Precisely why Russian action against Saudi Arabia’s proxy militias of fanatics is against western interests is something which nobody in the western elite seems to believe it is necessary to explain. That Russia is bad and evil and must be opposed is another one of those axiomatic beliefs of the governing elite, which they can’t bring themselves to believe the public do not wholeheartedly share. Equally they cannot quite understand why we the people do not see the necessity of backing the Saudi regime.
I am a stern critic of Russia’s democratic deficit, human rights record, and gangster dominated economy and government. But on all these counts it is still a thousand times better than Saudi Arabia, and I am quite certain that 99% of Europeans would be happier living in St Petersburg than Riyadh.
If the Russians turn back CIA and Saudi-backed rebels I for one shall be delighted.
Russian activity in Syria is nothing whatsoever to do with NATO. The Syrian rebels under attack by Russia are not members of NATO. Russia is not attacking Turkey and there is no chance whatsoever that Russia would deliberately attack Turkey. So the suggestion of NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg that NATO will send forces to protect Southern Turkey is absolute madness. In the Iraq War, two of the United States “pinpoint accurate” cruise missiles aimed at Baghdad actually hit Syria. At some stage Russia is going to accidentally hit something in Turkey, it is the nature of war. It is like playing football in the garden – it is inevitable the ball will go over the neighbours’ fence at some stage, however careful you are.
Increasing the amount of military hardware in Turkey – which is already extremely militarised and already full of US forces – just increases the political temperature and chances of something going disastrously wrong, with no possible gain except making the stupid western countries who messed up the Middle East feel less envious of Putin.
NATO countries have caused the crisis in the Middle East through their disastrous and criminal invasions. Russia is not and could never be strong enough to launch an actual attack on western Europe even if Russia wanted to – which Russia most certainly does not. Just like Trident missiles, NATO was no use to the United States on 9/11 and is no use against any actual challenge we face in the world. It exists to perpetuate the dominance of a neo-con elite and ensure massive income to the arms industry.
NATO’s attempts to build up forces around Syria and around the Baltic show that NATO’s over-activity poses the only viable threat of a disastrous world war. Ask yourself this question. Why does the USA, a country which faces no risk of invasion from anybody, account for 44% of the military spending of the whole world? NATO exists solely for client states to assist the projection of US military power abroad. Every decent European should be campaigning for their country to leave NATO.
Isn’t the legitimate NATO concern one of Russian influence over Syria Iran and Iraq?
Fwl
Kindly elaborate why Russian influence in Syria Iran and Iraq is really a threat to the physical security of the North Atlantic States?
Projection of power, control of resources, an attempt to face down any Sino-Russian sphere of influence.
Taking vast resources from those much maligned “hard working British families” who would all be better off if the resources were returned and the choice at the ballot box was either reduce taxes accordingly or improve public services accordingly.
Everyone else just gets bombed to smithereens.
It’s all so dispiriting.
An excellent concise and objective account of the situation. If only senior western politicians could ignore their ‘controllers/blinkers’ and open their eyes to this essentially obvious perspective. I imagine Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have no problem with such observations/analyses.
Glad to see you are getting the idea, Craig, which I have been claiming about NATO, the Mediterranean Dialogue, and taking over European defense in Brussels.
“99% of Europeans would be happier living in St Petersburg”
But what about fifteen miles or more OUTSIDE St Petersburg?
This is a much welcome factual article which should go viral, well said Craig.
Listening to Anders Fogh Rasmussen this morning, bothered about Turkey’s airspace being invaded, that is Turkey which is armed to the teeth, one of the highest arms spenders during the last 10 years, shock horror, what could possibly go wrong.
Never liked that little weasel always banging the war drum, spreading more fear when he should be reassuring members.
@Kenny: probably much the same as 15 miles outside Ryadh!
Exactly 15 miles outside St. Petersburg happens to be the town of Pushkin, the former Tsarskoye Selo. Surely still infinitely preferable to Saudi Arabia.
Kronstadt is 19 miles outside St. Petersburg.
It may be the retired naval officer in me, but I suspect I would not at all mind living in Kronstadt.
15 miles outside Saudi Arabia is Israel, where Russians go on holiday and most Arabs would prefer to live.
What is meant by ‘threat’ or physical effect?
