The Dissembler-in-Chief took to Twitter this past weekend to let the world know that “Something very big has just happened!” We now know that that something was a daring special forces raid that ended in the death of Osama bin Laden! . . . Or is that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Or maybe Abu Omar al-Baghdadi? No, no, it was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi! Honest! We took DNA evidence before we threw him in the sea! Find out about the unlikely story of Baghdadi’s umpteenth death in this timely edition of The Corbett Report podcast.
A project for Greater Albania – conspiracy or legitimate? According to a 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor report, 83% of Albanians in Albania supported the idea of a Greater Albania, with 81% and 53% of Albanians in Kosovo and North Macedonia respectively supporting such an ambition.
The ultimate goal? To have Kosovo and the Preševo Valley in Serbia, southern Montenegro, Epirus in Greece and western North Macedonia into a single Greater Albanian state. Although this may not be official policy of the Albanian Republic, it is ingrained into the Albanian mythos. The very idea of a Greater Albania has roots in the 1913 Treaty of London that left roughly 40% of the Albanian population outside the newly established Albanian country. This has been something that the U.S. could weaponize against Russian influence in the Balkans.
Despite the heroics of Albanian national figure and anti-Ottoman guerrilla leader Gjergj Kastrioti, more commonly known as Skënderbej, the Albanians became loyal Ottoman subjects and were used as colonists in more restive and disloyal areas of the empire, especially those inhabited by the Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks. They often became a majority over the initial inhabitants, like what happened in Kosovo and western North Macedonia.
Although the idea of a Greater Albania may seem like an exaggerated conspiracy, to the Serbian people this is anything but. The Serbian mythos finds itself in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, where despite their courage, Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović was martyred and his forces routed by the Ottoman invaders. Although the Serbs achieved sovereignty over Kosovo with the downfall of the Ottoman Empire, the region had already become an Albanian majority on Ottoman orders to weaken Serbian identity to the region.
Kosovo became an autonomous region of Serbia after the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia in the aftermath of World War Two and retained its Albanian-majority. The 1990’s proved this was always a weak point of Serbia. With the U.S. sponsoring the violent destruction of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s, the status of Kosovo was left unresolved, culminating in the terrorist-led war against the Yugoslav state (in which Serbia was the successor of) in 1999.
The terrorist ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with the backing of NATO and the Albanian Republic, defeated Yugoslav forces. The United Nations and NATO assumed control of the territory, which eventually declared independence in 2008. Since then the region has become a heroin ‘smugglers paradise,’ and a hub for human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms trafficking.
It is for this reason that in an interview on Saturday, the former Serbian Chief of General Staff, General Ljubisa Dikovic, discussed the project for a Greater Albania. Dikovic believes that the area of the Balkan Peninsula cannot be peaceful because of unresolved issues like Kosovo.
“There can easily be big problems if things get out of hand. I hope that there will be enough wisdom and intelligence and that everyone will do what we do, in terms of strengthening security, cooperation and trust. I am free to say that we are in the lead because I do not see on other sides showing desire to build peace. After all, the issue of ‘Greater Albania’ is a matter of the highest security risk. We can ask why this is happening now with Albania and [North] Macedonia? It might be waiting to create a ‘Greater Albania’,” Dikovic said.
His comments come as the economic situation in Kosovo continues to deteriorate and becomes even more reliant upon foreign aid and donations from the unilateral behaving U.S., their former Ottoman masters in Turkey that had gifted lands to them hundreds of years earlier, and Germany who effectively rules the European Union.
The former military man’s comments also come as Serbia leads Exercise “Slovenian Shield 2019” with Russia. Although some Slavic tribes broke off and headed south into the Balkans sometime at around 600AD, they maintained their Slavic kinship with the Russians and shared Christian Orthodox faith, ensuring Serbia has always had a pro-Russia view. Albanian expansionism has therefore become a natural ally of the U.S. to limit Russian influence in the Balkans.
However, this begs the question then why strong efforts for Albanian independence in Greece, Montenegro and North Macedonia has been weak in comparison to those in Serbia. Greece has been a long-time loyal NATO member, with the exception of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and therefore does not pose a threat to U.S. hegemony in the Balkans, protecting Greece from destabilization efforts via Albanian expansionism. Although Montenegro and North Macedonia also share Slavic kinship with the Serbs and Russians, as well as the Orthodox faith, they have proven to have Globalist ambitions, wanting to join NATO and the EU.
Serbia remains the only anti-EU/NATO state in the Balkans that is overwhelmingly pro-Russia. It is for this reason that Dikovic wants to renew compulsory military service, stating: “One should not gamble and think that there will be no conflict and risk. It is not only up to us, but we must have an answer to everything.”
Although the overwhelming majority of Albanians want a Greater Albania, it is unlikely to be achieved with Washington’s backing in Greece, Montenegro and North Macedonia as they do not pose a threat to U.S. hegemony in the Balkans, but rather serve it, while not encouraging Russian influence in the region. As Serbia is a pro-Russian island in a hostile region, it will continue to be targeted by Albanian expansionism with U.S. backing. Will this drive for expansionism violently spill over into the Preševo Valley? That remains to be seen.
Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.
The experts always know best…or do they? Join us today on The Corbett Report podcast as we scrutinize the media’s ready reliance on “experts” to say what the establishment wants to be said, and what this practice means for the rise of the scientific dictatorship.
This is the story of the Palestinian dream, Khaled Abu Joudeh, who decided to build a house for his seven children, in the Kafr Aqab neighbourhood; and under the pretext of its proximity to the Annexation and Expansion wall, the so-called Jerusalem Municipality decided to demolish it on June 12, 2019.
It’s not that the West’s central bankers are infallible – the similarity is that they cannot be held accountable. After all – who can call God to account for His decisions?
Like God, when things succeed it is They (central bankers) who deserve all the credit – when things fail it’s because we failed to properly follow Their policies.
And like God, they don’t need regulation – it is They who give the regulations, which must be accepted on faith alone and no matter how poor the results.
Central bankers are held partially accountable by only one sector – the markets of money. If markets go down based on any of their statements the bankers immediately reverse themselves, regardless of the situation. Countless times Bernake, Yellen, Trichet, Draghi and others have made statements purposely as clear as mud and then backtracked at the first lower lip quaver from the rich. Despite this exception, neoliberalism has proven to be the worship of bankers, as they rule and not markets – central bankers, of course, subvert and control the markets in many ways.
This idolatry is not new: for two centuries “capitalism with Western characteristics” has truly been “banker rule”. The most impressive victory of neoliberalism – their ability to extend their unholy domain despite provoking the Great Recession – proves this: Central bankers in the G7 nations and the Eurozone have all been given the power to set fiscal policy, to decide social policy priorities and to render domestic elections irrelevant. Western nations are no longer democracies (and they were all, every one, merely the types of democracies which pointedly refused to evolve after 1917) but bankocracies.
The Great Recession has exposed modern capitalism to be not just banker worship but also banker governance.
