SARS2 Fingerprint Found In 2018 Proposal
Synthetic assembly method posited in 2022 paper found in DEFUSE draft
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | JANUARY 29, 2024
There’s a great scene in the 1986 film Manhunter in which the protagonist—an FBI behavioral sciences profiler named Will Graham—correctly postulates that the fingerprints of a remarkably twisted serial killer will be found on the corneas of his female victim. The Bureau and the guys in the latent print lab are skeptical and think that Will is himself being a weirdo, and are then astonished to discover that he is right.
To put Will Graham’s character in Jungian terms: he is an excellent detective because he possesses a keen understanding of the Shadow—that is, the archaic, aggressive, lustful, power-hungry side of human nature that lurks in all of us. All humans are capable of evil, above all those who walk around with the smug, unexamined belief that they never would be.
I was reminded of this scene today as I read an extraordinary report by “Right to Know” investigative reporter, Emily Kopp, who obtained early drafts of the DEFUSE grant proposal, authored by EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak et al., and submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.
I highly recommend reading Kopp’s report, titled US scientists proposed to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. The following passage goes to the heart of the matter:
The documents reveal for the first time that a virologist working with the Wuhan lab planned to engineer new spike proteins – in contrast with the collaboration’s public work to insert whole spike proteins into viral backbones. Language in the proposal indicates this work may have involved unpublished viruses, generating unpublished engineered spike proteins.
This American virologist, University of North Carolina Prof. Ralph Baric, was set to engineer twenty or more “chimeric” SARS-related viral spike proteins per year of the proposal, and two to five full-length engineered SARS-related viruses. Documents previously reported by U.S. Right to Know show that some of the experimentation could secretly occur in Wuhan at a lower biosafety level than specified in the grant, apparently to save costs.
The proposal for Professor Baric to perform Dr. Frankenstein work on SARS-related viruses will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with his seminal papers on creating chimeric SARS-related viruses using gain-of-function procedures. The real fireworks revelation in an early draft of the DEFUSE proposal is the following passage:
The passage highlighted in blue is PRECISELY the assembly procedure posited by Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne, and Antonius VanDongen in their 2022 paper titled Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. Daszak et al. even propose purchasing the same restriction enzyme that Valentin et al. hypothesized was used in the lab synthesis of SARS-CoV-2. (Valentin’s Twitter commentary on the draft proposal fascinating and entertaining).
At the time Bruttel et al. published their paper, it was met with ridicule by prominent virologists Edward Holmes and Kristian Anderson, who called it “confected nonsense” and “kindergarten molecular biology.” Holmes and Anderson would say this, wouldn’t they? With stunning criminal energy, they have been key players in concealing the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 since February 2020.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, I was not all surprised to read about this development. As a true crime author, I’ve spent the last twenty-five years studying criminal behavior, conspiracies, and criminal investigations. For years, Peter Daszak and his virologist compadres have obviously been in the business of modifying and enhancing bat coronaviruses in order to make them infectious and pathogenic to humans. I suspect the creation of SARS-CoV-2 and its accidental or deliberate release from a lab will eventually be regarded as the greatest true crime story in history.
It’s going to take a while for our dummy politicians and knucklehead mainstream media journalists to recognize it, “but at the length, truth will out.”
West Starts to Understand That Ukraine Project ‘Failing’ – Russian Foreign Minister
Sputnik – 30.01.2024
MOSCOW – The West is beginning to understand that the “Ukraine project” is failing but can not stop assisting Kiev because of its economic benefit and fear of losing “prestige,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday.
“The figures that are hidden in Ukraine, they speak a lot about how important it is for the West to prevent the ‘failure’ of their ‘Ukraine project’. Moreover, they already understand that the failure has already begun. But nevertheless they cannot stop. And not only for reasons of prestige … And also from the point of view of economic benefits,” Lavrov said during a meeting with foreign diplomats in Moscow.
Addressing the UN Security Council meeting on January 22, 2023, Lavrov emphasized that there are no interests – and there never were – in the conflict with Russia in favor of the Ukrainian people. There are only “the interests of the Anglo-Saxons, their henchmen and the criminal, rotten Kiev elite, which is tied to the West by mutual responsibility and which is afraid of being swept away the day after the end of the war.”
The Russian top diplomat pointed out that Moscow has never given up on a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine conflict.
“We never gave up on the peaceful resolution, we are always ready to negotiate — negotiate not about how to keep the leadership of the Kiev regime in place but about overcoming the inheritance of a decade-long destructive looting of the country and violence against the people, removing the reasons for the tragic Ukrainian situation,” Lavrov said. However, the key factor hindering a resolution of the conflict in Ukraine is the continued support of the West, he added.
Western Media’s Blackout of Israeli’s “Hannibal Directive”
By Brad Pearce | The Libertarian Institute | January 30, 2024
In the time since the October 7 invasion of Israel there have been suggestions both from within Israel and from alternative media elsewhere that Israel used a version of a military protocol known as “The Hannibal Directive” that day, and perhaps has continued to operate upon that protocol since.
