Israel and its relationship to the Islamic State

Jonathan Yen | Mises Institute

This week, ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), also known as ISIL, IS, or Daesh, has reappeared in the headlines following the killing of two Iowa National Guardsman — Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard — in an ISIS airstrike in Palmyra, Syria. These two American men are only the latest of the over 40,000 soldiers, from numerous different nations, who have lost their lives in the war against ISIS — a war which America's supposed greatest ally against terrorism, Israel, has not assisted.

The AIPAC website proudly proclaims that Israel is an "Indispensable Ally" against terrorism; and indeed, the Trump administration has continued funding the Israeli government at massive expense, including a $4 billion dollar military aid package earlier this year.

Just this last week, a Newsweek Opinion author insisted that the United States must continue to support Israel, claiming:

"Instability around Israel does not stay local. It affects energy markets, counterterrorism efforts, nuclear proliferation, regional power balances and American credibility worldwide. A weakened Israel would invite wider conflict and embolden adversaries far beyond the region. Supporting Israel is not about subsidizing complacency. It is about preventing dangerous chain reactions in one of the world's most volatile regions."

A similar opinion piece in the New York Times bemoaned the breakdown of American support for Israel, claiming that Israel and the United States have been natural allies in the fight against "radical Islam." But is this true? Are these calls by regime media for a closer military relationship with Israel to stop terrorism based in fact? In fact, why does ISIS still have a presence in Syria at all?

Read more

How many countries has Israel attacked in 2025?

Hanna Duggal | Al-Jazeera

Israel has attacked more countries than any other country this year.

In 2025, Israel attacked at least six countries, including Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen.

It also carried out strikes in Tunisian, Maltese and Greek territorial waters on aid flotillas heading for Gaza.

According to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), an independent conflict monitor, from January 1 to December 5, Israel carried out at least 10,631 attacks, marking one of the broadest geographic military offensives in a single year. [...]

According to ACLED, in 2025, up to December 5, 2025, Israel attacked:

• Gaza and the occupied West Bank 8,332 times
• Lebanon 1,653 times
• Iran 379 times
• Syria 207 times
• Yemen 48 times
• Qatar once
• Tunisian waters twice, Maltese and Greek waters once each

Read more

Washington's embrace of Julani: The final collapse of the 'War on Terror' narrative

Kevork Almassian | Kevork's Newsletter 

The photograph of Abu Mohammad al-Julani walking through the White House — smuggled through a back door like contraband — should have been a geopolitical earthquake. Instead, the neoconservative commentariat, the self-appointed guardians against "Islamist infiltration," fell silent. The same voices that spent two decades terrorizing the American public about al-Qaeda said nothing when Washington received one of its senior alumni as Syria's new "president." Their sudden muteness tells us more than their theatrics ever did.

For us, none of this is surprising. It simply formalizes what we already knew: the so-called "War on Terror" was never about fighting terrorism. It was a geopolitical instrument that could be paused, reversed, or inverted whenever U.S. or Israeli strategic interests required it.

And Julani's rise proves that point better than anything else.

America's Betrayal: Not Only of Syrians, but of Its Own Veterans

I have American friends who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were told they were fighting al-Qaeda, fighting extremism, defending their country. Today, they live with PTSD, chronic wounds, and emotional scars, all while the very people they were told to fight are being escorted into the Oval Office for photo-ops. If I were in their shoes, I would feel deeply betrayed.

Meanwhile, Washington is rewriting history and hoping no one notices. The U.S. government had full knowledge of the jihadist engine that was being built in Syria. In 2012, Jake Sullivan emailed Hillary Clinton acknowledging that "al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria". The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned the Obama administration in 2012 that the insurgency's core force was jihadists, Salafis, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet Obama approved "Timber Sycamore," the CIA program that armed and trained these very groups.

Now, over a decade later, we arrive at the inevitable destination: the United States hosting the former emir of Jabhat al-Nusra — the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda — as the U.S.-approved steward of a "new Syria."

It is macabre theater. 

Read more

Staggering Hypocrisy

Craig Murray 

The outgoing Head of MI6 Richard Moore has formally admitted in a public speech in Istanbul that MI6 has been cooperating with HTS in Syria – a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act – for years.

The government is arresting little old ladies for holding signs supporting one proscribed organisation, Palestine Action, while it admits it has been actively supporting another proscribed organisation. HTS was proscribed as a division of Al Qaida, as shown on the government website:

 

Read more 

Israel has attacked six countries in the past 72 hours

Al Jazeera | Marium Ali and Alia Chughtai

In just three days, Israel has carried out strikes in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar and Yemen.