This is not some wild-eyed lefty nonsense – they are deciding public policy. If we called them a “Politburo” instead of a “central bank” the West would rally up a posse of Nazis and send them to invade.
This multipart series will – as many of my previous such series have also done – use an exceptionally important political book as a jumping off point, which also allows me to humbly impart my point of view gleaned from my work as a daily hack journalist in the heart of the Eurozone. This point of view is rarely heard, yet has virtues which academics, think-tankers, specialists and authors cannot possibly contain – even we hack journalists must have some virtues, after all?
The book is 2018’s Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive who saw the light and is now informing on the crimes of Western imperialism-capitalism.
Quite simply, the book’s primary virtue is chronological: Prins gives a historical account of central banker doings in key areas – Mexico, China, Brazil, Japan and Europe – ever since US banker crimes set off the Great Recession in 2007. Prins gives us all the key happenings in these regions (only China is the one which is undoubtedly not capitalist-imperialist), and that is not something you can find all in one place elsewhere.
And because central bankers run the West, it is like reading the daily itinerary of a dictator – “this is how things were decided”.
What Prins does a good job in reminding us is that this has all been done to keep US banks solvent. Every policy of the US Fed is about defending this goal, and not at all about the health of the global economy; the idea that the US would be militarily aggressive and culturally overbearing yet financially benevolent is preposterous and unsupported by evidence.
But the book is essentially conventional journalism – it is a recounting of historical decisions, facts and consequences. The only radical, non-Western change Prins really suggests is to move away from the dollar. The world “class” is used less than a handful of times. Her mentions of the negative effect of central bankers’ decisions on the average person are clearly sincere but both sparing and brief. Few people get into Wall Street out of their love for poetry, after all. The book is a former Wall Streeter watching other Wall Streeters who have taken a brief detour into public service (except in China) – it is banker-centric. And this is quite useful in the 21st century.
Prins clearly and correctly views bankers as the problem, but her solution is essentially limited to hoping that China’s central bankers will re-balance the status quo, and that their stewardship will allow developing countries to coordinate cooperatively instead of exploitatively. She does not believe that the entire system needs re-ordering upon new moral and political foundations (or even upon the very different moral foundations upon which Red China rests, and which account for their different policies).
But merely changing Western-centrism to Sino-centrism, with its obvious shift away from the US greenback (and even combined with her correct approval of cryptocurrency) cannot be enough. China is not insisting that Western capitalist-imperialist nations follow Beijing, but that they reform themselves – Iran does this too, but where Beijing uses a whisper Iran uses a megaphone amplified by a megaphone. Prins needed far more moral condemnation and to propose far more actual changes to the prevailing Western system, but – as I wrote – this is essentially a book of typical Western capitalist “objective” journalism, where moralising is supposed to be left entirely to the reader.
This series is advocacy journalism. What I have done is to take Prins’ useful chronological, globally-oriented journalism on modern economic history and analyse it from a perspective very different from her own: a pro-socialist and anti-imperialist one.
It’s a great book, but lacks a modern political viewpoint
Prins gets the main point across, though, and it’s there in her title: G7/G20 central bankers have colluded since 2008 to (greenback) paper over the causes of the Great Recession.
Her book makes it undoubtedly clear how monetary policy has been coordinated to inflate and appease the 1%-dominated “markets” at different points around the world at different times. She doesn’t use these correct political terms, but she shows that 21st century Western financial policies are fundamentally neo-imperialist: the world has slaved for the benefit of the former unipolar imperium since 2008 – even though said imperium provoked the financial crisis in 2008 – because of collusion orchestrated by the imperium to inflict policies on the global economy which were mainly to save their biggest, busted banks.
There you have it: three major points upon which the past 11 years of Western economic history have been resting. This also explains why the West’s financial foundation is even shakier than it was in 2008.
You don’t need a PhD in economics to immediately grasp the correctness of these allegations: Nobody in their right mind would buy the securities of the top US banks… except for unaccountable central bankers. Central banks West-wide routinely bought $200 billion of such assets per month. Taxpayers were not enriched by buying bad investments, of course, but the busted banks in the US, Germany and France were.
The collusion Prins refers to in her title is the way the Fed used their influence to force other G20 banks to adopt the same policies. These policies are: massive money printing via QE, ZIRP (Zero interest rate policies) to persuade banks to take the money, and relaxing collateral standards in order to make sure banks got that money no matter how unsound everybody knew they were.
The problem comes down to a simple difference between capitalist and socialist views of finance: governments with policies dominated by the former give taxpayer money to private banks with no rules or accountability, whereas governments with policies dominated by the latter give this money with massive oversight, regulations and directives in order to ensure that it is used as efficiently as humanly possible. The irony for socialist-inspired nations is that they are the ones who are painted as corrupt!
Governments influenced by the former can rely on compliant, privately-owned Mainstream Media to repeatedly insist that these loans are for the benefit of all even though there is no such evidence for such a claim, nor any logical reason to expect such an outcome. Governments influenced by the latter really don’t care what the Western MSM says – their own people don’t need to be propagandized in favor of capitalist lies, and thus they mainly try to keep a low profile as regards international media.
(Cuba spends almost nothing on their media; Iran only recently started PressTV (and this service is more notable for its “different” viewpoint – “Voice of the voiceless” is the official slogan – rather than its scope and size); Xinhua seems to spend most of its time on soft news and certainly doesn’t trumpet its own beliefs. Indeed, much can be said about that difference between Iran and China: the former is nearly screaming up to Heaven what it is thinking and doing, whereas inscrutability in China is not just a cliché but their government policy, which aims to avoid friction. But I digress….)
The ultimate problem with Prins is that – like all “I’m a capitalist but not THIS capitalism” – she is ultimately a historical/economic nihilist:
Prins is like so many fine commentators on the Anglophone fringe: accumulating, exposing and railing against the crimes of capitalism, and garnering many clicks and views, but remaining fundamentally supportive of the capitalist system. They don’t believe in the only philosophical and economic alternative humans have designed to capitalism – socialism – nor do such analysts ever thread the camel through needle and become the one capitalist who finally proposes a capitalist system which is not based on exploitation, competition, aggression, etc.
“There are ostensibly two main types of central bankers: the ones with more legacy power, and the ones with less but rising power, as is the case in China.”
Totally false: very real alternatives exist, and denying that – which Prins essentially does – only keeps people stuck in the political nihilism of TINA (There Is No Alternative).
The very real, very working alternative: the ‘terrorist’ central bankers of Iran & China
As I alluded to, China’s central bank is predicated on totally different foundations. And then you have Iran’s central bank: Iran’s central bank chief, Valiollah Saif, was declared a “terrorist” last month by Washington. Neither of these countries with socialist-inspired revolutions have banking leaders who are quotidian, interchangeable “central bankers minus legacy power”, as Prins describes.
Why was Iran’s Central Bank declared a “global terrorist”?
