Tag: perpetual war

Syria Severs Relationship With Russia, Forces Kremlin Exit From Port Of Tartus

Russia has long coveted its warm-water port on the Mediterranean at Tartus, Syria, as a base of influence in the Middle East and beyond.

That geopolitical situation has now come to a rather swift close as the new Turkish-backed Islamic government of Syria has cancelled the contract for the Russian firm operating the port, forcing the removal of Kremlin influence in the Levant.

Moscow will now focus on Libya and other regional hubs to focus basing operations for its military.

The development is a major increase in tension between Russia and Turkey as Ankara flexes muscles in the Levant. Basing for Russia forces in the Middle East will likely be a point of negotiation during Trump’s upcoming visit with Russian President Putin.

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Iran and Russia’s Friendship Just Got a Lot Deeper

By abstaining from diplomacy and relying so heavily on isolating countries and the broad stroke of sanctions, the U.S. runs the risk of creating a community of isolated and sanctioned countries. A community of sanctioned countries negates the effect of sanctions. And a community of isolated countries creates the very multipolar world the U.S. is trying to push back.

In the past couple of years, Iran has fought back against isolation and sanctions by joining the Russian and Chinese led Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, two significant international organizations intended to balance American hegemony in a multipolar world.

On January 17, though, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between their two countries, bringing Iran and Russia into a closer partnership than ever before.

Article 2 of the treaty commits the two countries to rejecting unipolarity and pursuing multilateralism, while Article 14 specifically commits them to “deepen[ing] cooperation within the framework of regional organizations,” including the promise to “interact and coordinate positions in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” In a press conference following the talks, Pezeshkian said that BRICS and the SCO are transforming the region and “represent new opportunities and potential for both countries to collaborate in the future.”

But the new strategic partnership is much more than a vague public announcement of Iran and Russia’s friendship. The detailed forty-seven article document is the product of months of intense diplomacy. The document brings the comprehensive partnership a historic new intensity. In his opening remarks at the press conference, Putin called the document “truly ground-breaking.” Dmitri Trenin, research professor at the Higher School of Economics, told me that Putin’s use of words like “breakthrough,” refer, above all, “to the very fact that the Moscow-Tehran relationship now has a treaty as a base.”

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The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake

The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian $1.7 trillion war budget in today’s dollars (FY 2025 $). But as we noted in Part 1, that figure had shrunk by a stunning 93% to just $125 billion by 1948 as post-war demobilization proceeded apace.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized, along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed by the marauding Nazi armies. In all, at war’s end tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been left destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland. And that’s to say nothing of maintaining bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

And yet and yet. Exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the inveterate out-of-power war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri. That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to a joint session of Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating web of entangling alliances that it fostered and the post-1947 American Empire that grew therefrom.

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Biden’s Legacy Is Written In Blood

Last week, aerial photos from Los Angeles with blocks of homes reduced to ash hit social media timelines, leading people to understandably draw comparisons to Gaza. Destruction of entire neighborhoods is always heartbreaking. Home, where most of us spend a great deal of our time, shapes who we are. The memories and love a home can hold are much larger than whatever the square footage may be. Behind all the devastation are all the people in power that make all of this tragedy and grief possible in the first place.

Joe Biden’s term as president ended on Monday, and the world doesn’t have to guess what his legacy will be. The crimes he is responsible for are written into history with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, each one coming from a neighborhood his administration helped turn to ash. The drone images from Gaza and Los Angeles share the same hues of grey and heartache, and originate from the same flavors of greed and contempt for human dignity. And now, all of a sudden we have a ceasefire, with no thanks to Biden. When I think of Joe Biden, I will think of every child I’ve seen dismembered and every home I’ve seen destroyed while I scrolled through social media for the last fifteen months. And I will remember that none of it needed to happen, he greenlighted and funded the genocide of the Palestinian people. He, and powerful people like him, let insurance companies back out of insuring homes and fueled the climate crisis for decades to come.