 

On Tuesday, Israel launched a targeted air strike on a Hamas leadership compound in Qatar's capital, Doha, during a meeting to discuss a US-proposed ceasefire for Gaza.

The strike killed six people, including the son of senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, the director of al-Hayya's office, three bodyguards and a Qatari security officer. However, its top leaders are reported to have survived the attack.

The attack was part of a wider wave of Israeli strikes extending beyond its immediate borders, and marked the sixth country attacked in just 72 hours and the seventh since the start of this year. 

Israel continues to bombard Gaza

Israeli attacks across Gaza have killed at least 150 people and injured more than 540 others since Monday.

On Monday, 67 people were killed and hospitals received 320 wounded, including 14 people killed while seeking aid, while six people - among them two children - died from famine-related causes. On Tuesday, another 83 people were killed and 223 were injured.

Israel is continuing its assault on Gaza City, targeting high-rise buildings, destroying infrastructure, and forcing residents from their homes, leaving many with nowhere safe to seek shelter.

Since its onset in October 2023, Israel's war on Gaza has killed at least 64,656 people, [a far more probable figure is at least half a million] including at least 404 who have died of starvation. Thousands more have been lost under the rubble and are believed to be dead. 

Read more

BBC Admits ‘Syrian’ Airstrike in Recent Story on Scarred Boy Turned Out to Be Turkish

Sputnik

The BBC has corrected its August 19 news story about a Syrian boy who was severely wounded in a 2018 airstrike, which the broadcasting company first said was carried out by Syrian forces but later admitted could be blamed on Turkey.

Some Twitter users posted screenshots showing that the BBC had actually redacted its text several times.

The headline of the short story, featuring a video about the life of a four-year-old Syrian boy whose face was scarred in the airstrike, originally referred to the incident as “a Syrian airstrike.” The mention of Syria was then deleted with an indication that it was “not clear who was responsible for the attack.” Now the headline refers to it as just “an airstrike,” and the article clarifies that “evidence indicates that Turkey carried out the airstrike.”

Last January, Turkish forces launched airstrikes on Kurdish fighters in Afrin, a city located in northern Syria, as part of a military operation dubbed Olive Branch. The boy, named Jouma, and his family were fleeing their home in Syria when an airstrike hit the bus they were on.

Jenan Moussa, a reporter for Arabic Al Aan TV, wrote on Twitter that Tolin Hassan, a close friend of the wounded boy’s family, told her that Jouma’s relatives “mentioned over and over to BBC-journo that the car was hit by a Turkish strike after escaping Afrin.”

Read more

Enough and Not Too Much

Patrick Armstrong
Strategic Culture

Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country’s military spending will gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the “world gendarme,” President Vladimir Putin said. Moscow is not seeking to get involved in a “pointless” new arms race, and will stick to “smart decisions” to strengthen its defensive capabilities, Putin said on Friday during an annual extended meeting of the Defense Ministry board. “Intelligence, brains, discipline and organization” must be the cornerstones of the country’s military doctrine, the Russian leader said. The last thing that Russia needs is an arms race that would “drain” its economy, and Moscow sure does not want that “in any scenario,” Putin pointed out.

– RT, 22 December 2017

It’s easy to forget it today, but the USSR was, in its time, an “exceptionalist” country. It was the world’s first socialist country – the “bright future“; it set an example for all to follow, it was destined by History. It had a mission and was required by History to assist any country that called itself “socialist”. The USSR had bases and interests all over the world. As the 1977 USSR Constitution said:

the Soviet state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the revolution and for building socialism and communism. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making turn from capitalist to socialism.

A novus ordo seclorum indeed.

Russia, however, is just Russia. There is no feeling in Moscow that Russia must take the lead any place but Russia itself. One of the reasons, indeed, why Putin is always talking about the primacy of the UN, the independence of nation states, the impermissibility to interfere in internal activities – the so-called “Westphalian” position – is that he remembers the exceptionalist past and knows that it led to a dead end. Moscow has no interest in going abroad in search of internationalist causes.

Internationalism/exceptionalism and nationalism: the two have completely different approaches to constructing a military. The first is obsessed with “power projection“, “full spectrum superiority“, it imagines that its hypertrophied interests are challenged all over the planet. Its wants are expensive, indeterminate, unbounded. The other is only concerned with dealing with enemies in its neighbourhood. Its wants are affordable, exact, finite. The exceptionalist/interventionist has everything to defend everywhere; the nationalist has one thing to defend in one place. It is much easier and much cheaper to be a nationalist: the exceptionalist/interventionist USA spends much more than anyone else but always needs more; nationalist Russia can cut its expenditure.

