I have never ruled out the possibility that Russia is responsible for the attack in Salisbury, amongst other possibilities. But I do rule out the possibility that Assad is dropping chemical weapons in Ghouta. In this extraordinary war, where Saudi-funded jihadist head choppers have Israeli air support and US and UK military “advisers”, every time the Syrian army is about to take complete control of a major jihadist enclave, at the last moment when victory is in their grasp, the Syrian Army allegedly attacks children with chemical weapons, for no military reason at all. We have been fed this narrative again and again and again.
We then face a propaganda onslaught from neo-con politicians, think tanks and “charities” urging a great rain of Western bombs and missiles, and are accused of callousness towards suffering children if we demur. This despite the certain knowledge that Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have had consequences which remain to this day utterly disastrous.
I fear that the massive orchestration of Russophobia over the last two years is intended to prepare public opinion for a wider military conflict centred on the Middle East, but likely to spread, and that we are approaching that endgame. The dislocation of the political and media class from the general population is such, that the levers for people of goodwill to prevent this are, as with Iraq, extremely few as politicians quake in the face of media jingoism. These feel like extremely dangerous times.
Couldn’t be more clear
I concur. It is a disaster. I hoped Mueller raid on Trump’s attorney might make him realise he is one of their targets, along with Assad and Putin, but it is lost on him.
In a way the feebleness of Russia may be the only saving grace, if they could sink the ships that launch the cruise missiles all hell would break loose. But it looks beyond their capabilities.
Look up the Zircon missile. Truly hope we dont find out it is real
I’ve often heard the phrase “it’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion”, but I can’t ever remember having experienced this surreal feeling of being an impotent spectator to what now appears to be an inevitable disaster
In a way – and this is of course assuming that we will at some stage be able to look back on these events – I am now almost hoping that it all goes off sooner rather than later, so that we can get on with rebuilding our lives, our national identities and our international reputations: some of the best literature of the 20th century was written quite literally in the ruins of post-WWII Europe, and I take quiet comfort from the fact that humans as a species seem able to draw upon vast resources of self-reliance and resilience when faced with the devastation of what they previously considered to be their birthright. People seem to derive a sense of purpose from adversity, and maybe the flip side of that – complacency bordering on arrogance – is what has brought us to where we are this evening. I wonder what tomorrow morning will look like
You must be very young…we marched against the Iraq war in 2001 (?year?) then felt the impotence as the missiles rained down on Baghdad for no reason other than to perpetuate the war machines a few days later.
I was an officer in the British Army during the Greenham Common protests; it felt different back then because The Enemy was The Bad Guy, not us
But that did not feel like it could end up with nukes flying between Russia and the US.
Spaull [this reply may perhaps be out of synch]
oh yes it did!. Greenham was all about the first generation of cruise missiles and neutron warheads, and where I was based the talk was all of Pershing II tactical nukes
I once spent 14 hours straight “buttoned up” for NBC in a Scorpion CVR(T) in the freezing cold just outside Hannover, and I can tell you, if it kicks off this time, I’m going to be out there dancing around in the fallout in my fur bikini to get it over quickly rather than go through that nonsense again
battlecruiser Admiral Nakhimov is in refit at moment , but may be pushed out early
Could the raid on Trump’s attorney be timed to place greater pressure on him to act militarily in Syria in order to deflect from the investigation and garner supprt?
Could not agree more, the public are being conditioned for serious military action. The same is happening in the US where I am at the moment. This is very serious as the incidents being used as justification are paper thin and do not stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
I can’t think of a more obvious false flag than this alleged attack in Douma. I don’t know how Russia can stop the west from continually poking them with a sharp stick. Dangerous times.
Dave G. wrote: “I don’t know how Russia can stop the west from continually poking them with a sharp stick.” See my post below at https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/04/the-rush-to-war/comment-page-2/#comment-734083 .
I agree with you , they have condemned Russia without any conclusive proof on either Salisbury or Syrian supposed but unproved chemical attack ? Someone wants to cause a military situation without waiting for the conclusive proof ! Why the rush I wonder ? Until a thorough investigation has been undertaken I hope that they can resist any attempt to exacerbate any intervention of any kind !
The rush is because of the coming Financial Crash and they need a distraction. Also they are aware of Russias superiority in Hypersonic nuclear weapons and are hoping to restrict the coming clash to the Syrian theatre.
The Big Picture is the failure of the Mahan Theory of Sea Route dominance by their 11 carrier groups. This is nullified by the New Silk road
High speed rail trade route from China to Europe,
This route spells the demise of the US dollar as Reserve currency and the Achilles heel of US hegemonic power.
Syria is blocking the route to Iran and up into Central ASIA to cut and control this route and impose the US dollar toll.
He who controls Central Asia controls the world island from Asia to Europe,as per Sir Halford Mackendrie , Heartlands Theory.
This is a reprise of the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires. nothing changes, just the weapons get bigger.
