sanctions

Our weekly documentary film, curated by our team at 21WIRE.
This ground-breaking documentary by award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, investigates the effects of US-led international sanctions on the people of Iraq, depleted uranium contamination, and discovers that after ten years of extraordinary isolation imposed by the United Nations – and enforced by the US and Britain, have killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Watch:

Fears grow that a phase two accord between Beijing and Washington will struggle to get off the drawing board
Gordon WATTS

Without warning, tech giant Google “permanently removed” Iranian government-owned media channel Press TV UK’s YouTube channel Monday night amid increasing American hostility to Iran.

The United States is relying more heavily on illegal unilateral coercive measures (also known as economic sanctions) in place of war or as part of its build-up to war. In fact, economic sanctions are an act of war that kills tens of thousands of people each year through financial strangulation. An economic blockade places a country under siege.

Silicon Valley giant Facebook announced Friday that it would be deleting all positive posts about recently assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani on its platform and its subsidiary Instagram. The reason for this, it explained to CNN, was that the new U.S.

Why doesn’t the U.S. respect the decision made by the Iraqi Parliament and move out of Iraqi territory? The short answer is, because the US doesn’t respect anybody’s – any country’s – decision or sovereignty, as long as it doesn’t meet their objectives.
Now, the US is steadfast and will not leave the region. Already President Assad has requested that the US leave Syrian territory. They didn’t. The stakes are too immense for the US. It has all to do with their move towards world hegemony by territory and by finance – meaning by the US dollar.

War? Iran knows it will get crushed militarily, Trump knows he’d be crushed politically, and Iraq still needs us around.
Peter VAN BUREN
History will judge the long-term impact of the death of Qassem Soleimani. In the short-to-medium term, let’s step back from the fear-mongering and instead focus on the geopolitical factors that make the large-scale war many fear unlikely.

Try as I did, I found it impossible to send New Year’s greetings to friends in Iraq given the unthinkable and shameless actions of Trump and his regime in the last weeks. His decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qasim Soleimani at the Baghdad airport led to the Iraqi Parliament voting to expel all foreign troops from Iraq. Trump’s quick response to that was “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

WASHINGTON DC — In a statement delivered late Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump made it clear that the U.S. would not militarily respond to the missile strikes launched by Iran on U.S. military installations in Iraq on Tuesday, strikes that were themselves retaliation for the Trump administration’s killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Front, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

When things are as crazy as they are right now, it’s hard to see just how much progress has been made. 2019 had in it a number of watershed moments in geopolitics which signal just how close to radical change in the game board we are.