Read more

Israel Continues Its Interference in Syria

Firas Samuri
Off Guardian

On June 2, Syrian Arab News Agency reported on Israeli aggression on the T4 airbase, located in the eastern countryside of Homs province.

It’s recognized that the Syrian Air Defense System managed to destroy two missiles. The remaining rockets hit targets on the territory of the base, resulting in one martyr, two injured servicemen, and damage to an arms depot and other equipment. 

For the past several days the Israeli aviation repeatedly attacked the Syrian territory. Tel-Aviv struck artillery and two anti-missile batteries not far from Damascus, on the night of June 2. Three Syrian soldiers were killed, and seven others were severely wounded. 

The Israeli forces hastened to declare that the strikes were a retaliation for the launches of the Syrian missiles towards Mount Hermon in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. 

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had ordered the strike. “We won’t tolerate fire at our territory and will respond forcefully to any aggression against us,” he said. The Prime Minister also held a meeting on security issues after the Syrian attacks on the Golan Heights.

However, the actual reasons for the Israeli attacks are entirely different.

Read more

Tulsi Gabbard: War With Iran 'Better Serves The Interests' of 'Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia' Than U.S.

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation

Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Rep Tulsi Gabbard spoke out against launching a war with Iran on Tucker Carlson's show Thursday and warned the consequences could be "devastating" for America.

From Fox News:

"I know where this path leads us and I'm concerned because the American people don't seem to be prepared for how devastating and costly such a war would be," Gabbard said Thursday during an appearance on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

[...] "So, what we are facing is, essentially, a war that has no frontlines, total chaos, engulfs the whole region, is not contained within Iran or Iraq but would extend to Syria and Lebanon and Israel across the region, setting us up in a situation where, in Iraq, we lost over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform," Gabbard said. "A war with Iran would take far more American lives, it would cost more civilian lives across the region."

Read more

The Evidence We Were Never Supposed to See About The Douma 'Gas' Attack

Robert Fisk
The Independant

The OPCW has opened the door to ridicule, when the simple truth would have been enough.

We like to take the Big Boys on trust. No longer do we believe in our meretricious little leaders with their easy lies and twitters: the Trumps and Mays and now all the nationalists of Europe. We certainly don't put any credit in Arab dictators.

But when, despite all its bureaucracy and corruption, the UN tells us that the world faces climate change, we largely believe what it says. If the International Red Cross warns us of a humanitarian catastrophe in Africa, we tend to take their word for it. And when the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) - which represents 193 member states throughout the world - reports on chlorine attacks in Syria, we assume we are hearing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Until now. For in the last few days, there has emerged disturbing evidence that in its final report on the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime in the city of Douma last year, the OPCW deliberately concealed from both the public and the press the existence of a dissenting 15-page assessment of two cylinders which had supposedly contained molecular chlorine - perhaps the most damning evidence against the Assad regime in the entire report.

The OPCW officially maintains that these canisters were probably dropped by an aircraft - probably a helicopter, presumably Syrian - over Douma on 7 April 2018. But the dissenting assessment, which the OPCW made no reference to in its published conclusions, finds there is a "higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft".

It is difficult to underestimate the seriousness of this manipulative act by the OPCW. In a response to the conservative author Peter Hitchens, who also writes for the Mail on Sunday - he is of course the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens - the OPCW admits that its so-called technical secretariat "is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised [sic] release of the document". 

Read more

See also: Real ‘obscene masquerade’: How BBC depicted staged hospital scenes as proof of Douma chemical attack

CONFIRMED: Chemical Weapons Assessment Contradicting Official Syria Narrative Is Authentic

Caitline Johnstone
Consortium News

The leak undermines the fundamental assumptions behind many years of Western reporting, writes Caitlin Johnstone.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has begun responding to queries by the press about a leaked document that contradicts official OPCW findings on an alleged chemical weapons attack last year in Douma, Syria. The prepared statement they’ve been using in response to these queries confirms the authenticity of the document.
 

To recap, a few days ago the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) published a document signed by a man named Ian Henderson, whose name is seen listed in expert leadership positions on OPCW documents from as far back as 1998 and as recently as 2018. It’s unknown who leaked the document and what other media organizations may have received it.