The “Hannibal Directive” is a military order which was created in 1986 in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli Defense Forces soldier in Lebanon. The premise of the original order is that in this circumstance, the IDF can prioritize stopping the kidnappers even if it endangers the hostage. The example that those within the Israeli government like to give is sniping the tires of the escape car knowing it may cause an accident which endangers the hostage, while ruling out an airstrike on the car. This highly controversial protocol was repealed in 2016 and replaced with an order whose text has remained secret. However, there is a growing body of evidence that on October 7 Israel issued a sort of “mass Hannibal Directive on steroids,” where an unknown number of Israeli civilians were killed by the IDF to prevent their becoming hostages. While there has been much discussion of this topic within Israel media, there is a near-total blackout on the topic in corporate media in the United States and United Kingdom.
Many who were already aware of the Hannibal Directive became suspicious of Israel’s actions quickly, most of all because of one particularly egregious instance which brought friendly fire casualties to light. At the Kibbutz Be’eri in what is known as “Pesi’s House,” after the owner, Hamas had taken fifteen Israelis hostage. One Hamas member ran out of the house releasing a hostage, who informed them that there were fourteen Israelis remaining in the house. A commander made the decision to fire two “light” tank shells at the house regardless, killing all but one of the hostages. The released hostage and the survivor both confirmed the same story, so it came out rapidly that Israel had knowingly shelled the house. This got a lot of press within Israel because it is such a horrible story, and people immediately referenced the Hannibal Directive. More recently, Israel’s leading news website Ynet released a large investigation which alleges that an IDF-wide Hannibal Directive-like order went out, and that Israel destroyed seventy cars returning to Gaza without regard to whether there may be hostages inside.
Some of Israel’s most prominent voices want to know if Benjamin Netanyahu’s government implemented a Hannibal Directive on October 7. The lead author of the IDF’s Code of Ethics, Asa Kasher, explained in Haaretz, Israel’s newspaper of record, that the incident at Kibbutz Be’eri needs to be investigated immediately. The Haaretz editorial board demanded an immediate investigation in an editorial published on January 8. These are among many other references to the issue within Israeli media. The Ynet investigation is extremely thorough and damning. The Hannibal Directive has also been mentioned by media sources throughout the Muslim world. However, despite the importance of this issue, and that discussion of the topic is readily available in Haaretz, there has not been any mention in any context in several major U.S. news sources since this new round of conflict began.
We are all used to the media lying and shaping narratives, but this is the most thorough campaign of ignoring news I have seen since the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was broken by the New York Post, so at least one “mainstream” source in American media was trying to talk about it. I checked several major, diverse news sources for mentions of the Hannibal Directive and did not find any which presented the question of if Israel had used this protocol. The New York Times last mentioned it in 2016 when the original order was repealed. There has been no discussion of it in The Washington Post, USA Today, or the magazine Foreign Policy. The Guardian has a single reference from October 11, where a woman says the hostility of politicians to recovering the hostages reminds her of the Hannibal Directive, but it is a random opinion, not a suggestion they used it on October 7. Tablet Magazine, a prominent American Jewish periodical, shows no search results on its website, though by using Google’s advanced search functions one can find a single mention since October 7. A Google News search finds many foreign sources, but the only American reference is from Briahna Joy Gray at The Hill, a far-left host who has been constantly attacked as an anti-Semite and is far out of the mainstream, though she happens to work for a mainstream publication. I wrote a Twitter thread documenting my attempt to find references to the Hannibal Directive in American and British media.
Those who happen to have learned about the Hannibal Directive, either from reading Israeli media or from alternative media or social media in the West, can and will draw many conclusions about what happened on October 7. But the suppression of this topic is a story in and of itself. I doubt it is any sort of explicit conspiracy. Instead, people who come to be in prominent positions in corporate media get to where they are because they know which way the wind blows and have a good instinct for what they should or shouldn’t print. The culture within American media is one where no one wants to cover this story, and if asked they would probably tell you they fear it will “empower extremists” or “promote conspiracy theories.” Most Haaretz articles which mention it seem to spend as long hemming and hawing about that concern as they do discussing the issue, but they still cover the story (even if carefully framed). These revelations greatly change how a person understand the events of October 7, and since the American government continues to support Israel, Americans deserve to know—but they certainly won’t learn about it from the corporate media.
The Libertarian Institute’s Executive Director Scott Horton recently spoke with Brad Pearce about the subject of this article and Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Their interview can be found here.
Biden Working to Prevent Possible Trump Cuts to Ukraine Aid
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | January 29, 2024
President Joe Biden is working on a document that would promise military assistance to Ukraine for the next decade. The White House hopes to get Congressional approval and prevent Donald Trump from changing course in Ukraine if elected. With the commitment to Kiev, Biden is seeking President Zelensky to adopt a defensive position and abandon aspirations to retake territory.
The Washington Post reports that the White House is working with the State Department to compile a document that will pledge short and long-term military assistance to Ukraine. The administration will seek Congressional buy-in. A portion of the policy would be included in a $111 billion supplemental defense spending bill that includes $61 billion in military assistance for Ukraine.
“According to US officials, the American document will guarantee support for short-term military operations as well as build a future Ukrainian military force that can deter Russian aggression,” The Post explains, “ It will include specific promises and programs to help protect, reconstitute and expand Ukraine’s industrial and export base, and assist the country with political reforms needed for full integration into Western institutions.”