How can I legally withold my taxes and stop feeding the system that disrespects the views of those it purports to represent?
Lawful Rebellion. Article 61, Magna Carta was enacted March 2001.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1327734/Peers-petition-Queen-on-Europe.html
Good analysis. Salford Lad
many millions killed in wars in the 20th century, history tells us millions more will likely be killed in war in the 21st century, yet wars are started by a relative few, words are not enough to express my utter contempt for these despicable power seekers, US behaves like the school bully, i said a while back the illusive motive in the Skripal saga was beginning to show itself, demonization to isolate to weaken before war. It’s odd how it’s usually women and children that appear to suffer from chemical attacks in Syria, are adult men immune.
Interestingly, the majority of the war dead occurred outside of both World Wars and the US accounts ofr a good chunk of those. In the period after 1945, the death toll from US wars exceeds 12 million.
yes and it is quite ironic the usa wants to present itself as the bastion of all things good and decent when it is about exactly 180 degrees opposite…. brainwashing works on americans, or a good number of them anyway.. might not be that different for all the poodle countries, canada, australia and etc. too…
The State Department is now in the unenviable position of having to backstop President Trumps tweet storm from just after the ‘Breaking News’ of the alleged, chemical attack.
Clearly, Trump overstepped the bounds of reasonableness in his tweet, and shows us why Twitter may not be the tool best suited to international relations, and diplomatic signalling.
Even though President Trump was out of line with his tweet, there’s going to be no way that such a fact could ever be admitted. The Russians will be aware of this aspect, and we can yet hope that they hatch between them, a US attack that like the last one, is more symbolic than damaging.
Viewing events from a more positive aspect, the latest Israeli attack on Syria does seem to demonstrate that Syrian air defences are such that the Israelis are unable to enter Syrian airspace without the real risk of loss ? Instead having to rely upon stand off weapons launched from Lebanese airspace.
That fact represents quite a degree of emasculation to the belligerence of Israel, and again shows that Trump with his recent comments of Syrian withdrawal that had to be immediately walked back, Needs to refrain from making foreign policy on the run. Like it or not, the USA is on the hook to support Israel, and whilst they cannot back out of that support, it would be a mistake to think that such support is unconditional.
I think that Russia, Iran and other nations, who are defending countries like Syria from military aggression, could could make even more effective use of the newsmedia. Perhaps those who conduct debates and interviews on Iran’s http://presstv.com – Marcia Hashemi (spelling?) and Waqar Rizvi – and Russia’s https://rt.com – Oksana Boyko, Afshin Rattansi, [1] Sophie Shevardnadze and others – could, prominently and repeatedly, issue standing invitations to the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Nikki Haley et al., or their delegated spokespersons, to put their views on their programs and have those views discussed and debated. Surely, if Theresa May et al. are so confident that they are speaking the truth, they would jump at the opportunity to show, to the audiences of RT and PressTV, how the views presented by those stations are wrong?
Of course, I don’t expect that they will acccept. RT and PressTV should then display prominently on their sites, lists of all those Western polititcal leaders who have refused.
Given that hundreds of thousands have already been killed by military aggression, just since the Gulf War of 1991, and that the stakes for humanity are so high if this pattern is not stopped, I see know reason for the managers of RT and PressTV to pull any punches from now on.
FOOTNOTE[S]
[1] However, I think all the others mentioned would struggle hard to improve on Afshin Rattansi. He is always issuing invitations to his detractors to appear on “Going Underground”. If those who declined to be interviewed by Mr Rattansi were prominently listed, his impact would be even greater.
the exposure rt and presstv get is peanuts next to the western msm… it is truly a david and goliath story.. david has to pick his spots!
Speaking of RT, remember the suspicious death of Mikhail
Lesion in the USA. He had a part ownership of RT and introduced it in the US. But he died, you see – what happened was that he beat himself to death. A strange way of committing suicide.
What terrifies my is the radicalization of normal, intelligent people, strangling any discussion and accelerating the madness.
We have come to the point where I am afraid to speak my mind at work, because I will be accused of being a Russian agent (I am in the US, btw.). Even very smart people with doctorates call Russia’s actions an ‘act of war’, they say that we finally need to stand up to them and much worse.
People, who call themselves liberals at heart, who are engaged in human rights activities, suddenly sound like fanatics, and tell me that we can’t let Russia get away with this. No need for evidence, because Russia is obviously the perpetrator.
A am seriously doubting my sanity, as suddenly everyone is throwing basing humanitarian and legal principles over board.
I don’t understand how, but clearly the propaganda machine has been successful.
Same story in online discussions:
Take for example a blog by an accomplished scientist with a phd in organic chemistry who has been working in the pharmaceutical industry for many years. He even wrote a series of posts about chemical warfare agents, so I assume he knows the subject as well as any other chemist.
In a recent blog post, he made it clear that his post will attract critical posts, and that these are either extremely skeptical onlookers, or liars.