More flagrantly oppositional than Iran’s foreign policy are the tenets which guide Iran’s National Bank: it is totally state-owned, whereas the Fed is a consortium of private banks and set up like private corporations (something rarely understood). Iran’s National Bank is not “independent” from the government in the slightest. Iran’s central bank cannot meddle in – much less dictate – domestic policy, because that is why Iran has elections. Iran’s Central Bank, due to its fundamental independence, anti-capitalist and revolutionary nature proves that not all central bankers are the same.
Importantly, the independence of many Western central banks came after the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979: The Bank of Japan was made independent in 1998, the same year the ECB opened its doors to let greed rush in. Of course, their independence ensures that they follow policies which are for private concerns and not public ones.
Contrarily, China and Iran have central banks owned, literally, by the People. Former ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet often talked about how the ECB was a “bank of the people”, but it was classic continental hypocrisy – the Maastricht treaty, in the neoliberal & anti-socialist model in which the EU and Eurozone were created, explicitly made the ECB independent of any government. Does anyone possibly persist in believing, 10 years into (not after) the crisis, that the ECB has chosen policies which benefit the 99% and not the 1%?
There is widespread agreement in Iran that Islam tolerates capitalism – there are plenty of private banks – but Iran has agreed with socialism that the only solution is to have the biggest banks owned by the state. That is the only way “strings” can ever be applied to taxpayer money-created-loans in order to create a virtuous – and not exploitative – monetary cycle between government and business.
Such a solution is not proposed by a capitalist like Prins. She even tries to intimate that China’s Central Bank is almost equally duplicitous (though she could never get away with implying that China’s central bank was as exploitative), which is pure political nihilism and easily disproved.
The reality is that governments must issue paper money and private bankers act as the middleman to get this money to citizens… but only in capitalist countries. In socialist-inspired countries government workers serve as the middleman, and that is why they are succeeding in the 21st century. China and Vietnam are the two biggest boomers since 1980, while Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and a handful of others would be booming if they were not so terribly sanctioned.
Conclusion: There is no god but God
(That is perhaps the theological heart of Islam there, and repeated in every Salah daily prayer. Various stone idols with multiple limbs, the Christian trinity and Western central bankers all are not God because there is only one, single God and His name is God.)
Allow me to conclude with a few more indisputable truths, many of which have been painfully learned over the past decade:
Neoliberal central bankers are not as competent as even those much-maligned Iranian Revolutionary Shi’a mullahs. Per Prins:
“With rates already near zero, or negative in some countries, there is little-to-no room to maneuver in the event of a looming crisis. After the decade-long money-conjuring policy, one with no real end in sight, one thing has become clear: central bank craftsmanship has been ineffective, at best, and has demonstrated gross negligence for the lasting consequences at worst. The assumption that these central banking policies will anytime soon evoke real growth is as preposterous as it is wrong.”
Once these paper props are stopped, chaos is certain to result in the Western economy. This chaos was always merely postponed via QE’s “helicopter money” (money thrown from helicopters (to the rooftops of fancy banker soirees?) in the hope that it will do good); this chaos will be even worse because 10 years of failed policies logically means that the West’s economies are far weaker than they were 10 years ago.
Capitalism is guaranteed to go from boom to bust, but the 2008 bust was both exceptionally bad and exceptionally driven by the US. The policy response was also exceptionally bad and also exceptionally driven by the US, and is also culturally designed to make Western society’s labor and financial laws even more exceptionally like those of the US.
If Western central bankers wanted to do everything they could to empower their enemy – socialist China – only then can they consider themselves as having been a success. The past decade has seen China soar so high they have broken the glass ceiling of a unipolar world. In slower historical processes, China has floated its yuan since January 2016, no longer pegging it to the dollar, and they have gotten the yuan added to the IMF Special Drawing Rights basket. QE could have changed the nature of Western societies in a good way, as it did in China, per Prins: “In China, conjured money went to building real things, whether they were needed or not, whereas for the rest of the G7, it tended to go into less tangible and more speculative uses.” The idea that China is building “unneeded” things and ghost towns is pro-capitalist propaganda, and is debunked here, but the result is clear: QE has only made China stronger but the West weaker.
The West has been told that the problem is developing countries not pulling their weight – China (alleged currency manipulation, their “slowdown” from incredible growth to merely fantastic growth, their trade war, etc.), Greece and other weak economies – when both the primary cause of the Great Recession and the primary cause of the continued global slowdown has been due to following the leading ideologies of the capitalist-imperialist West.
What the MSM has refused to shout from the rooftops is that all these trillions of QE could have gone directly into the pocket of the average person and produced comparatively spectacular economic growth on the macro level and on the micro/individual level. Half could have gone to citizens and the other half to infrastructure growth, and the money-conjuring nations would have assured their people 50 years of success and modernity. Sadly, capitalism does not believe in controlling their banks or their 1%. Instead, as everyone reading this fringe series on a fringe website written by a fringe hack journalist likely already knows, it went into the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) and created massive bubbles worse than the ones a decade ago.
It comes down to a palpable feeling of social responsibility in government policy – there is none in hyper-competitive, “you have no right to a social safety net” Western neoliberal capitalism: contrarily, there is some of this rather holy spirit in Iranian Islamic Socialism, Socialism With Chinese Characteristics, Cuban-style socialism, etc.
It does not matter if this social responsibility comes from fear of God, or fear of incurring social shame or fear of el Norte, or whatever – results matter in social policy, because they mean life and death; because social policy always has and always will include very real judges dispensing very real (even if unfair) justice. Western distractions like “psychological motivation” are mainly overly-dwelled upon by existential Western urbanites who need to pay a psychologist to get them to finally accept that they are ragingly self-destructive, just like their economic principles and policies.
I will allow you to skip to the final page (of my series, not Prins’): At some point China will be asked to pick up the baton of QE collusion, because they are the only major economy which hasn’t done it yet… and they will not do it.
Why would they save the West? Not just because of their socialist ideals, nor their “Century of Humiliation”, but also because they have already been propping up the US monetarily (along with Japan) for quite some time.
But perhaps realizing that China won’t devalue its own economy via Western economic policies, the US has begun their fourth round of Quantitative easing. Their private media/propaganda outlets are ordering us “don’t call it QE4”, but it’s exactly the same as before: printing new money to give to private banks with no strings attached.
Unlike God, there will be a reckoning for QE one day and it will be worse than in 2008.
For now, the West remains righteous neoliberal believers, and heaven rain down furious destruction on any Yellow Vester who smashes the window of a Western bank!
An 10-part series may seem like a lot, but these articles are shorter than my usual output when it comes to analytical series (Part 1 is the longest, or nearly). This series is essentially a continuation, updating and expansion of a 7-part series I wrote in autumn 2017 which also covered the failed Western policy of QE. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!
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Part 1 – Western central bankers: they’re God, they trust – a 10-part series on the QE economy
Part 2 –How QE has radically changed the nature of the West’s financial system
Part 3 – QE paid for a foreign buying spree: developing countries hurt the most
Part 4 – Iran vs Mexico: ‘economic inflows’ versus ‘economic independence’
Part 5 – Understanding the West’s obsession with inflation
Part 6 – The new ‘beggar thy neighbor’: wars to devalue labor, not currencies
Part 7 – Blaming China for the Great Recession… to avoid emulating China’s (socialist-inspired) success
Part 8 – 1941, 1981, 2017 or today – Europe’s mess is still Germany’s fault
Part 9 – Don’t forget the real root of Brexit: fear of Eurozone economic contagion
Part 10 – Bankocracies: the real Western governance model
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China and the upcoming Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television.
