lobbies–the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (or what is left of them) into conflict with the Obama regime’s threat of further sanctions against Russia. According to Bloomberg News, beginning tomorrow (June 26), the business groups will run advertisements in the New York Times, Wall St Journal, and Washington Post opposing any further sanctions on Russia. The US business organizations say that the sanctions will harm their profits and result in layoffs of American workers.

The strains that Washington’s morons are putting on NATO might break the organization apart. Pray that it does. NATO’s excuse for existence disappeared with the Soviet collapse 23 years ago. Yet, Washington has increased NATO far beyond the borders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO now runs from the Baltics to Central Asia. In order to have a reason for NATO’s continued expensive operation, Washington has had to construct an enemy out of Russia. Russia has no intention of being Washington’s or NATO’s enemy and has made that perfectly clear. But Washington’s military/security complex, which absorbs about $1 trillion annually of US hard-pressed taxpayers’ money, needs an excuse to keep the profits flowing. Unfortunately the Washington morons picked a dangerous enemy. Russia is a nuclear armed power, a country of vast dimensions, and with a strategic alliance with China.

Only a government drowning in arrogance and hubris or a government run by psychopaths and sociopaths would pick such an enemy. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has pointed out to Europe that Washington’s policies in the Middle East and Libya are not merely total failures but also devastatingly harmful to Europe and Russia. The fools in Washington have removed the governments that suppressed the jihadists. Now the violent jihadists are unleashed. In the Middle East the jihadists are at work remaking the artificial boundaries set by the British and French in the aftermath of World War I. Europe, Russia and China have Muslim populations and now must worry if the violence that Washington has unleashed will bring destabilization to regions of Europe, Russia and China.

No one anywhere in the world has any reason to love Washington. Least of all Americans, who are being bled dry in order that Washington can parade military force around the world. Obama’s approval rating is a dismal 41 percent and no one wants Obama to remain in office once his second term is complete. In contrast, two-thirds of the Russian population want Putin to remain president after 2018. In March the poling agency, Public Opinion Research Center, released a report that Putin’s approval rating stood at 76 percent despite the agitation against him by the US financed Russian NGOs, hundreds of fifth column institutions that Washington established in Russia during the past two decades. On top of US political troubles, the US dollar is in trouble. The dollar is kept afloat by rigged financial markets and Washington’s pressure on its vassal states to support the dollar’s value by printing their own currencies and purchasing dollars. In order to keep the dollar afloat, much of the world will be inflated. When people finally catch on and rush into gold, the Chinese will have it all.

Sergey Glazyev, an adviser to President Putin, has told the Russian president than only an anti-dollar alliance that crashes the US dollar can halt Washington’s aggression. That has long been my opinion. There can be no peace as long as Washington can print more money with which to finance more wars. As the Chinese government stated, it is time to “de-Americanize the world.” Washington’s leadership has totally failed the world, producing nothing but lies, violence, death, and the promise of more violence. America is exceptional only in the fact that Washington has, without remorse, destroyed in whole or part seven countries in the new 21st century. Unless Washington is replaced with more humane leadership, life on earth has no future.

Turkey and the ex-governor of Mosul, Atheel al-Nujaifi, would like to be present when the city is taken from Daesh, hoping to be able to prevent it from being occupied by the Popular Mobilisation Forces (al-Hashd al-Shaabi), the great majority of whom are Shia. It’s clear that everyone is dreaming – illegitimate President Massoud Barzani believes that no-one will question his annexation of the oil fields of Kirkuk and the Sinjar mountains – the leader of the Syrian Kurds, Saleh Muslim, imagines that he will soon be President of an internationally-recognised pseudo-Kurdistan – and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan presumes that the Arabs of Mosul long to be liberated and governed by the Turks, as they were under the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, in Ukraine, Turkey has deployed the International Islamist Brigade that it officially created last August. These jihadists, who were extracted from the Syrian theatre, were divided into two groups as soon as they arrived in Kherson. Most of them went to fight in Donbass with the Cheikh Manour and Djokhar Doudaïev Brigades, while the best elements were infiltrated into Russia in order to sabotage the Crimean economy, where they managed to cut all electricity to the Republic for 48 hours.

