Five years ago this month, Russia began conducting fateful military operations in Syria at the request of the government in Damascus. It was a momentous “turning point,” as noted by Syria’s President Assad this week, whose nation is slowly rising from the ashes of war.
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The armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has escalated over the past week to all-out war. Military casualties are reportedly in the thousands after the worst episode of violence since the end of a war 26 years ago. Civilians are among the dead and towns are coming under heavy artillery fire. Warplanes are being shot down on both sides.
The United Nations was formed after the worldwide defeat of fascism and at the birth of a Cold War. Seventy-five years later those pernicious currents are resurgent. It seems incredible that within living memory, geopolitics have apparently circled back to such destructive and potentially catastrophic dynamics.
Twice in the past week, the United States has clumsily weighed into mounting tensions in the East Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey.
This week marks 19 years since the 9/11 terror attacks hit the northeastern United States resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths. It was an era-defining event which has shaped the first quarter of the 21st century, and perhaps even beyond that. Within weeks of the horror, the United States launched a global “war on terror” which continues until today with even greater horrific consequences.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has all but accused the Russian government of attempted murder in the strange case of Alexei Navalny, the dissident figure who reportedly remains comatose in a Berlin hospital.
Merkel spoke after a German military laboratory announced earlier this week it had “unequivocal proof” that Navalny had been poisoned with “Novichok”, a Soviet-era military-grade nerve agent.
How do we know there will be no change from the election of Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Because they are essentially two faces on either side of the same coin. This is more self-evident after the Republican national convention this week officially nominating Trump for the presidency which followed the Democratic convention last week putting forward Joe Biden as their candidate in the November election.
More than two years ago, in May 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally walked away from the international nuclear accord with Iran signed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. President Trump derided the deal as the “worst ever” and proceeded to re-impose crippling U.S. sanctions on Iran.
William Binney is the former technical director of the U.S. National Security Agency who worked at the agency for 30 years. He is a respected independent critic of how American intelligence services abuse their powers to illegally spy on private communications of U.S. citizens and around the globe. Given his expert inside knowledge, it is worth paying attention to what Binney says.
Right at the beginning of the Cold War, the paranoid slogan “The Russians are coming!” was rather popular in a certain part of the American establishment. It is attributed to an eccentric US Defense Minister who fell out of a window in mysterious circumstances following a mental breakdown. Years passed by and the Cold War apparently came to an end, but the Russians kept on coming without ever arriving, while vast sums of US taxpayers’ money were spent on the arms race and on propaganda proclaiming that the Russians were still coming.