Former US Presidential Candidate, Pat Buchanan has written, “the Middle East and world, have been awakened to the reality that, when Trump said he was ending everlasting commitments and bringing U.S. troops home from “endless wars,” he was not bluffing. The Saudis got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh’s oil production, did nothing … thus, the Saudis have begun negotiating with the Houthi rebels, with whom they have been at war in Yemen since 2015. And they are seeking talks with Iran.” In other words, the paradigm has begun to shift.
The Trump decisions indeed, did send shock waves to the world. And in their wake, Twitter in the US has been ‘white hot’ with indignation and outrage.
That is one side of the Syria US forces withdrawal ‘coin’ – the outrage. The other, is that realistically, the US had been trying to achieve too many irreconcilable aims: ousting President Assad; enforcing ‘domain denial’ to both Russia and Iran; plus attempting to install an unpopular minority population (the Kurds are a minority – even in NE Syria) in a blatant nation-building ‘state-let’ project to rival Damascus. With such diverse aims, and with Russia and Iran opposing these aims, the US was achieving none.
In the same vein of an overdue dose of realism, (and as Edward Gibbons highlighted in his celebrated Decline and Fall in respect to Imperial Rome), once certain qualities are lost, decline and fall is fore-ordained. Saudi Arabia has long lost those original attributes that brought Ibn Saud power, and without which, decline follows inevitably (which Gibbons persuasively argued, is exactly what happened earlier, to Rome).
Saudi Arabia today, has not the least energy to rouse itself, and life is flaccid. The Houthis though, by contrast, exactly embody these Gibbons-esque vital qualities and virtues. The outcome to today’s Saudi-Yemeni conflict was foreshadowed in the character of its contestants – irrespective of all other disparities. The Pentagon, to be fair, saw this from the outset, but allowed the momentum of old US strategic alliances and enmities to override this key insight.
So why such hue and clamour in Washington over an overdue recognition of realities? The indignation is not so surprising – for it is not just the contrived hand-wringing over the Kurds that lies behind such a fuss and bother; but rather, it is because Trump has taken a hammer to two (inter-connected) establishment shibboleths — and shattered them into pieces.
One strand here concerns Vietnam: it’s always there, lurking in the US backdrop. In that still formative US war experience, more than two decades of involvement and half a million American troops never managed to alter the basic weakness of a U.S. proxy that could never hold the line, without constant American support. It finally collapsed under the weight of a conventional North Vietnamese invasion, in April 1975. (Think Afghanistan today?).
Here is the point. Though a majority of historians subscribe to the basic contours of the above narrative, the vast majority of senior American military officers do not.
Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and others entered service, when military prestige was at a low ebb. They and their colleagues were taught that the Vietnam failure was due to political pusillanimity in Washington (or in the nation’s streets), or else due to a military high command that was too weak to assert its authority effectively.
But none of the military analysis done by this post-Vietnam war generation of officers ever addressed the basic question “about whether the Vietnam War was winnable, necessary, or advisable” from the first. (Think: Syria today).
No – in this view, the Vietnam war could, and should, have been won – if only the right approach had been pursued. Thus, the ‘forever war’ notion was born: It was designed, empirically to ‘prove’ the two major military theses of the war lacunae (no ‘Clausewitz’ or COIN): That is, if both these strategies had been fully implemented in Vietnam, instead of being neglected, they would assuredly have led to an American ‘win’. (Mattis echoed this thinking when he introduced 2018 Trump’s Defense and Nuclear Reviews: America, Mattis insisted, simply must “start winning” again).
This revisionist version of Vietnam war history began in 1986 with an article by David Petraeus, in the military journal Parameters, in which he argued that the US army was unprepared to fight low intensity conflicts (such as Vietnam); and that “what the country needed wasn’t fewer Vietnams; but better-fought ones”. The definitive COIN doctrine, Field Service Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency Operations, however, was overseen by David Petraeus, working with another officer, Lt General James Mattis (the former US Defense Secretary), who has this week been howling at Trump about the US withdrawal from Syria (the issue – prospective withdrawal – over which he resigned as then Defense Secretary).
Thus, Trump’s original team of ‘my generals’ were precisely those who had spent three administrations expanding COIN-influenced missions to approximately 70% of the world’s nations. In an interview in 2017, Petraeus described the Afghan conflict as “generational”. In short, Trump’s original most senior military advisers didn’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars would ever end. Essentially, the Trump Administration’s National Strategy Statement put an ‘America First’ gloss on Bush’s 2002 NSS: that no rival would, or should, be permitted to challenge US political or financial primacy.
But this basic contradiction simply could not be sustained. Forever Wars were precisely those which Trump had campaigned as Candidate to end. And now, with Presidential elections again at hand, he has ditched the whole revisionist Vietnam meme.
Trump then, should be able to weather the criticism from this quarter quite easily. The US public is fed up with ‘forever wars’. And in any event, a new generation at the Pentagon now has shifted from COIN to ‘Great Power Competition’, and is intent on pivoting away from the Middle East, to China.
The other Shibboleth, still deeply embedded in certain strains of US thinking, but which now lies shattered by Trump too, is of a different order – and is far more perilous: It is the ‘Wolfowitz doctrine’, encapsulated in this 1991 exchange the then US Undersecretary for Defense had with General Wesley Clark. And for this act of iconoclasm, Trump can expect severe push-back.
Clark: “Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.”
Wolfowitz: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region — in the Middle East — and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes — Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower comes on, to challenge us.”
Wolfowitz’s thinking was then taken up more explicitly by David Wurmser in his 1996 document,Coping with Crumbling States (following on, from his contribution to the infamous Clean Break policy strategy paper written by Richard Pearle for Bibi Netanyahu earlier in the same year). The aim of both these seminal documents was to directly counter American ‘isolationist’ thinking.
Daniel Sanchez has noted: “Wurmser characterized regime change in Iraq and Syria (both ruled by Baathist regimes) as “expediting the chaotic collapse” of secular-Arab nationalism in general, and Baathism in particular. He [asserted that] “the phenomenon of Baathism,” was, from the very beginning, “an agent of foreign, namely Soviet policy”… [and therefore advised] the West to put this anachronistic adversary ‘out of its misery’ – and to press America’s Cold War victory on toward its final culmination”.
This tract, Coping with Crumbling States, which together with Clean Break was to have a major impact on Washington’s thinking during the GW Bush Administration (in which David Wurmser would serve). What aroused the deep-seated neo-con ire in respect to the secular-Arab nationalist states was not just that they were, in the neo-con view, crumbling relics of the ‘evil’ USSR, but that from 1953 onwards, Russia sided with these secular-nationalist states in all their conflicts regarding Israel. This was something the neo-cons could neither tolerate,nor forgive. Both Clean Break and the 1997 Project for the New American Century (PNAC) were exclusively premised on the wider US policy aim of securing Israel.