Another clear demonstration of his inaction occurred last week, when he suddenly removed Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, a demand we’ve been making to his administration for four years. The designation, along with the US embargo, has caused levels of deprivation the country hasn’t seen since the Soviet collapse. People in Cuba were starving because of Joe Biden’s decision to keep them on the SSOT list, and he only removed them on his way out the door.

A small part of accountability for Biden and his partners in genocide like Antony Blinken, Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin, Matt Miller, and others will be remembering the people that were killed in Gaza with their weapons shipments or because of their lies. Like George W. Bush, the man responsible for the death of a million Iraqis and the country’s destruction, who took up painting in his old age to make people forget what he had done in their name – Biden has time to change what people may think of him. We owe it to the Palestinian people to not develop amnesia while bombs could still rain over their heads. Biden could have ended the genocide at any moment, and he chose not to. And because of that, tens of thousands of children are dead, the only reason being that they were born in the largest open air prison in the world.

It’s hard to speak of legacies when the dust from the bombs dropped on Iraq hasn’t even settled. Babies are still being born in Fallujah with life-threatening deformities and diseases. For over a year, Israel continued to drop US-made bombs and, on multiple occasions, chemical weapons on the people of Gaza. From the environmental impact of the nonstop bombardment to the public health outcomes of living without proper shelter for so long, the extent of Biden’s crimes in Gaza won’t be understood entirely for decades.

It’s also hard to speak of legacies when next week a new President who has promised to stay the course of genocide takes office. In reality, the genocide of Palestinians will be several US president’s legacies – even before Biden.

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Pentagon Employees Responsible For Weapons Deliveries To Ukraine Have Been Fired

Ukrainian journalist Roman Bochkala is reporting personnel changes at the Pentagon for the office involved in weapons delivery to Ukraine.

“Everyone who was responsible for Ukraine has been fired or suspended. Or they will be transferred to other positions somewhere. A complete reboot,” Bochkala wrote, reported Ukrainian news entity Focus.

He explained that he received this information from a journalist from The Washington Post, who is responsible for Ukrainian topics and went to the Pentagon to find out what they were hearing about Ukraine.

“So, there will definitely be changes. A new format of relations. It’s all a bit disturbing. But somehow it will happen,” Bochkala emphasized.

The head of the Servant of the People parliamentary faction, David Arakhamia, stated that 
negotiations with Trump’s team could take place in early February.

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The Gaza Genocide: The Fall of Israel’s Immunity

A dramatic escape was cited by Israeli media as the reason that Yuval Vagdani, a soldier in the Israeli army, managed to escape justice in Brazil.

Vagdani was accused by a Palestinian advocacy legal group, the Hind Rajab Foundation, of carrying out well-documented crimes in Gaza. He is not the only Israeli soldier being pursued for similar crimes.

According to the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (KAN), more than 50 Israeli soldiers are being pursued in countries ranging from South Africa to Sri Lanka to Sweden.

In one case, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint in a Swedish court against Boaz Ben David, an Israeli sniper from the 932 Battalion of the Israeli Nahal Brigade. He is also accused of committing war crimes in Gaza.

The Nahal Brigade has been at the heart of numerous war crimes in Gaza. Established in 1982, the brigade is notorious for its unhinged violence against occupied Palestinians. Their role in the latest genocidal atrocities in the Strip has far exceeded their own dark legacy.

Even if these 50 individuals are apprehended and sentenced, the price exacted from the Israeli army pales in comparison to the crimes carried out.

Numbers, though helpful, are rarely enough to convey collective pain. The medical journal Lancet’s latest report is still worthy of reflection. Using a new data-collecting method called ‘capture–recapture analysis’, the report indicates that by the first nine months of the war, between October 2023 and June 2024, 64,260 Palestinians have been killed.

Still, capturing and trying Israeli war criminals is not just about the fate of these individuals. It is about accountability – an absent term in the history of Israeli human rights violations, war crimes, and recurring genocides against Palestinians.

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WSJ: Trump Wants Ukraine War Deal Within 100 Days

President Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg has stated the President would like the conflict ended in 100 days, reported The Wall Street Journal.