“I have already had comments on the earlier post throwing doubt and uncertainly about this case (and the earlier Litvinenko assassination, even). More of these may accrue to this post as well. Some of these may in fact be honest doubts from extremely skeptical onlookers – but others are surely lies. Smiling, straight-into-the-camera-lens lies.”
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/03/15/on-lies-and-liars
Obviously critical voices will remain silent if they are being vilified beforehand as a liar or an idiot, but the much more important question is this:
How can propaganda machinery turn such a highly educated person into a believer. What does he see that we don’t?
Nobody, I too am very disconcerted with the evident influence of anti Russian propaganda. It is mixed in with stupid stuff about Russia being the centre of all persecution of homosexuals. I notice that no one is being incited to worry about Saudi policies on gay rights.
What is so scary is how even educated people are falling for this nonsense. Sometimes I am doubting my sanity, but this all seems so obvious. It is as if the part in the brain responsible for critical thinking had been switched off in most of the population.
Look at the comment section of the NYTimes. Always the home of the left-leaning liberal elite. Today people over there are calling for blood.
Back in school, we all have seen these horrible pictures of trainloads of soldiers happy to join WW1.
They had decorated their trains with slogans like “we’ll be back by Christmas”. Everyone alive today in the west must have seen these pictures in high school. All of us have asserted then how much smarter we are then those people and how we would never fall for such propaganda. I was a kid during the last years of the cold war and remember the threat, the fear of a nuclear war.
Today, all of the reason has left people, as if they were under external control. In WW1, people were longing for a war, because they were hoping it would bring clarity to the situation. Maybe today people’s feelings are similar. All of us are under a lot of stress, and we are being constantly inundated with anti-russian propaganda. Maybe people feel that if we just stand up and show the Russians who is boss the stress and fear will go away.
Even if Skripal is going to die and Russia was responsible, which is of course a possibility, it would not be worth to go to war. Are we going to send Americans to Syria to die there because some dubious double Agent has been poisoned?
You bring up an interesting point about the gay rights, I didn’t think of those, but it is very true. I know the Russians are pretty macho and anti-gay, but homosexuality is legal and people don’t end up in prison or get beheaded for being gay. There have been scores of attacks on gay couples in western Europe committed by fundamentalist Muslims, but none of this is ever discussed in public. I personally know a couple of gays that moved to a different area because they were afraid for their life, and this was in a big European city.
“Even if Skripal is going to die and Russia was responsible, which is of course a possibility, it would not be worth to go to war. Are we going to send Americans to Syria to die there because some dubious double Agent has been poisoned?”
Totally correct! It has always been understood that spies are not protected by any legal conventions. What if the UK had poisoned Guy Burgess, would anyone have cared? My late father, who lived through the Cold War, commented that all the intelligence agents were expendable, and often killed by their own employers: “that’s why they call them spooks – because they are already dead.”
Propaganda comes in other forms besides newspapers, from Hollywood movies to US TV drama. Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda took control of all media, most of which of course is entertainment, but which can be written to convey a message: cinema, radio, theatre, book publishing, even school plays. Everything had to spread the Nazi line and that’s why I no longer watch US drama or war films, because it’s just the same with Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, and even Mark Wahlberg in Patriot’s Day, some lie about the Boston Bombing.
Yes Michael. I believe I might be right in saying that the term Novichock was first used in several episodes of the US TV series Strike Back with, you’ve guessed it, an almost identical plot of what is playing out now!
thanks craig.. bang on! keep on keeping on… someone has to address the constant lies and suggestion that our msm and political leadership have become known for pursuing… thank you..
The US along with the UK governments are about to start the WW3!!!!
It is on you now people from UK and US to stop them!
During civil wars the treatment of warring parties often involves atrocity and the death of civilians. The US Civil War, the English Civil War, the French Revolution… the list is endless. Foreign states do not, in principle, have the right to involve themselves as combatants in civil wars, much less as moral arbiters.
But this is not a civil war. It is the evocation of multiple state-sponsored ‘uprisings’ which have only remained viable because of external support. That by itself has been the cause of more harm to ordinary people than can be imagined. To be outraged by the death of a few in gas attacks while ensuring the persistence of the wider conflict and its horrible death toll from conventional weapons is breath-taking hypocrisy. Are we to believe that the US and Israel seek only to avenge civilian deaths from specific causes? Having bombed Syria to rubble and destabilized much of Europe with a massive refugee problem, the aim is apparently to prevent peace from breaking out in case the refugees return home. And as you say, there is dangerous brinksmanship given the possibility of direct Iranian and Russian involvement. The mobilization of press and media resources has been remarkable. It marks the death of the fourth estate as a credible democratic force, bar a few unlikely holdouts (I see the Saudis are ramping up the punishment of Qatar for, among other things, Aljazeera). The fifth estate is under international attack from a range of censorship, surveillance, crime and IP laws. So a well-informed democracy is increasingly rare and fear, xenopobia and jingoism prevail.