The point here is that whilst Wurmser stressed that demolishing Baathism must be the foremost priority in the region, he added: “Secular-Arab nationalism should be given no quarter – not even – he added, for the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism”.
There was, therefore, no other option: The point is that – on this premise – the US had no other choice but to ally with the Kings, Emirs and Rulers of the Middle East. It still is.
And in return, these States benefitted from the US security umbrella — until, that is, when Saudi Arabia lost half of its oil processing capacity with the strike on Aramco, and “Trump did nothing” (in Pat Buchanan’s words). The ‘umbrella’ guarantee expired.
It is in this context – the withdrawal of US security commitment – that Trump is at real political risk. Israel is in a panic. Israeli correspondents see these linked events as Trump’s death blow to Israel, with the “strategic balance of power shifting right before Israel’s eyes”. Israel is left alone: (Smadar Peri writing in Yediot Ahoronot (in Hebrew) : “Trump abandons allies without blinking, and Israel is liable to be next”. As Ben Caspit notes, “The shift in the region is forcing Israel to change its plans, rethink its concepts and prepare for scenarios that were shelved long ago. One of them is the possibility of fighting a war on more than one front in the very near future”.
“Israel has seriously mismanaged its conflict with Iran. For over a decade, Israel has relentlessly threatened and sought to intimidate Iran. Iran’s response has been effective: slowly but surely Iran encircled the Jewish state. Israel doesn’t share a border with Iran but Iran is present on so many of Israel’s borders … The recent attack on Saudi oil facilities achieved an astonishing precision of less than one meter, despite the fact that it was launched from 650 miles away, and delivered with it a clear message to Israel. Iran can attack any target in Israel from Western Iraq with precision, and without being detected. It proved that Iranian technology is decades ahead of anything offered by Israel, America or the west.
It now seems totally unrealistic to expect America to act militarily against Iran on behalf of Israel. Trump’s always unpredictable actions have convinced the Israeli defense establishment that the country has been left alone to deal with the Iranian threat. The American administration is only willing to act against Iran through sanctions, and by now the Israelis have grasped that sanctions can easily boomerang. They nourish technological and strategic independence … As things stand, Israel used the billions of dollars it squeezed from American taxpayers to build an obsolete anti-missile system that at best, might be effective against 1940 era German V2 missiles. Once again Israel prepared for the wrong war”.
Here is the ‘rub’ for Trump: It is not just that Israel’s overwhelming influence in the US Congress and amongst the élites puts him in a risky political corner. It does do that, of course. But a bigger danger is that culturally, Israel cannot change course. Netanyahu’s tardy response to Aramco was that Israel must immediately ‘spend billions on defence’.
Rationally, one might expect Israel, in these new circumstances, to rethink its strategy in respect to Iran. But can it? Is it not too culturally committed to Iran as the cosmic evil? There is little difference here between Likud and the Blue and White coalition of Gantz. Will a panicked Israel rather try somehow to recover its earlier regional military ‘edge’? Will Trump be able to maintain America’s distance, if Israel does try?
Trump probably sees himself as having taken a courageous decision (and it was that — a huge break with conventional thinking) to free America from “endless wars”. But he will need to watch his back from the repercussions arising from the Israeli realisation notes Ben Caspit, “after three years of being convinced that it was on the winning side, Israel is beginning to realise that it is on the one that’s losing; or at least [the side that] has been abandoned”. A cornered, and panicked Israel is a dangerous Israel.
Even before Rep. Tulsi Gabbard threatened to boycott the October 15th Dem debate as the DNC usurps the role of voters in the Democratic primacy 2020 election and with an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on the table, the Swamp was stirred and its slimy muck may be about to come to the surface as never before.
If so, those revelations are long overdue.
It is no secret to the observant that since the 2016 election, the Democratic Party has been in a state of near-collapse, the victim of its own hubris, having lost their moral compass with unsubstantiated Russisgate allegations; those accusations continue as a futile exercise of domestic regime change.
Today’s Dems are less than a bona fide opposition party offering zero policy solutions, unrecognizable from past glories and not the same political party many of us signed up for many years ago. Instead, the American public is witnessing a frenzied, unscrupulous strategy.
Desperate in the denial of its demise, confronting its own shadow of corruption as the Dems have morphed into a branch of the CIA – not unlike origins of the East German Stasi government.
It should not be necessary to say but in today’s hyper volatile political climate it is: No American should be labelled as anything other than a loyal American to be deeply disturbed by the Democrat/CIA collusion that is currently operating an unprecedented Kangaroo Court in secret, behind closed doors; thus posing an ominous provocation to what remains of our Constitutional Republic.
As any politically savvy, independent thinking American might grasp, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and their entire coterie of sycophants always knew that Russiagate was a crock of lies.
They lied to their willing Democratic rank n file, they lied to American public and they continue to lie about their bogus Impeachment campaign.
It may be that whistleblower Ed Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance state was the first inkling for many Americans that there is a Big Problem with an out-of-control intelligence community until Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that Trump was being ‘really dumb” in daring to question Intel’s faulty conclusion that Russia hacked the 2016 election.
“Let me tell you. You take on the intelligence community = they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Inescapably, Schumer was suggesting that the Congress has no oversight, that there is no accountability and that the US has lost its democratic roots when a newly elected President does not have the authority to question or publicly disagree with any of the Intel agencies.
Since the 2016 election, there has been a steady drumbeat of the US Intel’s unabashed efforts to undermine and otherwise prevent a newly elected President from governing – which sounds like a clear case of insubordination or some might call it treasonous.
The Intel antipathy does not appear to be rooted in cuts to a favorite social services program but rather protecting a power, financial and influence agenda that goes far deeper and more profound than most Americans care to contemplate.
Among a plethora of egregious corporate media reactions, no doubt stirred by their Intel masters, was to a July, 2018 summit meeting between Russian President Putin and Trump in Helsinki emblematic of illegitimate censures from Intel veterans and its cronies:
Not one praised Trump for pursuing peace with Russia.
And yet, fellow Americans, it is curious to consider that there was no outrage after the 911 attacks in 2001 from any member of Congress, President Bush or the Corporate Media that the US intelligence community had utterly failed in its mission to keep the American public safe.
There was no reckoning, not one person in authority was held accountable, not one person who had the responsibility to ‘know’ was fired from any of the Intel agencies. Why is that?
As a result of the corrupt foundation of the Russiagate allegations, Attorney General Bob Barr and Special Investigator John Durham appear hot on the trail with law enforcement in Italy as they have apparently scared the bejesus out of what little common sense remains among the Democratic hierarchy as if Barr/Durham might be headed for Obama’s Oval Office.