According to the newspaper, “dealmaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin will be far more difficult than Trump promised on the campaign trail, when he said he would end the conflict before he took office.”

Trump is determined to control peace talks himself, the Wall Street Journal adds.

Ukrainian media is reporting many of those responsible in the Pentagon for weapons deliveries to Ukraine have been fired, and is causing ‘worry’ in the war-torn nation.

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Russia Accuses Kiev of GENOCIDE

A Russian diplomat has accused Ukraine of committing genocide. Senior Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik claimed on Sunday that captured Ukrainian soldiers “have reported they were given orders to kill Russian speakers.”

According to Miroshinik, this amounts to genocide. He claimed that the Ukrainian military is conducting “language-based genocide” by giving orders to kill anyone who speaks Russian.

Miroshnik was commenting on the discovery of civilian bodies in a recently liberated village in Russia’s Kursk Region. He asserted that the alleged Ukrainian policy amounts to the “elimination of all civilians” in the area, which Kiev recognizes as Russian, according to a report by RT. 

On Sunday, the Foreign Ministry described the discovery as evidence of a “massacre” and the latest confirmation of the “terrorist and neo-Nazi essence of the Kiev regime,” as spokeswoman Maria Zakharova put it. She accused Western supporters of the Ukrainian government of turning a blind eye to Kyiv’s crimes and charged that foreign officials secretly condone such behavior. –RT

The Russian Investigative Committee is probing the Ukrainian military for alleged terrorism, based on the reports from Russkoye Porechnoye. A person convicted of such a crime can be sentenced to life imprisonment in Russia.

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Here are the 25 Shocking Photos That Expose the True Disaster of Joe Biden’s Presidency

In less than 24 hours, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States.

Since seizing office in 2021 following a presidential election that was tainted by widespread voter fraud, Joe Biden has overseen rampant inflation, disastrous foreign policy, a rise in poverty, the invasion of over ten million illegal aliens, the persecution and torture of political opponents and an obsession with identity politics, among many other failings.

In addition to his political failings, Biden has also been in a state of constant mental and physical decline that eventually culminated with him being forced to drop out the presidential race and make way for his vice-president Kamala Harris.

Thankfully, the American people recognized Harris’s role in Biden’s disastrous leadership and delivered a landslide election victory to Donald Trump that was too big to rig.

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Dr. Martin Luther King’s Prophetic Warning, Denouncing the Merchants of Death

Over the past three years, a collective of volunteer researchers, lawyers, and commentators created The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, dedicated to holding accountable four weapon manufacturing corporations based in the U.S. Their tribunal amassed copious evidence to prove that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Atomics (a company which manufactures weaponized drones) are guilty of committing war crimes. On January 15, 2025, as the world marks the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a press conference announced the Tribunal’s verdicts and release the report of ten international jurors who have weighed the evidence submitted to them.

Of necessity, the evidence was culled from examining a limited range of devastatingly criminal U.S. “forever wars,” of brutal and needless wars of choice. The Tribunal focused on   specific U.S. war crimes and crimes against humanity in the invasions, occupations and aerial assaults which followed the “9/11” attacks in 2001.

What if we could enlarge the Tribunal, bringing before it war crimes occurring right now, the U.S.-assisted massacres we watch in real time on our phone and computer screens?

Certainly, one witness we would beg to appear for testimony would be Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital when such a place existed. The Tribunal would wish to amplify his testimony on the harrowing weeks of siege during which Israel subjected his hospital to artillery and aerial bombardment. They would help to record his story of witnessing assassinations targeting medical staff, field executions of people clutching white flags in an attempt to surrender, the hospital’s forced evacuation with at-gunpoint humiliation stripping of women and girls. The initial attacks disabled the hospital’s operational capacities by targeting power generators and oxygen production equipment, but now an iconic photo shows Dr. Abu Safiya walking towards an Israeli tank through collapsed buildings and rubble. The Tribunal would like to interview him, but he is being held without charge by Israel’s military.

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