I take the Chinese approach to things that power and advantage is won and lost by a process of gradual adjustments until there is a disposition in your favour (the ‘Creeping Disposition’ approach). I appreciate that a creeping disposition rarely amounts to a physical threat either to life to a measureable concrete economic loss i.e. because it creeps up on you.
If Russia were to consolidate control over these three states then a few things would tip their way including energy advantages, regional advantages and global perceptions. Perhaps attempts to reduce dollar based international trade would be advanced.
I am not saying that there would be an immediate catastrophic disadvantage for NATO countries. Nor am I saying that we should necessarily take or support any military action, but I am simply saying that as Russia has upped its game its likely that there will be a consequence. Its not for me to assess what would be an appropriate response, nor do I even have the facts to understand how Syria or the Arab Spring kicked off. Fortunately, I don’t have to make these decisions. I do bear in mind that we are just a little island albeit one with some international influence, which some might say is disproportionate to size because of history and our role in international ‘affairs’ to date. If we don’t like that role we need to find something else to do other than weapons and finance. Maybe public QE could be a way forward though there are likely to be arguments with the EU if we really want to use public money to support and develop industry.
I know you take the view that things have got so bad that the break up this island is the only way forward, but I disagree. Maybe Jeremy Corbyn and his ideas will begin to find some establishment support. What Blairites should realise is that it is better for Corbyn to risk never achieving power so as to act as a potent magnet dragging the consensus into creative new ground than it would be for an impotent centre left labour party of Blairites to find power and piss it away in a meaningless way as they have done.
When Nick Griffin came on QT although that seemed to make the BNP unelectable he dragged the centre ground to the right by the very fact that he was granted that role in the spot light.
Now Jeremy Corbyn has the spot light and needs to use it not just to go left but to really start a debate; to be the magnet. Its already happening. Even though the media lampoon him. Reuters and the chancellor start advocating some sort of public QE concepts. Unfortunately, Jeremy Corbyn may have to accept his team’s ideas get stolen, but there should be no property on ideas, which are of benefit to the nation.
Ultimately it will be difficult for Britain to find a way forward.
I have only a foolish idea of what is going on. part of that foolish view is that we are moving out of the war on terror and back to a cold war. It is as if the Russians have said that we can all call it a war on terror, but if you cut the crap and look more closely in essence its a cold war…and they have brushed away some illusions.
A final point I’d like to make is that the Creeping Disposition approach may mean that you don’t have to and probably do not usually use force, but as Tony Keswick is reputed to have said back in the late 1930’s: if you don’t want to use guns you need to be pretty quick witted.
Russia and Turkey, the latter the old, Ottoman Empire, have fought several wars and many skirmishes over khanates, mainly in the 16th 17th and 18th century. The Russians, and the Turks also fought several sea battles, over who controlled the Black sea.
In my opinion there’s no love lost between Turkey and Russia.
Turkey surprisingly had the second largest army in NATO only bowing to the might of the USA.
Turkey is the ideal staging post for a NATO boots on the ground venture, as with the illegal war in Iraq, bombing isn’t sufficent enough to take Syria.
Russia, according to press reports has a fleet of ship in the Caspian sea launching missiles into Syria, meanwhile the BBC’s propaganda machine has reported that at least four Russian missiles have hit Iran.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34479873
If anything Saudi backed militants will increase their activites in Syria, (possibly coming through Turkey) now that Russia has openly entered the fray.
The Russian planes were over the Hatay province which annexed itself to Turkey in 1939. Syria has never recognised the annexation, it is historically Syrian and as far as the Syrian government is concerned it still is Syrian.
“15 miles outside Saudi Arabia is Israel, where Russians go on holiday and most Arabs would prefer to live.”
____________________
Anon1, If the Israeli’s keep usurping land at the rate of knots that they are currently at, Jordan will, soon be encompassed, as well, and Israel and its ally Saudi Arabia will be neighbours, how comfortable would their blood soaked alliance be then, I wonder.
Good point about Hatay province, Fred. If anyone cares to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatay_Province they will see a map, top right, of Turkey. Hatay is the tiny strip highlighted in red, hanging down along the Mediterranean coast. To any dispassionate observer, it logically belongs to Syria. Moreover it did until the Turks snatched it away – ironically enough – with a really genuinely fixed referendum. They actually traced avery single person in the whole of Turkey who had been born in Hatay, and the government transported them to Hatay to vote!