The terrorist forces We could deal here with the terrorist organisations, but that would involve pretending, like NATO, that these groups are independent formations which have suddenly materialised from the void, with all their salaries, armement and spare parts. More seriously, the jihadists are in fact mercenaries in the service of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – it seems that the United Arab Emirates have almost completely withdrawn from this group – to which we must add certain multinationals like Academi, KKR and Exxon-Mobil. Turkey continues its military deployement in Bachiqa (Irak), in support of the Kurdish forces of illegitimate President Massoud Barzani who, although his mandate is terminated, refuses to leave power and organise new elections. When the Iraqi government demanded that Turkey remove its troops and tanks, Ankara responded that it had sent its soldiers to protect the training forces deployed in Iraq according to an earlier international agreement, and that it had no intention of withdrawing them. It then added even more, bringing the number of troops involved to at least 1,000 soldiers and 25 tanks. Iraq referred its case to the United Nations Security Council and the Arab League, without provoking the slightest reaction anywhere.

The Coalition has announced that it has carried out new bombing missions and destroyed a number of Daesh installations, but these allegations are unverifiable and even more doubtful insofar as the terrorist organisation has not made the slightest protest. From this disposition, we may conclude that France may elaborate its own strategy, but that the United States can re-assert control at any time.

Saudi Arabia united its mercenaries in Riyadh in order to constitute a delegation in readiness for the next round of negotiations organised by the NATO Director of Political Affairs, US neo-Conservative Jeffrey Feltman. The Saudis did not invite the representatives of Al-Qaïda, nor those of Daesh, but only the Wahhabist groups who are working with them, like Jaysh al-Islam or Ahrar al-Sham. Therefore, in theory, there were no « terrorist groups », as listed by the UNO Security Council, present at the conference. However, in practice, all the participants were fighting with, in the name of, or alongside Al-Qaïda or Daesh without using their label, since most of these groups are directed by personalities who once belonged to Al-Qaïda or Daesh. Thus, Ahrar al-Sham was created just before the beginning of the events in Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood and the principal leaders of Al-Qaïda, drawn from personalities close to Osama bin Laden. Continuing to act as they had before the Russisan intervention, the participants agreed to a « political solution » which would start with the abdication of the democratically-elected President Bachar el-Assad, and continue with a sharing of power between themselves and the Republican institutions. Thus, although they have lost all hope of a military victory, they persist in counting on the surrender of the Syrian Arab Republic.

Since the representative of the Syrian Kurds was not invited to the conference, we may conclude that Saudi Arabia considers the project for a pseudo-Kurdistan as distinct from the future of the rest of Syria. Let us note in passing that the YPG has just created a Syrian Democratic Council in order to reinforce the illusion of an alliance between Selah Muslim’s Kurds and the Sunni and Christian Arabs, when in reality, they are fighting each other on the ground. In any case, there is no doubt that Riyadh is supporting Turkey’s efforts to create this pseudo-Kurdistan as a place of banishment for « its » Kurds. Indeed, it is now confirmed that Saudi Arabia supplied the logistical aid necessary for Turkey to guide the air-air missile which shot down the Russian Soukhoï 24. Finally, Qatar is still pretending that it has not been involved in the war since the abdication of Emir Hamad, two years ago. Nonetheless, proof is accumulating of its secret operations, all of which are directed not against Damascus, but against Moscow – thus, the Qatari Minister of Defence, in Ukraine at the end of September, bought a number of sophisticated Pechora-2D anti-air weapons which the jihadists could use to threaten Russian forces. More recently, he organised a false-flag operation against Russia. Still in Ukraine, at the end of October, he bought 2,000 OFAB 250-270 Russian fragmentation bombs and dispersed them on the 6th December over a camp of the Syrian Arab Army, in order to accuse the Russian Army of blundering. In this case too, despite the proof, there was no reaction from the UNO.