Dangerous times indeed. I haven’t felt like this since the Cuban missile crisis. At least it’s unlikely Putin will take his shoe off at the UN.
A century on we’re led by donkeys, but are we still lions?
A larger shape is crystallising out of the past few years just as many predicted. The election of Trump was a delay toward the catastrophic terminus of a global military industrial behemoth out of control. Nothing more, thanks to self described Liberals cheering on the Russia narrative. Innumerable and eminently justifiable reasons to impeach Trump were never aired as the machine ground onward over hearts and homes and bone impartially.
I predicted in 2016 that not only would Trump be brought to heel by ‘Russiagate’ but also that agencies, intent on deflecting American rage, would be warmly embraced by the fake anti-war movements, along with the agenda many Americans thought they had just voted against. And that ‘Centrists,’ Liberals and Neo-liberals alike would all break their ships on the rocks, guided by generational anti-Russian siren songs.
In the UK, the unprecedented push to oust Jeremy Corbyn has suddenly assumed chilling new dimensions. But of one thing we can be fairly certain, Ye-Olde-New Labour, had they been successful in 2015 would have greased the wheels of war willingly, unquestioningly.
Lions?
I think we can safely rule out any involvement of Russia in the Skripal food poisoning case. Where is the motive?
The age old game of plunder needs its justifications. In Syria the plunder is oil, and the justification is what? We care about them and need to fight to protect them? Democracy or something, right?
In the old days it was enough to justify plunder on basic racist grounds — ‘white man’s burden’, their racial inferiority, belief in false Gods, uncivilised ways of life, etc. — and a thousand evil genies were released from bottles to that end. We are still living with and trying to come to terms with the anti-social blowback of those genies to this day.
You see, plunder in itself is very hard to justify, even if it is easy to explain. “They have oil, we want it and we are prepared to kill for it!”, isn’t a very prudent stance to take when you think about it. Justifying that sort of stuff will get you in all sorts of trouble. It’s the moral equivalent of stealing purses from old ladies. Actually, when you boil it down, you are inviting others to rob and plunder you on those very same terms.
So we dress it up. Racism served a purpose in that regard, just as communism, Islamic fundamentalism, and humanitarianism amongst other pretexts have. We use these ‘isms’ as a justification for plunder because we can’t face the truth that we are simply robbing bastards.
That all said, I don’t think the Syrian conflict will escalate to dangerous levels. It might take us further down the road to some sort of new Cold War but the Cold War in itself was another justification for interventions in the south and continuing plunder.
And that’s the thing, we are as always talking about the south. The Cold War was a North-South thing, not the purported East-West thing we read about in spy novels and the papers. Plunderers like to plunder, they don’t like to get into fist fights with enemies that can fight back. That’s why it won’t escalate.
I think there’s a lot of money to be made from keeping it a Cold War, I think it’s good for business in both russia and the us, although I think putin would rather have just traded with the EU. There are a lot of daft old men that work in George Town who will not retire. Until they die off I can’t see any change.
A full hot war won’t be as good for business so I can’t see it escalating. However a few “almosts” is necessary to make the Cold War believable.
Good piece up at The Duran help explains Guardian hysteria:
“The reason that logic is not being followed, and why against all reason a military strike is likely, is because those who want a military strike do not want an objective investigation to take place, which might expose them as having acted previously on a false basis.”
http://theduran.com/russia-controls-douma-guarantees-impartial-investigation-us-attack-more-likely/
my thoughts exactly. Keep posting xx
Tucker Carlson libertarian right commentator on Fox News just delivered a powerful seven minute anti-war monologue on his show. That’s how crazy things are in the US. Only sane person in corporate media is a libertarian right Fox News host…
https://mobile.twitter.com/caitoz/status/983520608775356416
Don’t forget what a war hawk Hillary was/is.
God knows I did not want Trump to win the Presidency, but I don’t for one moment think this particular incident would have played out any differently. In fact, it might have played out sooner.
Ah, but is Tucker Carlson hoping to save the world or hoping to save Tucker Carlson? It depends on what he thought about war on Afghanistan in 2001, because I reckon Syria is not the fifth or sixth war thereafter but the progression of that same war. If he was against the war then he can honourably say he’s against war now, but if he wanted war then, maybe it’s getting a bit too close now.
I hope Russia publishes the intelligence that led them to predict, correctly, this falsely attributed attack. It’s unlikely they were naive enough to believe that revealing the plan would necessarily forestall its implementation, and they must surely have prepared a public relations response in the eventuality that the parties involved went ahead with it regardless – a fortiori given the demonisation they’ve been subjected to, including in international bodies, in the Skripal affair.
One highly aggravating feature of this is that in the minds of some, crying “fake” or “false flag” or both puts us in the same camp as the far-right psychos in the US who talk e.g. of “crisis actors” at Sandy Hook, to whom most people have a strong “yuck, you sick bastards” reaction.