Barr’s earlier comment before the Senate that “spying did occur’ and that ‘it’s a big deal’ when an incumbent administration (ie the Obama Administration) authorizes a counter-Intelligence operation on an opposing candidate (ie Donald Trump) has the Dems in panic-stricken overdrive – and that is what is driving the current Impeachment Inquiry.
With the stark realization that none of the DNC’s favored top tier candidates has the mojo to go the distance, the Democrats have now focused on a July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump allegedly ‘pressured’ Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden’s relationship with Burisma, the country’s largest natural gas provider.
At issue is any hanky panky involving Burisma payments to Rosemont Seneca Partners, an equity firm owned by Joe’s errant son, Hunter, who served on Burisma’s Board for a modest $50,000 a month.
Zelenskyy, who defeated the US-endorsed incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a landslide victory, speaks Russian, was elected to clean up corruption and end the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The war in the Donbass began as a result of the US State Department’s role in the overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Trump’s first priority on July 25th was Crowd Strike, a cybersecurity firm with links to the HRC campaign which was hired by the DNC to investigate Russian hacking of its server.
The Dems have reason to be concerned since it is worth contemplating why the FBI did not legally mandate that the DNC turn its server over to them for an official Federal forensic inspection.
One can only speculate…those chickens may be coming home to roost.
Days after an anonymous whistleblower (not to be confused with a real whistleblower like Edward Snowden) later identified as a CIA analyst with a professional history linked to Joe Biden, publicly released a Complaint against Trump.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the initiation of an ambiguous Impeachment Inquiry campaign with little specificity about the process. The Complaint is suspect since it reads more like a professionally prepared Affidavit and the Dems consider Pelosi’s statement as sufficient to initiate a formal process that fails to follow the time-honored path of a full House vote predicating a legitimate impeachment inquiry on to the Judiciary Committee.
Of special interest is how the process to date is playing out with the House Intelligence Committee in a key role conducting what amounts to clandestine meetings, taking depositions and witness statements behind closed doors with a still secret unidentified whistleblower’s identity and voice obscured from Republican members of the Intel Committee and a witness testifying without being formally sworn in – all too eerily similar to East Germany.
The pretense of shielding the thinly veiled CIA operative as a whistleblower from public exposure can only be seen as an overly-dramatic transparent performance as the Dems have never exhibited any concern about protecting real whistleblowers like Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling and others who were left to fend for themselves as the Obama Administration prosecuted more true, authentic whistleblowers than any other administration since the Espionage Act of 1917.
As the paradigm shift takes its toll on the prevailing framework of reality and our decayed political institutions, (the FBI and DOJ come to mind as the Inspector General’s report is due at week’s end), how much longer does the Democratic Party, which no longer serves a useful public purpose, deserve to exist?
Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter.
Clean power, green jobs, no emissions – the wind industry is used to being one of the good guys. But to Åsa Larsson-Blind, president of the Sami Council, it’s just the latest – and potentially most deadly – industrial threat to a fragile, ancient culture focused around reindeer herding up towards the Arctic Circle.
“The wind industry often says it wants to have a dialogue,” Larsson-Blind told Recharge. “But I believe it thinks it is easier to accommodate than it actually is. I think it has a naïve view that it is just putting up some windmills, not taking away [reindeer] pastures.”
The most immediate spark for Larsson-Blind’s anger is the Norwegian state’s rejection of a non-binding request from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) to order a halt to work on the Storheia wind farm in central Norway, ahead of further investigation of the impact on traditional reindeer husbandry at the site.
The 288MW Storheia is the second and largest project in the Fosen complex, the 1GW development led by Norwegian utility Statkraft. According to the Sami Council, like other wind farms already operating across the Nordic states and – far worse – the many more in the pipeline, it will have a drastic effect on the reindeer grazing lands that have underpinned the livelihoods and culture of the indigenous Sami people for thousands of years.
Storheia’s 80, V117 Vestas turbines are due to start installation from April. The Sami Council hoped its complaint to the UN CERD, followed by the organisation’s mid-December request for a pause to work, would at least prompt the Norway to allow time for more studies of the project’s impact.
But Larsson-Blind is resigned to a decision that she claimed reflects the odds stacked against the Sami as they attempt to defend the herders’ way of life against a regional wind boom. “We know there are huge economic interests that are at stake.”
A favourable regulatory regime, excellent wind conditions and demand from the region’s flourishing data centre sector means Nordic wind power is moving north and its projects getting larger. The Sami people – numbering about 100,000, and whose traditional lands stretch across Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia – fear the consequences. With a potential 4GW total scope, Markbygden in Sweden is another Nordic mega-project with implications for the Sami.
Wind is the most recent of a clutch of industries to impinge on lands traditionally used for reindeer husbandry – mining and logging are others – but the scale of the projects planned in the Nordics could be “the last straw”, said Anna Skarin, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who has investigated the impact of the industry on reindeer grazing lands.
Skarin – who says her work on the issue is non-partisan and funded by the Swedish Energy Agency – has found reindeer avoidance of turbines even on small projects of eight or 10 machines, with an impact observed up to 5km away. The reindeer have a visual aversion to the turbines and, it is believed – Skarin is about to start work to establish for sure – also dislike their noise. On top of that comes disruption from the associated construction work and infrastructure needed to support the projects.
At the level of build-out planned, Skarin reckons the ability to implement mitigation measures could be stretched to breaking point. “There are thousands of turbines in the planning system,” Skarin told Recharge. “I think if everything is built, it will really be a big impact on the ecosystem. We’ve already seen it beginning.”
The number affected is hard to pin down, but Skarin estimates there are 1,000 reindeer herders in Sweden alone, most of them Sami.
Larsson-Blind claims the threat from the wind industry is one of “life or death” for the Sami culture. “When a big wind farm comes like Fosen, it will be impossible to carry on the traditional lifestyle [embodied by reindeer herding].
“The traditional way of life is considered one of the big denominators of Sami culture. If you can’t continue that way of life and pass on the culture, you have no culture.”
Her most scathing criticism is reserved for the Norwegian state, which she believes is providing legal cover for wind power and other industries in a manner that shows “double standards” in a nation that likes to see itself as a paragon of human rights.
In its rejection of the CERD request for a pause at Fosen, Norway’s energy ministry found “no basis” for complying, noting that the project has been “thoroughly tested in several rounds in the legal system” during which racial discrimination against the Sami did not arise as an issue.
Larsson-Blind claims that legal system simply isn’t set up to adequately deal with the issue, leaving the Sami with no choice but to turn to international agencies like CERD. “The hard thing is that we do not have enough support from legislation or the government in securing Sami rights to land.” And she appealed to the wind industry to take an independent view of its impact.
“Every company needs to make sure they are taking Sami rights to land into consideration. They can’t just trust the state processes, because they are not perfect.”
For its part, the Nordic wind sector is at pains to emphasise its efforts to take account of the Sami when developing projects – and to scrupulously abide by the legal process operating in each jurisdiction.
Asked by Recharge whether a request from a UN agency should of itself be enough to prompt a halt in work at Fosen, a spokesman for Statkraft said: “If you don’t look at the facts of the case, I can see it would be easy to jump to that conclusion.”