It continues, “Not incidentally, a US official said, the hope is that the long-term promise will also “future-proof” aid for Ukraine against the possibility that former president Trump wins his reelection bid.”
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump started to criticize Biden for failing to prevent the war. Trump claims that, if elected, he will be able to end the conflict within days of retaking office.
It is unclear how Trump plans to accomplish this. As president, he significantly escalated tensions with Russia in Ukraine by providing Kiev with lethal arms.
While the Biden White House cannot ensure that his predecessor does not alter Ukraine policy, last year, the Wall Street Journal explained that the significant number of pro-Ukraine war hawks in Congress will create roadblocks for policy changes.
Additionally, the White House is pushing Zelensky to forego offensive operations this year. “The Biden administration is putting together a new strategy that will de-emphasize winning back territory and focus instead on helping Ukraine fend off new Russian advances while moving toward a long-term goal of strengthening its fighting force and economy,” the Post explains.
“The emerging plan is a sharp change from last year, when the US and allied militaries rushed training and sophisticated equipment to Kiev in hopes that it could quickly push back Russian forces occupying eastern and southern Ukraine.” The authors add, “That effort foundered, largely on Russia’s heavily fortified minefields and front line trenches.”
In the early months of the war, Kiev’s Western backers pledged to support Ukraine for as long as it takes and pushed Zelensky to abandon a potential agreement with Ukraine. Nearly two years into the war, the White House has depleted its funds to arm Ukraine, and Western arms stockpiles are running low.
In Ukraine, Kyiv’s weapons depots are also depleted, and under-equipped soldiers are struggling to push back advancing Russian forces.
Direct US Attack on Iran Would Open Pandora’s Box – Mideast Experts
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 29.01.2024
Having groundlessly accused Tehran of masterminding a recent deadly drone bombing on US personnel, President Joe Biden and his team are allegedly considering a covert strike on Iran or targeting Iranian officials, as per Bloomberg. How could the purported plan pan out for Washington?
Three US soldiers were killed and 34 wounded in a drone attack over the weekend that is ramping up the pressure on Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 elections, according to the US press. The Biden administration rushed to pin the blame on Iran, presenting no evidence to back up its claims.
Even though Tehran made it clear that it had nothing to do with the attack, Washington is reportedly planning to either conduct a covert strike on Iran and later deny it, or resort to extraterritorial assassinations of Iranian officials, as then-President Donald Trump did by ordering the killing of General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020.
“A direct attack on Iran will open Pandora’s Box,” Professor Hossein Askari, political analyst and emeritus professor of business and international affairs at George Washington University, told Sputnik.
“If the attack was from an Iraqi militia that Iran supports, then a US attack on the militia will affect relations with Iraq, which has already objected to other US responses to the militias and is engaged in talks for the US to exit Iraq. It is an election year in the US and there is a great deal of pressure on Biden to be ‘tough’ on Iran.”
Per Askari, Biden has found himself between a rock and a hard place: no matter what he does, he is likely to come under fierce criticism for either being too weak or escalating the conflict.
“An attack inside Iran would undoubtedly widen the war with the end game becoming even murkier and [an attack] inside Iraq would further damage US-Iraq relations,” the professor stressed.
He believes that Biden will strike nonetheless and that the strike will pour more gasoline on the fire as Tehran is “still looking for revenge for the assassination of General Soleimani and the Iraqi militia leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”
When asked what forces could be potentially involved in any “covert strike”, the expert assumed that only cruise missiles and no planes or Special Forces are likely to be used. He added that no regional player would join the purported US action except, possibly, Israel. “But if the US allows Israel to join in, then this would become a much wider war with religious overtones,” Askari warned.
Even though neither the US nor Iran have an interest in a wider regional war, “there is a tug of war between the two countries to sway influence over the wider Middle East, and particularly the Arab Gulf States,” echoed Dr. Imad Salamey, associate professor of political science and international affairs at the Lebanese American University.
“I believe the US will take on limited retaliatory attacks against [Islamic] Revolutionary Guards targets in Iran or Iraq without engaging in a wide-scale war,” Salamey told Sputnik.
“It remains too early in this conflict for the US to target strategic positions such as nuclear facilities. I do not think the allies will join the US in the standoff against Iran, as none have a reason to join rank. Only in the case that Iran decided to close down the Strait of Hormuz that other states would join the US war efforts. I believe the US is now after attacking Iranian Revolutionary Guards and no longer as interested in proxies.”
Iraqi resistance is quietly but effectively hitting the Israeli regime where it hurts
By Wesam Bahrani | Press TV | January 2024
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced a drone attack on Sunday deep inside the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, marking another significant development amid the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
What makes it a major development is the location of the target. The Israeli Zevulun naval facility near Haifa Port was struck as part of a “new phase” of operations against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine as well as the illegal American occupation of Iraq and Syria.
A pattern is emerging of the Iraqi resistance attacking Zionist targets in the Mediterranean while the Yemeni military continues its operations against Zionist and US targets in the Red and Arabian seas.
In a statement on Sunday, the Iraqi resistance said it struck “four enemy targets”, which included three illegal American bases in Syria and “the Israeli Zevulun naval facility”.
In a sign of how quickly these operations are occurring, by Sunday afternoon the Iraqi resistance published another statement announcing an attack on another illegal US base in Erbil, northern Iraq.