The report picks apart the extremely shaky physics and narratives of the official OPCW analysis on the gas cylinders allegedly dropped from Syrian government aircraft in the Douma attack, and concludes that “The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, and the surrounding scene of the incidents, were inconsistent with what would have been expected in the case of either cylinder being delivered from an aircraft,” saying instead that manual placement of the cylinders in the locations investigators found them in is “the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.” 

Read more

Israel Attacks Syria Two Consecutive Nights While Hosting Eurovision Finals

Times of Israel

State TV says military shot down ‘hostile targets coming from direction of occupied territories,’ a day after explosions heard in vicinity of Iranian and Hezbollah facilities.

Syria claimed its air defenses on Saturday night shot down a number of missiles fired from Israel, for the second time in less than 24 hours.

The official SANA news agency said the military intercepted “hostile targets coming from direction of occupied territories.” Syrian state TV said the missiles were shot down over Quneitra and near Damascus.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Israel fired at least three missiles. Two of the strikes targeted a Syrian army brigade which supervises the country’s Quneitra province, he told AFP, while the third missile was destroyed by Syrian defenses.

On Friday night, Syrian state TV reported sounds of explosions near the capital, and aired footage of what it claimed were air defenses intercepting missiles fired from Israeli jets seen over Quneitra in the Syrian Golan Heights.

“Aerial defenses detected hostile targets coming from the direction of Quneitra and dealt with them,” the official SANA news agency quoted a military source saying, referring to a Syrian town in the Golan Heights bordering Israel.

Read More

“Saving Syria’s Children”: Response to the HuffPo - The BBC's history of faking news

Comment: Incontrovertible evidence that the BBC is a primary propganda outfit working for the British Deep State. (The Jimmy Savile cover up already proved that). 

So, please donate to Robert's crowdfunding campaign here.

---------------------  

Robert Stuart
Off Guardian

Corrections and clarifications to “Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria”

News and opinion website The Huffington Post has written about my campaign to crowdfund a documentary about the 2013 BBC Panorama programme Saving Syria’s Children.

Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria was published on May 4th 2019. Some notes in response follow.

Stuart says he has spent nearly six years compiling “a mountain of evidence” that shows the BBC’s footage was “faked”. He claims the national broadcaster worked “cheek by jowl with Isis” to produce the Panorama documentary, which was broadcast in September 2013.

Evidence that sequences in Saving Syria’s Children were fabricated is set out on my blog. Readers are free to make their own topographical analogies.

During the programme’s making BBC Panorama reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway were embedded with then ISIS partner group Ahrar al-Sham – a group described elsewhere by the BBC as “hard-line Islamist”. Less than three weeks earlier Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS and other groups together killed over 190 civilians, including women, children and elderly men, and kidnapped over 200 mostly women and children.

In the programme’s climactic scenes of the aftermath of an alleged incendiary attack the BBC crew filmed at close quarters an ambulance prominently bearing the ISIS emblem and its militarily attired occupants, at least one of whom was armed.

In an interview with TalkRadio on Friday, Stuart claimed “the only source of [this attack] is the BBC”. However, the strike was also reported by NBC News who interviewed doctors who described the “apocalyptic” attack in detail, documented in painstaking detail by the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria (VDCS), and confirmed by Human Rights Watch.

The NBC News article cited features an interview with a single volunteer doctor named “Roula”. This is clearly Dr Rola Hallam. Dr Hallam and Dr Saleyha Ahsan were being followed by the BBC Panorama team of reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway as they visited hospitals run by the UK charity Hand in Hand for Syria. As such Hallam was central to the BBC reports in question and cannot be considered an independent commentator. [1] [2] [3] [4]

The Violations Documentation Centre in Syria report cited gives the time of the alleged attack as follows:

On 26 Aug 2013, at 02:00 pm, the Syrian air forces shelled ‘Iqraa’ Institution in Orm Al Kubra in Aleppo, which had been under the Free Army’s control for several months then.

The VDCS report also quotes Mustapha Haid, “Head of ‘Doulati Organization/My State Organization’”:

At 3 in the afternoon, On 26 Aug 2013, I was in Al Atareb City and I heard rumours about a ‘chemical attack’ on Orm Al Kubra and that tens of casualties were brought to Al Atareb Hospital.