But a “long and thorough licensing process” had consulted all affected parties, “and we know the effect on reindeer herding was given extensive attention, and thoroughly assessed during the appeals processes”.
The Statkraft spokesman pointed to mitigation measures for reindeer populations contained in the license – and that a compensation agreement had been struck with the local herders.
“We do acknowledge that the reindeer herders will be negatively affected by the wind farm. But the negative effects will be mitigated and compensated fully.”
“We are committed to act in a sustainable, ethical, socially responsible manner in everything we do,” said the Statkraft official.
Charlotte Unger, head of industry association Svensk Vindenergi, is also keen to stress the industry’s “dialogue” with the Sami.
“Since they depend on nature with their reindeers, and of course a stable environment, trying to hinder climate change is of course very important also for the Sami people. I hope we could find solutions that are good for [the industry], the Sami people, and regarding climate change,” Unger told Recharge.
With the Sami on the frontline of climate change around the Arctic Circle, this is an argument Larsson-Blind hears often – but it cuts little ice with her.
“Do children really have to grow up without their language, their culture, in the name of fighting climate change?”
This article is partially written in response to The Saker’s analysis on the IRGC’s arrest of Russian journalist Iulia Iuzik. In his analysis, the Saker theorizes that the Ruasian journalist’s arrest could be due to one of two possible reasons:
– The Israeli visa stamp on her passport really infuriated somebody at the IRGC and that person acted impulsively
– This is the result of internal infighting in Iran
It would most likely be fair to say that it could be a combination of both. I know for a fact that Iranians view Russia very differently depending on who you’re asking. Even among the IRGC there are different factions that either view Moscow as a friendly country, who can help achieve Iran’s goals of kicking Washington out of West Asia, or they view Russia with suspicion and bitter memories of past grievances.
To understand these stances one must delve deep into the history of these countries and their relations over the past three centuries. Iran and Russia have a long history of animosity and differences, stretching back to the Caspian expeditions of the Rus. The most important conflicts were the ones between the Qajar dynasty and the Romanovs of Russia. Already during the southwards expansions of Pyotr I were Iran and Russia known to have sour relations. Pyotr’s forces quickly captured large parts of northern Iran and the entire Caucasus region as the crumbling Safavid Empire was quickly subdued. All the territory lost was later recaptured by Nader Shah, founder of the Afsharid Dynasty, one of the successor states to the fallen Safavid Empire. Following the advent of the Qajar dynasty, Western powers and Russia had begun a colonial race as the Qajar government was unable to confront these threats after the death of its founder Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar, who stabilized the nation and re-established Iranian suzerainty in the Caucasus. While the Portuguese, British, and Dutch competed for the south and southeast of Persia in the Persian Gulf, the Russian Empire largely was left unchallenged in the north as it plunged southward to establish dominance in Persia’s northern territories.
Iranians, even today bitterly remember the treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay. A weakened and bankrupted Qajar royal court, under Fath Ali Shah, was forced to sign the notorious Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 following the outcome of the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813), forcing Iran into ceding what is modern-day Dagestan, Georgia, and large parts of Azerbaijan. The Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) was the outcome of the Russo-Persian War (1826-1828), which resulted in the loss of modern-day Armenia and the remainder of Azerbaijan, and granted Russia several highly beneficial capitulatory rights, after efforts and initial success by Abbas Mirza failed to ultimately secure Iran’s northern front. By these two treaties, Iran lost swaths of its integral territories that had made part of Iran for centuries. The area to the north of the Aras River, the land of fire, Azarpadegan, a land so closely connected to Iranian history was now forever lost.
Anti-Russian sentiment was so high in Iran during that time that uprisings in numerous cities were formed. With the Russian Empire advancing south in the course of two wars against Iran, and the subsequent signing of the aforementioned treaties, Iran lost its crucial foothold in central Asia and the Caucasus. By the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire’s dominance became so obvious, that Tabriz, Qazvin, and a host of other cities were occupied by Russia, and the central government in Tehran was left with no power to even select its own ministers without the approval of the Anglo-Russian consulates. These, and a series of climaxing events such as the Russian shelling of Mashad’s Goharshad Mosque in 1911, and the shelling of the Iranian National Assembly by the Russian Colonel V. Liakhov, led to a surge in widespread anti-Russian sentiments across the nation.
By the time of the Russian revolution in 1917, with the formation of the Soviet Union, Russian involvement continued with the establishment of the short-lived Persian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1920, supported by Azeri and Caucasian Bolshevik leaders. After the fall of this republic, in late 1921, political and economic relations were renewed. During the 1920s, trade between the Soviet Union and Iran reached important levels. In 1921, Britain and the new Bolshevik government entered into an agreement that reversed the division of Iran made in 1907. The Bolsheviks returned all the territory back to Iran, and Iran once more had secured navigation rights on the Caspian Sea. This agreement to evacuate from Iran was made in the Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship (1921), but the regaining of Iranian territory did not protect the Qajar Dynasty from a sudden coup d’état led by Colonel Reza Pahlavi.
The treaty of friendship wouldn’t last during Reza Shah Pahlavi as the Second World War started and the Soviet Union together with the United Kingdom launched an undeclared joint invasion of Iran, ignoring its plea of neutrality. After the end of the war, the Soviets supported two newly formed [entities] in Iran, the Azerbaijan People’s Government and the Republic of Mahabad, but both collapsed in the Iran crisis of 1946. This postwar confrontation brought the United States fully into Iran’s political arena and, with Cold War starting, the US quickly moved to convert Iran into an anti-communist ally.
After the fall of the monarchy, the Soviet Union was the first state to recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran, in February 1979. However, during the Iran–Iraq War, the Soviets supplied Saddam Hussein with large amounts of conventional arms. After the war, especially with the fall of the USSR, Tehran–Moscow relations experienced a sudden increase in diplomatic and commercial relations, and Iran soon even began purchasing weapons from Russia.
Yet despite the improved relations, Moscow partook in the UN sanctions on Iran with regards to Tehran’s Nuclear program. As late as 2010 Moscow voted for UNSC resolution 1929, Banned Iran from participating in any activities related to ballistic missiles, tightened the arms embargo, travel bans on individuals involved with the program, froze the funds and assets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, and recommended that states inspect Iranian cargo, prohibit the servicing of Iranian vessels involved in prohibited activities, prevent the provision of financial services used for sensitive nuclear activities, closely watch Iranian individuals and entities when dealing with them, prohibit the opening of Iranian banks on their territory and prevent Iranian banks from entering into relationship with their banks if it might contribute to the nuclear program, and prevent financial institutions operating in their territory from opening offices and accounts in Iran.
This long history of animosity has only recently seen major improvements as Moscow and Tehran find themselves in similar situations in the face of Washington’s aggressive policies. After Moscow’s entry into the Syrian war, Tehran-Moscow relations deepened considerably as both countries coordinated and cooperated on the battlefield, with the shared goal of saving Syria.