The attack by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq near Haifa followed a successful operation against the Israeli port of Ashdod just two days before that, which followed two other operations against Haifa itself as well as drone attacks on the Israeli Karish gas rig.
All these military operations against the Zionist entity have one thing in common: strategically all these targets sit on the Mediterranean Sea.
Last month, the Iraqi resistance pledged a new phase in its operations against the Zionist entity and its American patrons, declaring that “more is to come” and in “solidarity with “our people in Gaza”.
The commander of Kataib Sayyed al-Shuhada, Abu Ala’a al-Walai, one of the senior officials in the Hashd al-Sha’abi (Popular Mobilization Units), recently spoke about the beginning of a new phase and said “This stage includes preventing Zionist shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and disabling the ports of the Zionist regime”.
In response to the now almost daily attacks on the illegal US bases in Iraq and Syria by the Iraqi resistance as well as targeting vital Israeli targets, America’s military response has seen deadly airstrikes on buildings belonging to Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Hezbollah.
These are the two prominent anti-terror groups belonging to the Hashd al-Sha’abi, which is an integral part of the Iraqi National Armed Forces.
The Commander of the Hashd al-Sha’abi for the Central Euphrates Operations in Iraq, Major General Ali al-Hamdani on Sunday declared that “The Americans only understand the language of the force and will not leave Iraq through dialogue”.
As Washington continues to violate Iraqi sovereignty by attacking and killing members of its armed forces and continues to violate Yemeni sovereignty by attacking Yemeni military positions (as the US claims) or redecorating the sand in the desert, one thing is clear: both parties targeted are undeterred.
American and British warships are trying their best to prevent Ansarullah from attacking Israeli vessels or ships heading to the occupied Palestinian territories, but it is simply not working.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is now seeking to target the other side of the Israeli occupation’s waters in the Mediterranean, which explains the strikes on Haifa, Ashdod and the Israeli regime’s natural reserves in the Mediterranean Sea.
Ansarullah-led Yemeni military and Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi are with surgical precision targeting the Zionist entity’s naval and maritime interests, which the Israeli regime depends on for a significant amount of its trade.
Haifa Port itself (on the Mediterranean) is believed to handle up to 90 percent of vital commodities entering the occupied Palestinian territories.
These operations are causing notable damage to the Israeli economy amid a sizeable drop in shipping activity in the regime’s ports with Israeli officials speaking about workers being furloughed.
The threat posed to the regime’s economy, at the moment, is bigger in the port of Eilat (on the Red Sea), which has been targeted on various occasions by the Yemeni military in recent weeks, who have also imposed an embargo on ships docking at the Israeli occupied Palestinian ports.
As much as the US and its now “poodle” vassal, Britain, insist that the resistance operations from Yemen and Iraq have nothing to do with the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, the writing is on the wall.
Every statement put out by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq or the Yemeni armed forces mentions “our brothers in Gaza” and “our occupied land in Palestine”.
These resistance operations in solidarity with the oppressed people of Gaza, targeting the infrastructure of the illegitimate Zionist entity and American military assets in the region will continue unless three conditions are met.
An unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aid entering the besieged territory and the withdrawal of the Israeli military from the blockaded strip where the death toll now tops 26,500.
There is no coordination between the Yemeni military (Ansarullah) and the Hashd al-Sha’abi, this is simply strategic thinking by both sides, something Washington and Tel Aviv are lacking.
On October 8, when the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented operation, the United States lacked a coherent strategy for West Asia, choosing to focus on Russia and China instead.
More than 115 days later, as the ripple effects of the faith, determination, and power of the Axis of Resistance is slowly being digested in the White House, Washington’s strategy remains incoherent.
It has and can only resort to “precision strikes” as putting boots on the ground in Yemen or allowing those boots to leave their bases in Iraq will rubber stamp the end of Biden’s presidency.
It would be like Vietnam and Afghanistan put together but on steroids.
The attacks by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq against the Israeli occupation and the American occupation will not only persist but expand as the genocidal war on Gaza rages on.
The Zionists will feel this in their ports, vital naval sites and trade in the Mediterranean for as long as their indiscriminate attacks against the women and children of Gaza continue.
Does Hamas need help in defending Gaza?
The Palestinian resistance doesn’t have the air defense systems to protect Palestinian women and children from Israeli attacks. But still, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups have been inflicting heavy losses on the regime’s military on ground zero.
Up to 80 percent of Hamas tunnels in Gaza are still intact despite months of Israeli attacks aimed at destroying them, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, citing Israeli officials.
All that the Zionist regime has done is kill civilians and allow 2.3 million people to starve while the West, with the US in particular, has looked the other way.
That has prompted the resistance groups in the region to step up and help the oppressed Palestinians.
For Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi, Yemen’s Ansarullah, Lebanon’s Hezbollah or the Islamic Republic of Iran, support for Gaza and the people of Gaza is not a matter of public relations or goodwill. They consider it a moral and religious duty.
Wesam Bahrani is an Iraqi journalist and commentator.