The patriotic forces The Russian forces have been bombing the jihadists since the 30th September. They plan to continue at least until the 6th January. Their action is aimed principally at destroying the bunkers built by these armed groups and the totality of their logistical networks. During this phase, there will be little evolution on the ground other than a withdrawal of jihadists towards Iraq and Turkey. The Syrian Arab Army and its allies are preparing a vast operation for the beginning of 2016. The objective is to provoke an uprising of the populations dominated by the jihadists, and to take almost all the cities in the country simultaneously – with the possible exception of Palmyra – so that the foreign mercenaries will fall back to the desert. Unlike Iraq, where 120,00 Sunnis and Ba’athists joined Daesh only to exact revenge for having been excluded from power by the United States in favour of the Chiites, rare are the Syrians who ever acclaimed the « Caliphate ». On the 21st and 22nd November, in the Mediterranean, the Russian army took part in excercises with its Syrian ally. As a result, the airports of Beirut (Lebanon) and Larnaca (Cyprus) were partially closed. On the 23rd and 24th November, the firing of Russian missiles on Daesh positions within Syria provoked the closing of the airports at Erbil and Sulaymaniyah (Iraq). It seems that in reality, the Russian army may have been testing the possible extension of its weapon that inhibits NATO communications and commands. In any case, on the 8th December, the submarine Rostov-on-Don fired on Daesh installations from the Mediterranean.

Russia, which disposes of the air base at Hmeymim (near Lattakia), also uses the air base of the Syrian Arab Army in Damascus, and is said to be building a new base at al-Shayrat (near Homs). Besides this, some high-ranking Russian officers have been carrying out scouting missions with a view to creating a fourth base in the North-East of Syria, in other words, close to both Turkey and Iraq. Finally, an Iranian submarine has arrived off the coast of Tartus. Hezbollah, who demonstrated their capacity to carry out commando operations during their liberation of the Sukhoï pilot held prisoner by militias organised by the Turkish army, are preparing the uprising of Shia populations, while the Syrian Arab Army – which is more than 70% Sunni – is concentrating on the Sunni populations. The Syrian government has concluded an agreement with the jihadists of Homs, who have finally accepted to either join up or leave. The area has been evacuated under the control of the United Nations, so that today, Damascus, Homs, Hama, Lattakia and Der ez-Zor are completely secure. Aleppo, Idlib and Al-Raqqah still need to be liberated. Contrary to peremptory affirmations by the western Press, Russia has no intention of leaving the north of the country to France, Israël and the United Kingdom so that they can create their pseudo-Kurdistan. The patriot plan forsees the liberation of all the inhabited areas of the country, including Rakka, which is the current « capital of the Caliphate ». This is the calm before the storm.

France is convinced that once the “Muslim Brotherhood” came to power in Turkey, headed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has become a major headache for Western politicians, says Le Figaro. According to its journalists, Turkey used to be an ally of the West, however, it is nothing of the kind anymore. Relations with Turkey took a U-turn once Erdogan started systematically “undermining” Turkey’s strategic relations with Israel which were stable since 1949. Anti-Turkish sentiments in the West were aggravated even further by the games Erdogan had been playing during the “Arab Spring”, when he first became a close friend of Bashar al-Assad, and then stabbed him in the back by allowing jihadists from around the world to swarm into Syria by crossing through Turkey’s territory. When the sworn enemies of Erdogan – local Kurds were dying in a heroic defense of the city of Kobani, Turkey did nothing to relieve their suffering, waiting for Western countries to save the population of the city instead. In this context it’s curious what the former NATO commander of Europe, Ret. General Wesley Clark, has been saying about Turkey : “Let’s be very clear: ISIL is not just a terrorist organization, it is a Sunni terrorist organization. It means it blocks and targets Shia, and that means it’s serving the interests of Turkey and Saudi Arabia even as it poses a threat to them All along there’s always been the idea that Turkey was supporting ISIS in some way… Someone’s buying that oil that ISIL is selling, it’s going through somewhere. It looks to me like it’s probably going through Turkey, but the Turks have never acknowledged it.” Here’s the reason why Russia was stabbed in the back by a NATO member country.

Once Russia began military operations against ISIL in Syria, Ankara’s relations with Washington started deteriorating rapidly. The situation we have on our hands now is further complicated by the fact that it was “defenseless” Turkomans who were shooting Russian pilots as they descended with parachutes, along with bringing down a Russian helicopter that was sent to rescue the pilots. All the recent NATO meetings have been stained by concerns that the Turkish agenda in Syria has little to do with the position of the West. Now that Erdogan’s arrogance has become apparent to everyone, even though he allowed the US Air Force to use a base in Turkey’s territory, he has also been launching attacks against Syrian Kurds that remain the most faithful allies of Washington in the fight against ISIL. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that a retired US Major General Paul Vallely accused the Turkish government of an attempt to create a new Ottoman Empire. According to him, due to all well-known facts of Ankara’s assistance to the Islamic State, Turkey should be expelled from NATO. The Washington Times is also questioning Turkey as a member state of NATO, while underlying that the attack on the Russian Su-24 makes this debate particularly relevant and timely. The newspaper notes that Ankara has been providing ISIL units with close air support when the latter was fighting Kurds in Syria and Iraq. Its journalists are convinced that Turkey has been turned into a theocratic Islamist dictatorship, where the freedom of the press is gradually been destroyed.