Despite this, unfavorable views on Russia remain among some factions of the IRGC and the Iranian population on general. The faction among the IRGC mostly recognized as anti-Russian consists of mainly veterans from the war with Iraq. They have not forgotten the Soviet weapons used against them by Saddam’s forces.
This faction can be found among the Iranian Principalists (known as hardliners in the West), who stand in opposition to the Reformist Rouhani government. It was this faction that voiced protests against Moscow’s use of Iran’s Hamedan airbase, in 2017, as part of Moscow’s anti-ISIS operation in Syria. They argued that Moscow’s use of the airbase was in violation of Iran’s constitution which states that no foreign bases are allowed in Iran. The government countered with the argument that Moscow was only temporarily using the airbase, due to its shorter distance to Syria, but that control over the airbase remained in Iranian hands. It is believed that this faction among the IRGC is linked to Ahmadinejad’s political faction among the Principalist bloc. It would make sense since Ahmadinejad’s presidency coincided with a worsening in Tehran-Moscow relations as it was during his presidency that Iran was denied the purchase of the S-300 system by Moscow.
They believe that Russia cannot be trusted, and that Moscow is pursuing its own agenda in Syria. Moscow stands an Israeli ally who will side with the Zionists if and when the war with the Israeli regime breaks out. Moscow’s growing influence in the Syrian war is something that rather worries them instead of relieving them, as many of them believe that the Syrian war would eventually have been won without Russian interference, a view opposed by powerful figures such as Khamenei and the famous General Qassem Soleimani who favor a more pragmatic approach towards Moscow.
Due to the improved relations after 2015, Moscow and Tehran’s relations have expanded substantially to cover fields other than Syria. Moscow played an instrumental role in the negotiations of the JCPOA. Moscow has also stood by Iran on many occasions against US aggression. Moscow has grown especially popular among other IRGC factions, such as the Quds forces, led by General Qassem Soleimani. They have first-hand experience cooperating with Moscow in Syria. In general, many Iranians have also gained a favorable view of Russia. According to a December 2018 survey by IranPoll, 63.8% of Iranians have a favorable view of Russia, with 34.5% expressing an unfavorable view.
With regards to this, one can imagine that in the case of the Russian journalist, a sensitive thing such as an Israeli visa stamp on a passport can immediately give cause for suspicion of a Russian-Israeli plot among some circles in the IRGC. The Tehran-Moscow alliance is a fragile and a new one, and for the past few years, the nature of the relations between these two countries has only given us a glimpse of what the future of West Asia holds, only time will tell if the sceptics will be vindicated.
A few weeks ago I had a terrifying nightmare, so gruesome was it that I awoke screaming and had to run to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet. In this dark horror show, I was carving a pumpkin for Halloween. The cap came off easily and I disemboweled the slimy interior quickly, but as I did, I felt a strange sensation on my hand, as if a tongue were biting it. When I was finishing carving the face, however, the trouble really started. The pumpkin head came alive as the eyes and mouth moved and then it started speaking in a voice that was familiar but one I couldn’t place. Blond hair started sprouting from its head as it started shrieking and bouncing on the table in an hysterical manner. I jumped back in fear and trembling as it started cackling, “I running, I running.” Blood ran from between the carved teeth and the blue eyes pulsated with the mania of a serial killer in a horror movie.
I awoke with a scream when I realized it was Hillary Clinton.
So hideous was this night terror that I kept it to myself. But a week later when the next Democratic pseudo-debate was being promoted, I said to my wife that something told me that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee and the debates were a sideshow. She said she thought that would never happen and that Clinton was now hated and done for. I disagreed without recounting my nightmare because to describe it at that point would have induced more retching at the thought of the night monster.
Then this past week during the Democratic debate, the courageous Tulsi Gabbard put the lie to the murderous militarism of U.S. foreign policy and its regime change operations with its use of American supported terrorists in Syria and throughout the world. She calmly and eloquently denounced the militarist positions of the other candidates standing beside her, as they listened disquieted and disturbed to a patriotic American speaking truth that they dare not even think, so bought and sold are they.
She was a woman alone among a cast of sycophants denouncing the murderous policies carried out by presidents Democratic and Republican and foisted on the American people through a vast network of propaganda, appealing to their worst instincts. It was a stunning few minutes, for it is so rare, almost unheard of, for a politician to tell Americans the brutal truth about their government.
To many it was a sign of hope, but to the evil forces that run this country, Rep. Gabbard had gone too far and the knives came out in force, this time led by the pumpkin-headed Hillary Clinton and her accomplices at The New York Times and The Washington Post, who have consistently trashed Tulsi Gabbard in an effort to destroy her candidacy.
I felt my dream was prophetic when Clinton, in her slimy manner, attacked Tulsi Gabbard, without naming her, by saying,
I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve [The Russians] got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.
Well, I ain’t making any prediction either; I’m leaving that up to my nightmare to do my talking.
It tells me that Hillary-O-Lantern, spitting blood, is running and gunning again.
She’s the favorite of the CIA and the military industrial complex and all those who profit from war and live off the deaths of victims everywhere. They have bunches of sites and bots and fake news conspirators and all sorts of ways of supporting her, which they have been doing for many years, straight through their constructed Russia-gate and Ukraine-gate conspiracies and her barbaric support for wars everywhere, including the destruction of Libya and her joyful response to the fiendish death of Muammar Gaddafi, among so may atrocities.
Tulsi, never cowered, said it straight and true in response:
Great, Thank you. You the Queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
She later said, “I stand against everything she represents.”
Halloween is the time for masks and dissembling. Hillary Clinton is a figure straight out of a grotesque Halloween party, as are her clones in the Democratic party. Tulsi Gabbard was not invited to their party but came anyway, and came to tell the truth about the masquerade.
She has torn off Clinton’s mask and asks the American people to see the true face of Clinton and all her minions, who represent the triumph of war and death, and the sick play we have been living through, an endless war on terror justified by endless lies.
Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set:
Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.
Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States.
Tulsi Gabbard has told the truth.
Like me, I am sure you don’t want your nightmares to become reality. Let’s live in the truth.
International Humanitarian Law prohibits the attack, destruction, or rendering useless of objects indispensable to civilian survival.
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | June 10, 2026
… During the first Gulf War, the United States “deliberately bombed Iraq’s water system,” Thomas J. Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, wrote in September, 2001. The Bush administration, “with malice aforethought,” “destroyed, removed, or rendered useless” Iraq’s ‘drinking water installations and supplies’… They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA’s own words, ‘fully degrade’ Iraq’s water sources.”
Nagy found declassified documents at the website of the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses that detailed the effort to degrade Iraq’s water supply and commit a serious violation of humanitarian law. The documents included “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerability,” “Disease Information,” “Disease Outbreaks in Iraq,” “Medical Problems in Iraq,” “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” “Health Conditions in Iraq,” and “Iraq: Assessment of Current Health Threats and Capabilities.”
Then Representative Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia (subsequently removed from Congress), referred to the Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities document, and said, “Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations.” … Read full article
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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I awoke with a scream when I realized it was Hillary Clinton.
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