‘Black Hawk Down’ For Biden in the Red Sea
By Dan McAdams | Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity | January 26, 2024
The breaking news that Ansar Allah (Houthi) fighters have fired on the USS Carney in the Red Sea today [Friday, January 26] underscores the shocking failure of the Biden Administration, which initiated airstrikes on the Houthis this month with no plan for “victory” beyond hoping that the mere presence of U.S. warships would intimidate them into surrendering.
Even a junior Pentagon or State Department analyst could have advised the Administration that, based on everything we understand about the Houthis and their successful defeat of Saudi Arabia (and, by proxy, DC), lobbing a few missiles in their general direction was not going to result in an ocean of white flags raising over Aden.
In other words, it was the kind of doomed operation that, had cooler (i.e. non-political) Pentagon heads prevailed, would never in a million years have been launched. There was simply no possibility of success and 100 percent probability of failure.
How did it all start? In response to the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza (codified as “potential genocide” in today’s International Court for Justice ruling), Ansar Allah announced last month that they would not allow international shipping to service any commerce to or from Israeli ports. They judged the killing of more than 25,000 Palestinian civilians to be a “genocide” and cited obligations under international law to take steps to end the killing.
Whatever one’s view on the legality of the Houthi decision to interdict Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, the fact is by virtue of their unique geography they have the ability to do so. It is also a fact that the Houthis did not explicitly target U.S. or U.S.-flagged shipping unless it was headed to or from Israeli ports.
In short, it was not our fight. Until [Joe] Biden made it our fight.
On January 11, Biden announced that he was ordering the U.S. military to launch airstrikes against Yemen, but very soon it became clear that far from being intimidated into surrender, Biden’s move was just what the Houthis wanted: a David’s slingshot chance at Goliath.
As it turns out, the Bidens were a Goliath intent on sacrificing the U.S. standing in the world, military deterrence, U.S. economy, and even U.S. servicemembers in its blind support of Israel.
And, as any of these junior analysts (or seasoned analysts) could have predicted, the hits just keep coming for Biden.
Yesterday, the U.S. Navy attempted to escort two Maersk tankers—the Maersk Detroit and the Maersk Chesapeake—through the Red Sea loaded with weapons for Israel. This after nine rounds of U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis. The U.S. show of force backfired into an unprecedented and “Black Hawk Down” kind of moment where after several missiles were launched the Maersk lines reversed course followed by the U.S. Naval warships. It was a massive defeat for the notion of U.S. military superiority—but don’t hold your breath for it to be reported in the mainstream media.
So today the Houthis again fired on U.S. military ships in the Red Sea and have again scored a massive success for “the resistance,” which is a truly global movement against the albatross that the Biden Administration has taken on its shoulder.
Here is the main point: an ill-advised U.S. policy of airstrikes against the Houthis has been an enormous gift to them while in no way diminishing their ability to fulfil their mission. What will you do next, Joe Biden? They are immune to your bombs. They have no military-industrial-complex. They just shoot your ships. Are you going to launch a ground invasion? In an election year? Dead Americans in Yemen for Israel? Really?
Even the most comatose U.S. [House] members and senators are starting to wake up to the fact that Joe Biden—who seems unable to even speak English—is taking the country to war without any authorization.
Attacks against Biden’s forces in Iraq, Syria, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean will escalate. And he is backed into a corner. What’s next?
US Vows Response to Deadly Attack on Mideast Base, Seeks to Avoid Wider Conflict
Sputnik – 29.01.2024
WASHINGTON – The United States will retaliate to a deadly drone attack on its al-Tanf military base on Syrian-Jordanian border at a time and in a manner of its choosing, but it is not seeking a wider conflict in the region, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday.
Earlier in the day, Axios reported that President Joe Biden discussed a “significant military response” to the attack during a meeting with top US officials on Sunday.
“As for our response options, the President is working his way through that right now. He had a good meeting yesterday with the National Security Team,” Kirby told CNN.
According to Axios, the White House and Pentagon are seeking to calibrate their retaliation to contain the risk of a wider conflict. Meanwhile, some hawks on Capitol Hill are pushing for strikes inside Iran, the report said.
“We will respond. We will do it in a time and a manner of our choosing. We’ll respond, you know, in a very consequential way but we don’t seek a war with Iran. We are not looking for a wider conflict in the Middle East,” Kirby said, when asked if the US is considering strikes inside Iran.
On Sunday, three US soldiers had been killed and 34 others injured in a drone attack on a US military base in Jordan’s northeast near the border with Syria.
President Biden pinned the blame on unspecified Iran-backed militant groups, while also saying the US was still gathering the facts. Jordanian cabinet spokesman Muhannad Mubaidin said that the strike targeted the US’s Al-Tanf base in Syria, not a base on Jordanian territory.
Iran has nothing to do with the drone attack on a US military base, Iranian state-run news agency IRNA reported, citing an Iranian official.
Russia-China Joint Approach to the Middle East
By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern outlook – 29.01.2024
By repeatedly targeting the Houthis in Yemen and pushing for an escalation in the Red Sea, the US is jumping into the Middle East with a military and strategic mindset. The objective is to create space for Washington – and its global allies – to push back against the recent gains, i.e., normalization between Iran and Saudi and Arab normalization with Syria more than a decade after the start of the so-called “Arab Spring”, that Russia and China have made. A wider war in the region will, in the US calculation at least, re-politicize regional fault lines that might allow Washington to reverse the larger normalization process. Considering the high stakes Washington has in developing a wider war in the region, it makes sense for both Russia and China, who largely have similar interests vis-à-vis normalization processes within the Middle East, to develop a joint approach.