“I hope Russia publishes the intelligence that led them to predict, correctly, this falsely attributed attack…”
They didn’t necessarily have or even need any intel-style intelligence to predict this – just common sense. I and many other commenters saw it coming as soon as the truth about Salisbury began to emerge. After all what actual evidence do the anti-Assad forces require?
A shitty little two-bob video that I could have knocked together in five minutes on my laptop.
Look! Some people are lying on the ground!
Look! Some children are being hosed with water!
Look! Other children are having respirators held over their faces!
What fool could need any more proof that BUTCHER ASSAD has dropped a BARREL BOMB containing CHEMICAL WEAPONS on a HOSPITAL filled with WOMEN AND CHILDREN, egged on by PUTIN!?!
To WAR!!! To WAR!!!
N_ : “[…] puts us in the same camp as the far-right psychos in the US who talk e.g. of “crisis actors” at Sandy Hook, to whom most people have a strong “yuck, you sick bastards” reaction.”
Unfortunately, these same sick bastards exist over here, adamantly parroting the US far-right line that every mass shooting is indeed staged. Not only that, but in the “false-flag” Las Vegas shooting last year, besides there being no real injuries and crisis actors, there were also multiple shooters! Go figure, as the Yanks would say.
Why don’t these conspiracy buffs ask themselves the obvious question: Why doesn’t Fox News – the far-right mouthpiece for the NRA, the GOP etc. – call out these conspiracies themselves? If there really was no genuine shooting and casualties, why doesn’t Fox simply say so outright, and get the “truth” out?
The answer should be pretty obvious.
Far-right psychos!
Maybe you mean serious researchers from across the board. https://vimeo.com/210054322
I KNOW THIS ISN’T MY PLACE BUT.
Please do not let us get dragged into US gun conflicts or other divisive areas whether they are conspiracies or not. Those who starts posting these extremely controversial topics might not have the interest of this blog as their agenda. I am confident everyone on here does not want this blog discredited. So it might be best for those of us to beware of being dragged into conversations about topics that are not relevant to the threads in question.
Please feel free to express your view on me writing this, but I have enjoyed finding this site and I don’t want to see it demonized by those who only seek to stop the questioning of our authorities.
Thank you, you are correct in replying. Point taken.
Sorry Craig but the Skripal case appears to have become a bit of obsession, you’ve written about little else over the past month, and you’ve gone out of your way to ridicule any suggestion that it might be the Russians. What’s caused the U-Turn?
As far as the recent chemical weapon attack on Ghouta is concerned this enclave has been under siege for five years now and the Syrian army are still struggling to take it. Accurate numbers are hard to come by but 60,000 to 90,000 Syrian soldiers have died in the civil war so far with rebel casualties 2-3 times that number and of course hundreds and thousands injured on both sides, some of whom will be needing a lifetime of care. Half the pre-war population have been forced from their homes, 4-5 million have fled the country. Assad wants to finish the war, obviously, and finish it quickly. Of course he’ll resort to any and every weapon he has available.
Under your logic, if “Assad wants to finish the war” and “finish it quickly”, why would he use CWs that, with 110% of certainty, will provoke a US attack with Tomahawks or worse?.
Well the last barrage didn’t seem to really do a great deal of damage.
You mean the 2017 barrage based on the previous CWs (Sarin) false flag, already debunked by no other than Mad Dog Mattis, I guess.
http://www.newsweek.com/now-mattis-admits-there-was-no-evidence-assad-using-poison-gas-his-people-801542
Read the actual press release and you get a slightly different take.
https://apnews.com/bd533182b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5
Straight from the “Actual Press Release” you link to:
“The U.S. has no evidence to confirm reports from aid groups and others that the Syrian government has used the deadly chemical sarin on its citizens, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday. “We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. “We do not have evidence of it.”
Sorry Kempe. I’m still getting the same take as from the Newsweek report. As in, er… “The U.S. has no evidence to confirm reports from aid groups and others that the Syrian government has used the deadly chemical sarin on its citizens, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.”
Sorry, no Reply button.
@Kempe
How can you read something different from this “press release”, quoted from your link?:
—-
The U.S. HAS NO EVIDENCE to confirm reports from aid groups and others THAT THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT HAS USED THE DEADLY CHEMICAL SARIN ON ITS CITIZENS, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.
“We have other reports from the battlefield from people who claim it’s been used,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon. “We do not have evidence of it.”
—
So, basically, they launched 59 Tomahawks due to a supposed attack with Sarin gas, by Assad “The Butcher”, of which, ten months later, they recognized NEVER had ANY evidence.
Yours is just propaganda and very lousy for that matter.