What’s more, in recent years when the USA has been leaning heavily on the Syrian government, Turkey has taken advantage of its privileged status as a member of NATO to fly fighters over the border and into Syrian territory, threatening to shoot down Syrian aircraft in their own country! This was done to provide a safe refuge for terrorists near the border with Turkey. By flying missions right up to the border, Russia has warned the Turks that this practice will stop. By flying some missions with SU-30s, Russia has also made the point that it can easily shoot down Turkish F-16s.
It’s fun to see weasels squirming when they are forced to stop cheating. Of course they can (and will) go on lying – but they are powerless.
I am far from sure that Craig is right about Russian weapons hitting Turkey sooner or later. Everything the Russians have done so far has had the clinical precision and care of a top-flight operating theatre. The Yanks talk about “surgical strikes”, but the Russians actually deliver them. It’s clear that everything is done with the greatest of care, checked, double checked, and then triple checked. According to Russian sources the cruise missiles they launched from the Caspian Sea followed courses carefully designed to avoid any inhabited areas, just in case of a failure en route. And the expected accuracy of the missiles was FIVE METRES – from a distance of nearly 1,000 miles.
Absolute corker, Craig.
It seems as if Russia has achieved more in one week than the US has in a year of bombing. How is that possible?
It may be the case that the US simply wants to contain ISIS, and are happy to leave it broadly intact as a fighting force. I fail to see how convoys of Toyota pick-ups cannot be vapourised if that’s what the US really wants to do.
Anon1’s ad for the joys of living in Israel is one of the funniest I have heard. Most ill advised.
These Arabs just love living under Israeli Occupation.
No killings reported yesterday but plenty of other offences committed against them, their homes and property.
http://www.nad-plo.org/userfiles/file/pmg-reports/dailyr/PMG.Daily.Sitrep.07.10.15.pdf
The US has 22% of the world’s GDP and about 34% of the defence expenditure. Their defence spending has fallen 20% since 2010.
http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/recent-trends
“NATO… exists to perpetuate the dominance of a neo-con elite and ensure massive income to the arms industry”
Its probably the other way round… membership of NATO has enabled European countries to freeload off that vast US expenditure – and slash their armed forces in safety – massively reducing income to the arms industry.
A lot of Ukrainians really wish they’d joined NATO. Then Russia wouldn’t have been able to slice off Crimea, and so on.
I refer folks to this bit of the Jon Snow interview with Cameron on Channel 4 News on Tuesday…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=13&v=R42KCqgccZY
Details of how Hatay was annexed to Turkey in 1939 are given in the Wikipedia entry Hatay. The whole process does sound quite dodgy.
Hatay, by the way, is very close to İncirlik, with the important air base, right outside Adana.
The numbers of the dead in the latest Hadj incident has slimmed to 2700 or more. These numbers of the dead have been under reported as seven hundred, not even one third of the actual numbers. Where was/is the outrage of the indignant oligarch owned media?
The death occurred because one of the princlings was visiting Mena and the foot traffic of the throngs of the pilgrims were diverted! The disaster caused by the ceremonials surrounding the princeling’s visit was then blamed on the pilgrims for incorrectly following their instructions for the new diverted route. True to the form the vassal in charge of the benighted lands of Hijaz, were blaming the dead.
In US Saudi have set aside the sum of fifty million dollars to improve the image of the Kingdom. In UK the supine media need not be lobbied they are already covering up the deaths and the incompetence on an gargantuan scale that has yielded industrial scale deaths. The is the payback for the money funnelled in by prince alwaleed bin talal to write off the News of the World to bury the bad news and the paper together.
All the while NATO a defunct organisation in search of a purpose has decided to throw its weight around to intimidate Russians and keep the US Saudi proxy war going in Syria.
This the culmination of the years of untethered aggression of US banksters and their cat’s paws as in zionistan and Saudi bringing the third world war closer to a street near you! Russia is not Iraq, or Libya to roll over and play dead after a few bombing runs, is going missing on the gungho armchair generals in Nato and elsewhere drunk on their success/victory over defunct failing third world adversaries!