In October, soon after Israel launched its brutal war after the October 7 attacks by Hamas and much before the US started doing its own strikes, Russia, anticipating a deeper US military involvement in the Middle East, confirmed that it was already coordinating its Middle East policy with China. This coordination, on the other hand, is also an outcome of the recent state of Russia-China bilateral ties, which, in the words of the Russian foreign minister, are in the best state in the “centuries-old history”.
This coordination also has its roots in the ways that the Arab world itself has come to see its ties with the US on the one hand and Russia and China on the other. For instance, some recent surveys have shown that an increasing number of people across most Arab states view Russia and China as crucial economic players above all. The core reasons for this favourable view are twofold. First, many Arab societies today view the US as no longer a reliable partner. Second, they view Russia and China not from a revisionist perspective, i.e., as states deepening their involvement in the region to replace the US. Rather, Russia and China continue to emphasize the Middle East as a region that can play an autonomous role, i.e., a role not tied to, or disproportionately overshadowed by, any superpower’s interests.
The fact that Russia and China both see the Middle East from this perspective, their calculation sees the Middle East as a vital region that can really push for shifting the center of the present world order away from the West to creating multiple power centres within a multipolar world order. Therefore, developing a joint policy and indirectly protecting the Middle East from slipping too much under the US radar makes sense for both Moscow and Beijing. Were the Middle East to relapse to being a US vassal region, it would make it extremely difficult, if not entirely impossible, for Russia and China to realize their ambitions for a new world order.
Now, for both Russia and China, keeping the Middle East – which is already on the verge of a wider war – as a center of power, they must project their ties beyond the Gaza war. Of course, Israel’s war on Gaza is the most important issue today, and both Russia and China have adopted and emphasized a pro-Arab/pro-Palestine position. But Russia and China are also taking steps to not allow their ties with the region to be bogged down by this one issue.
China and Russia, as we know it, already have deep economic ties with the Middle East. Both, as we know, remain focused on maintaining and expanding these ties despite the ongoing conflicts. Putin’s recent visit to the Middle East was not simply provoked by the Gaza crisis, nor was this war the sole subject of his discussions with Arab leaders. In fact, a lot of discussion was around the core issue of a multipolar world order. Putin emphasized how the conflict in the Middle East is a US failure, a failure that makes it imperative for the Middle East to not only distance itself from Washington but also adopt a more autonomous role to, among other things, resolve the issue through its initiatives. But beyond this, Putin emphasised that “The UAE is Russia’s main trading partner in the Arab world.”
For China as well, this logic of relationship beyond and above the Palestine issue remains prominent. While Beijing has openly supported the Arab state’s current stance on the issue, its ongoing engagement with this region remains predominantly underpinned by the logic of trade and development, building a relationship that helps the Middle East transform into a powerhouse that can ultimately help China and Russia tackle the hegemony of the West. (That’s why both China and Russia recently adopted new members into BRICS, including those from the Middle East.)
At the same time, China has taken steps to use the scenario, like Russia, to step up itself as a global power that can help mediate regional conflicts. In November, China announced its five-point peace plan that placed heavy emphasis on the United Nations, calling for the implementation of all relevant UN resolutions on the conflict and an international conference organized by the world body that leads to a two-state solution, all overseen by the Security Council. While nothing concrete followed this plan, it served China’s purpose of projecting itself as a power different from the West on the one hand and very close to the Arab world on the other.
For Washington, which has been hoping for differences to emerge between Russia and China taking them back to the era of rivalry, this situation is frustrating, making it extremely difficult for it to not lose ground in the Middle East specifically and across the Global South more generally. But its continuing support for Israel’s war machine and its continuing push for NATO’s expansion is doing exactly the opposite of what the US aims for, i.e., preventing its global decline and the related rise of Russia and China.
Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs.
‘Swarming’ the US in West Asia, until it folds
The US is so deeply mired in an unwinnable battle from the Levant to the Persian Gulf that only its adversaries in China, Russia, and Iran can bail it out.
By MK Bhadrakumar | The Cradle | January 29, 2024
Deterrence in defense is a military strategy where one power uses the threat of reprisal to preclude attack from an adversary, while maintaining at the same time the freedom of action and flexibility to respond to the full spectrum of challenges. In this realm, the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, is an outstanding example.
Hezbollah’s clarity of purpose in establishing and strictly maintaining ground rules that deter Israeli military aggression has set a high regional bar. Today, its West Asian allies have adopted similar strategies, which have multiplied in the context of the war in Gaza.
America, surrounded
While the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah is comparable to Hezbollah in certain respects, it is the audacious brand of defensive deterrence practiced by the Islamic Resistance of Iraq that is going to be highly consequential in the near term.
Last week, citing sources in the State Department and Pentagon, Foreign Policy magazine wrote that the White House is no longer interested in continuing the US military mission in Syria. The White House later denied this information, but the report is gaining ground.
The Turkish daily Hurriyet wrote on Friday that while Ankara is taking a cautious approach to media reports, it does see “a general striving” by Washington to exit not only Syria but the entire region of West Asia, as it senses that it has been dragged into a quagmire by Israel and Iran from the Red Sea to Pakistan.