——————————————
Kempe
April 10, 2018 at 06:53
Read the actual press release and you get a slightly different take.
https://apnews.com/bd533182b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5
Kempe
You are sort of projecting how someone would act without any resort to logic. The facts are that the SAA have already liberated 90 % of East Ghouta with only the city of Douma. Throughout this they have used overwhelming military force and managed to evacuate over 150,000 civilians who have been jubilant, but of course you wouldn’t know because it was not reported by our MSM. So having done so and having given the terrorists in Douma several chances to be evacuated so as to save civilian life, they refuse. So when this victory is so near , Assad decides to kill 40 civilians with chlorine to hasten this military action and attract approving. No logic whatsoever.
“and the Syrian army are still struggling to take it. ”
A complete distortion, which, if you were honest, you would know to be untrue. The Syrian offensive has progressed rapidly, and if I understand correctly Douma is now all in their hands.
You do understand correctly. The rebels have a greed to a safe passage out of the area and have left.
you my friend…..are a total idiot….are you sure you’re not Kay Burley??
Yes, for some years I have been worried by the horrible parallels between the first years of last century and the first of this. I believe the fundamental cause of WW1 was a failing political and economic “status quo” with decaying centres of politics, a refusal to acknowledge change in society, outmoded political and economic systems and the misguided attempts to preserve power in the face of this inexorable change. This is what is happening now – our economic, political and social systems are decaying and instability is the new norm and greed and corruption thrive. The demonisation of Russia and Putin is part of the same picture, much as the demonisation of Kaiser “Bill” Wilhelm 2nd by the UK press and parliament at the turn of last century, concerned at Germany’s supposed rivalry to the British Empire. Similarly, Putin and Russia are becoming more effective rivals of the West, not to be tolerated by the UK or the US, and their own failing systems make irrationality the norm. . Kaiser Bill complained in 1908 –
“You English… are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation? What more can I do than I have done? I declared with all the emphasis at my command, in my speech at Guildhall, that my heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word?” And for Putin, according to a recent BBC report “At the same time, the idea that Russia faces a hostile outside world has spread. It was the West that fomented chaos in the 1990s and tried to force its ways on to Russia, Putin argues. Not satisfied with winning the Cold War, he insists that the West wanted to humiliate the former superpower……..So he has built up Russia – allowed it to feel strong again. Now, it is pushing back”.
Four years after Kaiser Bill’s plea, Europe erupted and blood like lava flowed through the continent, as it did just 21 years later. Perhaps wisdom and understanding could have averted this cataclysm, but though no doubt it was present in some parts of society, it was overwhelmed by jingoism and martial rhetoric. As it is now.
there were – apparently – two notable incidents during the UN Security Council meeting yesterday, both of which I missed:
1. The Russian delegate stated quite bluntly that, if the USA once more refers to his Government as “a regime”, then he will stand up and bring the meeting to an end
2. As soon as the Syrian delegate started speaking, the entire US contingent walked out. How childish can you get? Well, quite childish, actually – its on the same level as “shut up and go away”.
What we are witnessing here is the demise of the United Nations as a forum for discussion and resolution: it has long been toothless and prone to manipulation, but now we see how the USA can evict foreign UN delegates that it doesn’t like, insult those it wishes to goad, quite literally turn its back on those whose views it shows contempt for, whilst reflexively protecting Israel in the face of universal condemnation.
The USA certainly is not “agreement capable”, and of all the Member Nations of the UN, why the hell did the World default to them as a de facto hegemon? – it’s the surely the equivalent of electing a clown like Trump as President and expecting anything other than pantomime along the lines of “The Apprentice-meets-Punch & Judy”
Ophelia
Sadly nobody voted for them to be a hegemon. But to get over this rudeness maybe the UN should introduce a rule that if a country does not attend the whole discussion, they should be disqualified from voting on the issue.
I would be interested in confirmation (video preferably) of these 2 incidents, if anyone has them readily at hand.
Every time capital or the owning classes were in real trouble there was a war, or in some form, a world war, each and every one paved with incitements, propaganda and staged provocations. However it happened, 9/11 was opportunistically seized and exploited to the full by the convergence of interests which allowed it or made it happen. The Salisbury and all of the Syria alleged chemical incidents are lovingly crafted but amateurish miniatures, amplified through the macro lens of modern mainstream media.
I have been Following a Great writer for a few years now… The Burning Blogger of Bedlam –
his / Her, most recent work Articulates how I have been thinking.. Very Worrying Stuff –
” Syria is also definitively where international law died. Arguably, Iraq and Libya saw international law already collapsing: but Syria is where even all pretense of international law died. It is where borders, sovereignty and the right to self-determination got tossed out the window.
It is also where compassion, logic, reason, diplomacy, and truth, all seem to have died – along with journalism and along with probably the United Nations – their corpses rotting in the desert for all to see.
I want to explore here the subject of why international law is so important; why it is dead; and why I blame not just governments and military regimes, but journalists and the media.
… ” This brings to mind, for me, Gaddafi’s angry UN speech in 2009, in which he warned “any one of us could be next: every year could be the turn of someone else.” What he meant was that “every year could be the turn of someone else” to be invaded or violated.