The conservative American Thinker goes even further by claiming it’s about time to replace Turkey with Russia in NATO, since the West has more in common with Russia than with the Islamist Turkey. To support this position, the magazine notes that when Turkey joined NATO back in February 1952, the advocates of this step argued that they need an Islamic state to prevent Soviet expansion in the region from happening. But it’s clear that this was a deal with the devil. After all, it was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 that broke the alliance apart, forcing Greece to withdraw its troop from under NATO command. In 2012, Syria shot down a Turkish fighter since it was deliberately violating its airspace. Later that same year, Turkey bombarded government facilities in Syria. For decades, Turkey has used NATO membership, in order to achieve its own objectives, which, as a rule, do not coincide with the interests of the alliance. In the early 2000s, Turkey chose to demonstrate its support of Islamism, which has always been a more serious threat to the West than the Soviet Union. Therefore, it seems that the American Thinker has expressed the opinion of a larger part of the western public, by urging NATO to get in an alliance with Russia against Islamism, including the “Islamic state of Turkey.”

The exposure of an American presidential candidate as being involved in state sponsorship of terrorism while serving as a top government official is a powerful incentive for the Obama administration to find a lurid diversion. Hence, the latest charges by the US government against Russia as perpetrating cyber-crime and of trying to subvert American democracy. This is just one more illustration of how irrational and unhinged the US government has become. Day by day, it seems, leads to more damning revelations of Washington’s complicity in illegal wars, covert subversion of foreign states, and systematic collusion with terrorist networks which have inflicted thousands of deaths on American citizens, among many more thousands of other innocent civilians around the world. In addition to exposure by sources like Wikileaks, much of revelation about US criminality and state-sponsored banditry has emerged from Russia’s principled military intervention in Syria. Russia’s intervention has not only helped salvage the Syrian nation from a foreign conspiracy of covert war for regime change. Russia’s intervention has also brought into clear focus the systematic links between Washington and its terrorist proxy army working on its behalf in Syria.

Washington’s mask of moral and legal superiority has been ripped from its face. And what the world is seeing is the vile ugliness beneath. Such is Washington’s ignominious fall from pretend-grace to its grim, odious reality that Vladimir Putin this week was empowered to speak from the moral high ground. In announcing Russia’s unilateral suspension of a 2002 accord with the US for the disposal of nuclear-weapon-grade plutonium, Putin went much, much further. He gave Washington a list of ultimatums that included the US ending its trumped-up sanctions against Russia, with financial compensation, as well as the scaling back of NATO forces from Russia’s border. In other words, the Russian leader was talking truth to American power in a way that megalomaniac Washington, with all its ridiculous delusions of «exceptionalism», has never ever heard before.

American pretensions of greatness are eroding like a castle built on sand. Washington’s criminal enterprises and specifically the complicity in terrorism for the supreme crime of foreign aggression are being glaringly exposed. And now with due contempt, Russia is putting manners on Washington. It must be excruciating the humiliation for the narcissistic American tyrant to be treated with the disrespect that it deserves and which is long overdue. Moreover, the humiliation is not just in the eyes of the world. The American people can see the true ugly nature of their rulers too. When a giant banner declaring «Putin a peacemaker» was unfurled off Manhattan bridge in New York City this weekend, the popular enthusiasm went viral. Washington is reeling from Putin’s righteous courage to call it out for what it is. The truth-telling is hard to take for this unipolar unicorn. Its deluded myth-making about its own virtues are being stripped bare. What’s going on here is a world-class, historic exposure of American power as a nefarious excrescence on humanity.

he reaction is understandable: foaming-at-the-mouth, desperate, hysterical and panicked. Accusing Russia of hacking into the American «democratic process» is a wild attempt to divert from the paramount issues: Washington’s exposed descent into a vile morass of its own making; the emperor is a criminal; the people know it; and a genuine world leader like Vladimir Putin has the temerity to lay it on the line to this has-been.