Security


A recent leaked email from an OPCW officer is even more damning evidence that its initial report from its own inspectors was doctored to point the finger at Assad. But who cares?
Was it Edmund Burke who said “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”? Sadly, this adage doesn’t apply to western leaders or the journalists in big titles which can’t admit to a ‘mea culpa’ on Douma chemical attacks.

Cuba and Palestine do not have a great deal in common, other than that their citizens are innocent targets of Trump Washington’s spiteful malevolence. In the case of Cuba this has been exercised with varying degrees of effectiveness for sixty years, and the fandangos of the military-industrial complex have included an attempt to invade the country and several efforts to assassinate its leader.

We are led to understand that the unipolar ‘moment’ of US ascendency is giving way – grudgingly – to a multipolar world: a reversion perhaps to a more nineteenth century ‘concert’ of powers (or, of significant ‘poles’ – since size is not always the prime determinant). And that Trump is trying simply to prolong that hegemonic, US moment – albeit through different means, which is to say, adopting seemingly bizarre, and sometimes counterproductive, acts and language, that infuriate the American foreign policy establishment.

A strange spy affair broke out in Balkan Casablanca, aka Serbia, on Wednesday. Were NATO “advisers” and liaison personnel embedded in the Serbian army command finally caught red-handed by vigilant Serbian counter-intelligence operatives, purloining secrets? Not this time.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week announced yet another radical shift in Washington’s policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by way of saying that the United States “was accepting realities on the ground”.
What the mendacious and cynical Pompeo omits to add is that the Trump administration has been dramatically fueling the change in “realities” – specifically the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory and the demolition of Palestinian homes.

In an interview published in The Economist on November 7, President Macron was reported as stating that the US-NATO military alliance is suffering from “brain death.” In relation to international affairs, the article notes that “Mr Macron thinks Europe can best establish its global influence as a power that mediates between the gorillas of China and the United States.

What happens if the two premises on which Israel and America’s grand Iran strategy is founded are proven false? ‘What if’ maximum pressure fails either to implode the Iranian state politically, nor brings Iran to its knees, begging for a new ‘hairshirt’ nuclear deal? Well …? Well, it seems that Netanyahu and Mossad were so cocksure of their initial premise, that they neglected to think beyond first move on the chess board. It was to be checkmate in one. And this neglect is the cause of the strategic bind in which Israel now finds itself.

By 1937, the German Army, the Wehrmacht was confident enough to show off its new Panzer armored combat tactics to visiting military delegations from other nations. Senior officers from Germany’s ancient enemy France were especially impressed – and appalled – at the radical new weapons systems and tactics on display.
According to one story, which may be apocryphal, a French general asked a senior German officer where the new concepts came from. “But we just read the book of your own great armored theorist, De Gaulle,” the answer came.

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint that teachers hear that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issues here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be boring. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate New Flesh that is too wired to concentrate and the confining concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems.

At one point in his memoirs Third Reich’s wartime soft power emissary in the Balkans, Hermann Neubacher, also known as Hitler’s der fliegende Diplomat, recounts that when in 1943 on the various battlefields the Reich’s fortunes waned, he was tasked with making the rounds of Orthodox Church dignitaries in the occupied Balkans to “animate” them to actively join the faltering crusade against the Soviet Union.