Murdoch’s getting agitated about Russian prowess.
Putin raises Syria stakes with threat to Nato jets
A picture taken on October 5, 2015 shows Russian air force pilots and technicians checking a Russian Sukhoi Su-30 jet fighter at the Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian province of Latakia. AFP PHOTO / KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA / ALEXANDER KOTS *RUSSIA OUT*ALEXANDER KOTS/AFP/Getty Images
06 Oct 2015, Syria — SYRIA. OCTOBER 6, 2015. Russia’s Mil Mi-24 combat helicopters at the Hmeymim airbase. TASS — Image by © TASS/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis
October 7 2015
Russia has sent sophisticated jamming equipment to Syria that could blind Nato pilots in a further escalation of the stand-off in the Middle East.
The Krasukha-4 system has been spotted at a Syrian airfield being used by Russian fighter jets and its presence has been confirmed by US officials. The mobile system can disrupt surveillance by drones, satellites or western early warning aircraft.
It has a range of 186 miles (300 kilometres), can also disrupt the systems of radar-guided missiles and would allow Russia to enforce a no-fly zone over President Assad’s military.
Russian weaponry in Syria includes the rapid……paywall
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article4578177.ece
More from Middle East
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With regular and vivid video footage on news bulletins, Russian state media is having a field day with the Kremlin’s intervention in Syria
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Nato has put thousands of troops on standby, ready to be sent to Turkey to protect the country in the face of Russia’s military campaign in Syria
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Excellent post, Craig.
As I have said before, NATO is a crucial issue here in Britain. Or it will be if we make it, which we urgently need to.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, by the way, is a follower of the loony occultist Rudolf Steiner. This is on the record. Practically every bourgeois family in Norway has at least one person involved in anthroposophy.
These nutters are also behind “transition towns” and the “global seed vault” and stuff. I could say a lot more, but I’ll close this point by referring to how they believe that bullying, concentration camps, disasters and wars are a playing out of karma. Would you trust one of their fuckers with the Secretary-Generalship of NATO?
I have long referred to Islamic State, Israeli-certified (by Rita Katz of CITE) Youtube headchoppers as “Saudi cultural ambassadors”.
I reckon most British people have forgotten that the vast majority of the air raids by foreign forces in Syria have been carried out by the US and Britain. We are talking about thousands of raids.
And every one has been unlawful, for exactly the same reason that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was unlawful – because they have not been in self-defence and have not been authorised by the UN Security Council. It’s about time someone makes that point.
There are no two ways about it. Everyone nowadays talks about “illegal war” and “war crime” – well now this is happening in front of their faces again and they’re not noticing. It’s reminiscent of Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres in Viz.
US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter has made the extraordinary statement – that could only work on an idiotic audience – that the Russian forces “have initiated a joint ground offensive with the Syrian regime, shattering the facade that they are there to fight Isil“.
But look at the words that he follows up with…
“This will have consequences for Russia itself, which is rightly fearful of attacks.”
The downing of an aircraft on a sortie is not an “attack”.
What kind of “attack” is he thinking of?
The German defence minister, meanwhile, Ursula von der Leyen (I’ve said it before: watch that bitch, look at her background – she will go far!) said that if Russia targets opposition groups in Syria that are fighting Isis, “Russia will strengthen Isis and this can be neither in the Russian interest, nor in our interest” – a statement of jaw-dropping hypocrisy even for a government minister. Bad Russia, they’re strengthening Isis – you what???
It’s the US-backed Saudi Sunni-flavoured despotism that’s arming and funding ISIS. You don’t have to know much about Iraq and Syria to know that.
As for the British defence secretary, Michael Fallon, he says that Russia’s intervention is making “a very serious situation in Syria much more dangerous”…and that Britain will be sending a hundred more British military trainers to the Baltic states to counter Russian pressure there. Uh? Mustn’t make things more dangerous, eh, Mikey boy? (This guy’s a former director of Quality Care Homes and a business associate of the crook and former jailbird Duncan Ballatyne, a player in the murderous Glasgow ice-cream wars. No shit!)
There has previously been talk of NATO establishing an armed line along the eastern borders of the Baltic states, with absolutely no mention of Kaliningrad. I doubt that Russia could be expected to allow such a line.