Russia’s special presidential representative for the Syrian settlement, Alexander Lavrentiev, also told Tass on Friday that much depends on any “threat of physical impact” on American forces present in Syria. The swift US military exit from Afghanistan took place with virtually no advance notice, in coordination with the Taliban. “In all likelihood, the same may happen in Iraq and Syria,” Lavrentiev said.
Indeed, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq has stepped up its attacks on US military bases and targets. In a ballistic missile attack on Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq a week ago, an unknown number of American troops sustained injuries, and the White House announced its first troop deaths on Sunday when three US servicemen were killed on the Syrian-Jordanian border in strikes earlier that day.
Calling Beijing for help
This situation is untenable for President Joe Biden politically — in his re-election bid next November — which explains the urgency of the National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday and Saturday in Thailand to discuss the Ansarallah attacks in the Red Sea.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby explained Washington’s rush for Chinese mediation thus:
“China has influence over Tehran; they have influence in Iran. And they have the ability to have conversations with Iranian leaders that — that we can’t. What we’ve said repeatedly is: We would welcome a constructive role by China, using the influence and the access that we know they have…”
This is a dramatic turn of events. While the US has long been concerned about China’s growing sway in West Asia, it also needs that influence now as Washington’s efforts to reduce violence are getting nowhere. The US narrative on this will be that the “strategic, thoughtful conversation” between Sullivan and Wang will not only be “an important way to manage competition and tensions [between the US and China] responsibly” but also “set the direction of the relationship” on the whole.
Meanwhile, there has been hectic diplomatic traffic between Tehran, Ankara, and Moscow, as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Turkiye, and the moribund Astana format on Syria last week got kickstarted. Succinctly put, the three countries anticipate a “post-American” situation arising soon in Syria.
A US exit from Syria and Iraq?
Of course, the security dimensions are always tricky. On Friday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad chaired a meeting in Damascus for commanders of the security apparatus in the army to formulate a plan for what lies ahead. A statement said the meeting drew up a comprehensive security roadmap that “aligns with strategic visions” to address international, regional, and domestic challenges and risks.
Certainly, what gives impetus to all this is the announcement in Washington and Baghdad on Thursday that the US and Iraq have agreed to start talks on the future of American military presence in Iraq with the aim of setting a timetable for a phased withdrawal of troops.
The Iraqi announcement said Baghdad aims to “formulate a specific and clear timetable that specifies the duration of the presence of international coalition advisors in Iraq” and to “initiate the gradual and deliberate reduction of its advisors on Iraqi soil,” eventually leading to the end of the coalition mission. Iraq is committed to ensuring the “safety of the international coalition’s advisors during the negotiation period in all parts of the country” and to “maintaining stability and preventing escalation.”
On the US side, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement that the discussions will take place within the ambit of a higher military commission established in August 2023 to negotiate the “transition to an enduring bilateral security partnership between Iraq and the United States.”
Pentagon commanders would be pinning hopes on protracted negotiations. The US is in a position to blackmail Iraq, which is obliged, per the one-sided agreement dictated by Washington during the occupation in 2003, to keep in the US banks all of Iraq’s oil export earnings.
But in the final analysis, President Biden’s political considerations in the election year will be the clincher. And that will depend on the calibration by West Asia’s resistance groups, and their ability to ‘swarm’ the US on multiple fronts until it caves. It is this ‘known unknown’ factor that explains the Astana format meeting of Russia, Iran, and Turkiye on January 24-25 in Kazakhstan. The three countries are preparing for the endgame in Syria. Not coincidentally, in a phone call last Friday, Biden once again told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to scale down the Israeli military operation in Gaza, stressing he is not in it for a year of war,” Axios‘ Barak Ravid reported in a ‘scoop’.
Their joint statement after the Astana format meeting in Kazakhstan is a remarkable document predicated almost entirely on an end to the US occupation of Syria. It indirectly urges Washington to give up its support of terrorist groups and their affiliates “operating under different names in various parts of Syria” as part of attempts to create new realities on the ground, including illegitimate self-rule initiatives under the pretext of ‘combating terrorism.’ It demands an end to the US’ illegal seizure and transfer of oil resources “that should belong to Syria,” the unilateral US sanctions, and so on.
Simultaneously, at a meeting in Moscow on Wednesday between the Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev and Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, the latter reportedly stressed that Iran-Russia cooperation in the fight against terrorism “must continue, particularly in Syria.” Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to host a trilateral summit with his Turkish and Iranian counterparts to firm up a coordinated approach.
The Axis of Resistance: deterrence means stability
Iran’s patience has run out over the US military presence in Syria and Iraq following the revival of ISIS with American support. Interestingly, Israel no longer abides by its “de-confliction” mechanism with Russia in Syria. Clearly, there is close US-Israeli cooperation in Syria and Iraq at the intelligence and operational level, which goes against Russian and Iranian interests. Needless to say, the backdrop of the imminent upgrade of the Russia-Iran strategic partnership also needs to be factored in here.
These developments are a vintage illustration of defensive deterrence. The Axis of Resistance turns out to be the principal instrument of peace for the issues of security that entangle the US and Iran. Clearly, there isn’t any method or any reasonable hope of convergence to this process, but, fortunately, the appearance of chaos in West Asia is deceiving.