The question I ask now is whether this discarding of international law is by design….
https://theburningbloggerofbedlam.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/the-end-of-international-law/
“The question I ask now is whether this discarding of international law is by design….”
By design, indeed.
I think the situation is more like this: “International Law should be respected unless you happen to be an exceptional country” or, in Orwellian terms, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
After UNSC Resolution 1973 fiasco, about Lybia in 2011, after which China and Russia started to oppose any additional interventionist UNSC resolution, International Law and the UN stopped to be useful for TPTB.
I studied International Law as part of the core 2nd-year Tripos syllabus, and what stuck me back then was that it was no more than a body of Jurisprudence without the backing of an independently potent Judiciary or the mechanisms of Justice: more prosaically, “all hat and no cattle”.
Even back then – many years ago – one of the key concerns was the extraterritorial application of domestic US law, and the seeds of what became an asymettrical relationship where overseas citizens could be extradited to the USA without evidence, but not vice versa.
It ultimately comes down to what you think “Justice” looks like – if you are The Exceptional Nation, then your righteousness not only places you above the Law, but also in Judgement over lesser tribes. To be frank, we really have not progressed much since the very earliest palaeolithic societies, where Might Was Right, and if you were fool enough to site your country on top of “my” oil, then that was your problem not mine
I’ve thought for some time our corrupt western leaders have been demolishing international law [such as that abomination at Guantanamo, Extraordinary Rendition and reinventing torture], is because they want another war of annihilation as there was between the Nazis and Communists. Anything goes, no Geneva Convention. Millions of us wiping out millions of them before they wipe us all out kind of thing.
” Saudi-funded jihadist head choppers have Israeli air support and US and UK military “advisers'”
Craig, you are forgetting about God, who has made it abundantly clear in His Qur’an that political confederacy with the enemies of Islam is 1/ Betrayal 2/ Not allowed 3/ Going to lead to disaster , as it already has, for the Muslims.
In the entire history of Islam generation after generation of Muslims has been sucked into fighting against other Muslims on the promise of being given power in the Muslim community by the British imperial colonisers. every generation of political Muslims has produced a bunch of criminal confederates who have fought against the Muslims on the promise of power. It’s not just Muslims, the British interference in Ireland comes to mind.
What God says about these confederates with the enemies of Islam is that even if our prophet SAW, or ourselves his successors, forgive them, He, Allah, will never forgive them, because they have sold their own souls for money and power. The problem is not the disconnect between the powerful elite and rational Western human beings. The problem is the adherence of political Muslims, members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist sects, to the powerful Western elites instead of obedience to the word of God, the Qur’an.
I personally think that God will punish the enemies of Islam, the Western elites, and their Islamist scum confederates. He has already destroyed the military superiority of the West by advances in Russian radar technology. Russia is patient and ready for a Western intervention. You have only to look at the intellectual quality of the Tory politicians, huffing and blinding about Russia, to know that the only endgame is destruction of the jingoist British politicians of all parties and their servile MSM. Bring it on.
“Craig, you are forgetting about God […]”
No, sorry. God – if he ever existed – has long since forgotten about us.
giyane forgets that one of the problems is that god sometimes also acts as a real estate arbitrator.
SA
I don’t forget that Allah sometimes acts as a real-estate arbitrator. The Muslim Brotherhood logic is that if they can pretend that the Muslims of Syria and Iraq, Libya and Palestine, are not Muslims then they can make jihad against them. there’s nothing in the Qur’an about having to make jihad against Muslkims, but there’s quite a lot about oppressing your own brothers and sisters in Islam.
The whole ridiculous charade about this being a civil war is now replaced by another ridiculous charade about being a proxy world war, part of the great game. The Syrian war is an attempt by USUKIS to replace the benign authority of the present imams with the fascist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria has resisted 8 years of confederated malice by the political classes of the West and Islamism. the real estate may change but Muslims will never accept MB fascism as a replacement for the old renditioning dictators.
Put it in your head , not going to happen. Trouble is neither Theresa May nor Boris Johnson have got a head to put it in.
So I suppose you evolved from a rotten banana skin – makes sense.
Your larger point is a good one. It never ceases to amaze me how the central game, “down the line we’ll give you something you really want,” is never connected up with what happens to every one of these puppets a little while after they’ve got it.
News that the May regime, having demolished the guinea pigs and agreed to the CIA-sponsored disappearance of the Skripals, is now intent upon demolishing the Skripals’ home, the Mill pub and Zizzis restaurant leads one to wonder what evidence might reside in Salisbury Cathedral and whether this too will be demolished, or merely exorcised.
Salisburyites can now appreciate the upside of having their city ringed by military bases.
just a reminder here from mid-March
https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2018/03/14/russian-claims-that-us-is-planning-a-false-flag-chemical-weapons-attack-is-a-distraction-pentagon-says/
Pentagon spokesrobot claims that Russia makes things up, in a made-up claim.