These and many other indications that could be mentioned suggest that a NATO-Russia war is very probably about to be started.
Although Russia will not invade western Europe (why the fuck would that be an objective?), it is quite capable of successfully defending itself, including at long range.
And Syria isn’t as far from Russia as certain western mouths are implying.
My information is that
– US and British forces haven’t got the electronic and cyber defences to support a limited war against Russia, either in the Ukraine or the Baltic area
– Russian air defences are pretty damned hot.
Which raises questions about what the western objectives would actually be. The answer doesn’t look good.
And despite lower average living standards than in the US and Britain, morale in Russia is much higher than in those countries.
I don’t know whether you will agree with me on that last point, Craig, but if your reaction is sceptical, please consider that the CIA and MI6 psy-ops against Russia have come to practically fuck-all. (I actually thought they might, back in 2012, but close study showed how mistaken that view was.) At Vauxhall Cross they may enjoy the tits-out actions of Femen, and the low-church types may even enjoy the gyrations of Pussy Riot in St Basil’s, but you should see how youths in the motherland respond to the playing of the Russian national anthem at pop and rock concerts. The morale in Russia is far higher than it’s been in the US or Britain not just for years but for two or three generations at least.
It’s also clear that in psy-ops and intelligence the advantage lies with Russia, not NATO.
The US Congress has begun an investigation into whether US intelligence agencies had anticipated the scale and objectives of the Russian intervention in Syria. That’s according to good ol’ Brit-helpy Reuters. Ha ha!
Russia will not invade western Europe, but they will win any war against NATO that will actually occur.
And I wouldn’t fancy western people’s chances of getting their money out of their bank accounts either, despite the PR that’s been done in support of Swift and Visa and how the Russians are so behind in those departments. Like…really?
The factor I haven’t mentioned is the Zionist machine. Their intelligence, morale and readiness are of course high, and their terrorist capability is global.
When we talk about proxy warfare, we have to recognise that the US has often functioned as an Israeli proxy.
Jewish mafia bosses are pretty damned influential in the Ukraine and in Russia, and the criminal drug-dealing Chabad (formerly known as Lubavitch) types are powerful not just in the US but in the Ukraine, Russia, France, Britain, Africa, India and elsewhere. Among Russian-origin Jewish billionaires there is some kind of vague division between those who have either already aligned with Israel or who may do, and those who are reluctant to or inclined not to. (Aficionados may recall that Zionist interests had to pull out all the stops to get the diamond dealers of Rotterdam to relocate.) Whether this division will sharpen, I don’t know. To what extent there are safe rooms in the KGB – oops, FSB and FSR – not penetrable by Zionist ear’oles, I also don’t know.
@Mary
“sent sophisticated jamming equipment to Syria that could blind Nato pilots”
Sure, it’s Murdoch, but nonetheless Russia is ahead in some areas of electronic and cyber warfare.
The west has been frantically trying to narrow the gap since it got humiliated in 2007 in Estonia – when they hardly knew what had hit them – and since the shit hit the fan in the Ukraine after Sochi. (One wonders whether some military “strategists” in the US actually thought the US navy was going to sashay into Sevastopol – they may have done.)
NATO has always been a fig-leaf for US military control of western Europe and an instrument of US and allied aggression.
At the very first meeting of the NATO Council on September 5, 1949 (in Washington, appropriately enough), the British delegation proposed a covert invasion of Albania (outside the NATO area) to overthrow the government of Enver Hoxha, using a small force of Albanian exiles directed by British personnel. The Americans acquiesced. The operation was a complete fiasco and all the Albanians were killed or captured, partly because a senior British intelligence official (Kim Philby) was working for the Russians and tipped them off in advance.
At the same time, British forces – with propaganda and disinformation provided by the BBC – were launching secret operations in the Baltic states and Ukraine, all designed to undermine the Russian position in eastern Europe – even though Churchill/Attlee and Roosevelt/Truman had explicitly agreed to Soviet control of eastern Europe at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences at the end of WWII. These adventures also failed.
Plus ca change…
p.s. I’ve been (about) 15 km outside Riyadh and there’s nothing there, except desert
Tom Welsh
Don’t be stupid. NATO and Russia both put out absolutely identical propaganda about how clinical and infallibly targeted their air strikes are. Both are lying.