Beyond the distractions of partisan argument and diplomatic ritual, one can detect the outlines of a practical solution to the Syrian stalemate that addresses the inherent security interests of the US and Iran that are embedded within an outer ring of US-China concord over the situation in West Asia.
Russia may seem an outlier for the present, but there is something in it for everyone, as the pullout of US troops opens the pathway to a Syrian settlement, which remains a top priority for Moscow and for Putin personally.
American Base Near Syria-Jordan Border Attacked Amidst Rejection of US Role in Area
By John Miles – Sputnik – 28.01.2024
A US base near the Syria-Jordan border was struck by an overnight drone attack in the latest demonstration of widespread rejection of the United States’ role in the region.
The attack killed three US Army soldiers and injured more than 30, according to the latest reports from US officials Sunday.
There is dispute over whether the targeted US installation was in Jordan or Syria. US officials have claimed the attack hit Tower 22 in Jordan, which US media describes as a “small US outpost” in the northeast of the country. Meanwhile Jordanian government spokesman Muhannad al Mubaidin told a local television channel the strike was actually against the Al-Tanf base, which hosts a substantial US military presence in Syria.
The distinction is significant as the Syrian government and other countries consider the US presence in Syria to be illegal.
The instance is the first known time US troops have been killed in attacks targeting the country’s presence in the Middle East since US backing of Israel provoked retaliatory strikes starting in October. US strikes are thought to have produced casualties as recently as four days ago, when the White House reported that an attack on Kataib Hezbollah likely killed several members of the militia.
Although the United States has never formally declared war on Syria, the country has been involved in efforts to oust President Bashar al-Assad for more than a decade. Here, Sputnik takes a look at the controversial US role in the country, which has contributed to the death of at least half a million people.
Covert Operations
Many of the details surrounding the genesis of US presence in Syria are still shrouded in mystery. The intervention is thought to have begun in 2012 or 2013 as a classified program of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) known as Timber Sycamore. The program was launched by the agency’s infamous Special Activities Center, a division that conducts secret paramilitary activity, psychological operations, and economic warfare without oversight from the US public.
Launched at a time of mass US public opposition to unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, CIA officials hoped they could topple Syria’s government through the arming and training of rebel forces in the country. Ironically, many of the militants backed by the CIA had ties to ISIS, a force the United States has ostensibly fought to defeat in the region. This led former US President Donald Trump to claim former President Barack Obama was the “founder of ISIS.”
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also claimed ISIS is a tool of US foreign policy, claiming he cannot distinguish between the United States and ISIS. Meanwhile Israel admitted in 2019 to arming ISIS-linked Syrian rebels in its shared desire with the US to eliminate al-Assad. Ex-US State Department official Michael Maloof has claimed US foreign policy in the Middle East is oriented around eliminating Israel’s enemies in Syria, Iran, and Libya, among other countries.
Hefty Pricetag
The CIA’s Timber Sycamore program is thought to be one of the most expensive efforts in the agency’s history. It’s been reported that more than $1 billion in weaponry has been sent to Syrian rebels, although the exact figure is not known. Thousands of tons of arms have been shipped from allied US countries.
The Al-Tanf base on the Syria-Jordan border is one of at least ten that the United States operates in Syria without the approval of the country’s government, which has ordered US forces to leave the country. Thousands of US troops have been stationed in the country and an unknown number of Special Operations Forces. The US military has worked to keep details of the US presence secret, and responded angrily when a Turkish news agency published a map of US installations.
US politicians have typically sold the US military presence as necessary to combat ISIS, despite the country’s cooperation with ISIS-linked Islamic radicals in the country. The United States has long sought to expand its presence in the oil-rich region more broadly, to the exclusion of others. The US has criticized the presence of Russian forces in the country, who assist Syria’s military at the invitation of the allied country’s government.
In a rare moment of candor of the type that earns him opposition from members of the US intelligence community, former US President Donald Trump once proclaimed the United States maintains a presence in Syria “only for oil.”
Legalities Be Damned
Many observers claim the American presence in Syria is contrary to US law and the so-called “rules-based order” often purportedly championed by the United States.
US Senator Rand Paul has sought to end the war, which he points out has never been declared by Congress in line with the US Constitution. The war’s backers insist US presidents have the authority to oversee action in Syria based on the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) which gives the executive branch broad latitude in the so-called “War on Terror.” Others say the AUMF itself is an unconstitutional abrogation of Congress’s defined constitutional powers.
“The United States cannot fix Syria,” said Robert Ford, Obama’s former ambassador to Syria, recently. “Yet we still have 900 troops in eastern Syria for eight years, going on nine. I’m puzzled that we haven’t had a national debate on what U.S. troops are doing in Syria.”
“We need to have that debate about the authorization of military force,” he added. “There needs to be a definition of the mission of U.S. forces. There needs to be a set of metrics to measure their success or failure.”
Given that the CIA’s intervention in the country may have begun without even informing the US president at the time, America’s decade-long presence in Syria raises questions about the sprawling US deep state’s lack of accountability.
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Jewish Guilt is the Discourse of The Goyim
By Gilad Atzmon | April 24, 2018
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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