Speaking of reminders, we’ve been here before:
Last year Trump bombed Syria knowing full well they were not behind the chemical attacks.
https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html
See also:
Washington’s False Flag: United Nations Confirmed that US Supported Syrian “Rebels” Were Using Chemical Weapons
https://www.globalresearch.ca/united-nations-confirmed-that-us-supported-rebels-were-using-chemical-weapons/5583988
And the people opposed to the rush to (war)profiteering are White Supremacists?
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-white-supremacists-call-syrian-chemical-attack-false-flag-operation-1.5988679
do they mean this US commentator?
https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/04/09/tucker-carlson-chemical-attack-children-syria-false-flag-attack/219895
or this US commentator?
https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2018/04/09/ron-paul-on-another-false-flag-will-trump-escalate-in-syria/
seems there are several places, other than the Guardian, that use the term “false-flag” advisedly
One might think that Trump might dwell on his Scottish ancestry and the legend (admittedly one of many competing derivations) that Albia was one of the daughters of the King of Syria, who, set adrift, washed up on the west coast of Scotland, wed a native and gave the name Alba to Scotland and later Albion to the whole of Britain.
Are there any practicing journalists who have heard of the Gulf of Tonkin or who observed the disasters that followed tall tales about WMD in iraq, Gaddafi’s supposed slaughter of his own people, etc?
Where are all the politicians who assured us that “lessons will be learned” after their lemming-like rush to war on a mountain of lies? And all of the news outlets who headlined those promises?
How is anybody with a memory greater than that of a gnat supposed to maintain respect for these people? Sadly we seem to be living in days where you are scorned for mentioning the glaring lessons of the very recent past.
Is there a website that catalogues the drum-beating paid journalists/war-shills?
Listing them openly in a Wiki – for future reference. Post war.
Newspapers/websites can easily be profiled by a simple machine learned tool looking for propaganda pushers. Easy to discriminate at present when they push fact free stories that are orthogonal to rationality and actuality.
Billy-the-fizz , todays Torygraph, might well head today’s Wiki.
The well paid head of International Rescue, popped up on the radio yesterday, at first I thought he was talking sense – but although all his words were nearly correct, he had somehow swapped over the aggressor and the victims, shameless.
These demonstratively false ideas can be written down, simply, and remembered.
Now there’s a plan. Naming and shaming the enablers of war and purveyors of deceitful lies.
The lessons were learned OK. They were just not the lessons we thought they were telling us.
The lessons they learned were that in the modern day where people can source information from many more sources they will have to make there lies more visual and involved Hollywood productions in the theater of operations. They also learned that they have to have control of all the MSM. They can’t have some channels like UK C4 news or some journalists of the BBC poking holes in the Iraq WMD story.
So yes the lessons were learned and we were better off before they learned them.
This regularly repeated use of horrific set piece false flag tactics, whether staged or real, is as criminal as it is atrocious.
The military industrial complex, and its taxpayer/banker-backed quest for world privatisation and indebtedness, has reached the hitherto warned about size and power. Its mafia-style organ grinders can keep us in a permanent state of war, all the while lining up the long ago planned targets with their apparent command of government leaders and mainstream media, who are groomed and selected for their eagerness to both follow the script and feather their own nests.
They know that Russia has a nuclear arsenal and are backed by China. Do they care? When people like you and me, or even Mr Corbyn, call foul, they simply tweak their narrative and push forward with their agenda regardless.
It seems that this machine is going to roll on inexorably forward until densely populated cities start getting hit, yet our visible leaders seem to show no caution or restraint.
We need to be scared and we need to be angry and push back as best as we can, but I fear the machine is too firmly rooted and too well resourced to be shifted. Brave whistleblowers come forward, pleeease.
Two years ago anti-Russia media propaganda had me tweeting my prediction of a pre-planned war with Russia in 2021. Could this come to be true, but sooner? Are Theresa May, Gavin Williams or Boris Johnson set to cast themselves as our new Churchill in a new and unprovoked world war for corporate dominance?
It doesn’t look good.
But is it not clear that the Skripal affair was a deliberate diversion and prelude to galvanise everyone to attack Russia in Syria and to stifle all internal criticism? It is difficult to still believe the Russians may have done this for no gain whatsoever, even the supposed target is alive.
It has been previously stated that Putin had nothing to gain, quoting the elections and the World Cup but the real target throughout has been Syria and East Ghouta. The recklessness of the rhetoric is such that there are deep secrets in Douma and East Ghouta that the West wants to be forgotten and not found because there will be clear evidence of complicity with jihadists.
It appears that Naval ships are already being placed for action in the east Mediterranean and are being buzzed according to some ME sources. Will it stop at limited action or will the Russians really carry out their threat to attack the platform from which missiles are launched. I am afraid the countdown to a major conflagration has already started.
My suggestion: We need to push one message, hard, and constantly.
Why the hell are we proposing military action to help ISIS win a war?