However the BBC has categorically stated in complaints correspondence that:

The attack happened on the 26th of August at around 5.30pm at the end of the school day.[5]

The VDCS report quotes a second witness, Issa Obeid, “Head of Nursing Department in Al Atareb Hospital”, who provides a first-hand account of his actions at Atareb Hospital:

We washed the casualties with water and serums after taking off their clothes. We used ‘Florasline’ liniment on the burnt areas and provided the casualties with fluids and some of them were given tranquilizers like Morphine.

However on 26 August 2013 Issa (or Iessa) Obied would appear not to have been present at Atareb but to have been attending a battle first aid training course in Antakia, Turkey. [6]
Iessa Obied has been photographed posing with an arsenal of weaponry including assault rifles, an anti-aircraft gun and a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. [7] [8] 

Read more

Will the US ever be held accountable for its war crimes?

Jean Perier
New Eastern Outlook

For more than a decade, the United States has been steadily increasing the scale of its illegal military operations across the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Eighteen years ago, the US invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of ousting the Taliban who allegedly granted sanctuary to Al-Qaeda. According to a study released by Brown University, more than 140,000 Afghan militants and civilians have died in the fight.

Since December 2001, the United States has been conducting various operations in Somali, and even today the Pentagon carries out both air strikes and ground operations, accompanied by a constant toll of civilian lives.

Back in 2003, Washington launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMDs he didn't even have and to convert Iraq into a «democracy», plunging this country into a state of perpetual chaos guaranteeing that it will remain a Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic World for years to come.

Eight years ago, the US succeeded in destabilizing Libya, when US warplanes attacked the troops of Libya's most successful ruler to date - Muammar Gaddafi. Back then, Washington took every step to ensure his government would be ousted and and its key leaders murdered. The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. In 2016, Barack Obama said that Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.

The seven years of war in Syria resulted in a death toll of half a million Syrian nationals. Here, American troops are stationed illegally to fight ISIS and "indigenous ground forces." The strange wording that Washington uses in its official rhetoric is no coincidence, since more than on one occasion US armed forces have opened fire on both Syrian government troops and civilians, with no official rationale ever being given to explain this brutality.

In Yemen, the United States has been backing Saudi Arabia's efforts to put an end to the Houthi rebellion for three years. Washington carries on supplying Saudi authorities with high-precision weapons, combat aircraft and intelligence. This war has already triggered the largest humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, with 20 million people finding themselves on the brink of starvation. 

Read more

US, Israel to supply anti-aircraft missiles to Kurdish militants in Syria: Report

Press TV

 

The United States and Israel are reportedly set to supply anti-aircraft missiles to Kurdish militants in northern Syria amid tensions between Ankara and Washington over the latter’s support for the militants, which the Turkish government views as terrorists.

Citing local sources, Turkey’s Yeni Safak daily reported that the US is set to deliver shipments of Stinger Man Portable Air Defense System (MANPADS) to militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The PKK, it added, has designated the towns of Rmelan and Shaddadah in Syria’s Hasakah Province as well as the Jalabiyah and al-Omar regions as launching points for its American-supplied missiles.

Ankara is unhappy with Washington’s support for Kurdish militants of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which it views as an extension of the PKK, and has repeatedly called on the US administration to stop providing them with arms.

The PKK has been fighting for autonomy inside Turkey for decades and runs bases in neighboring Syria and Iraq as well.

The report further said the regime in Israel has also vowed to supply the Kurds with Spike anti-aircraft missiles in the Syrian provinces of Dayr al-Zawr and Raqqah following high-level meetings between the militants and Tel Aviv.

Israel has long been backing the militants operating against the Syrian government. The regime has, on several occasions, criticized Turkey for its operations against the Kurdish militants.

The US-Kurdish alliance is closely coordinating the missiles’ deployment to Syria as part of a “special joint strategy,” according to the report.

Read more

At Least 40 Members of White Helmets Admit Staging Syria Chemical Attacks

Sputnik

UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) – At least 40 members of the White Helmets organization have admitted during recent interviews that they staged chemical attacks in Syria to provoke retaliation against President Bashar Assad, Foundation for the Study of Democracy Director Maxim Grigoriev said on Thursday as he unveiled the results of a new study at the UN.

"We have interviewed … 40 members of the White Helmets, including those from Douma, who provided a detailed description of their methods commonly used by their organization to fake scenes,” Grigoriev said.

The foundation conducted a fact-finding mission in Syria and located both White Helmets members and dozens of other people who participated in the staged attacks, Grigoriev said.

“Those people told us in detail how they had to participate in the staging for few dollars to buy some food for their families,” he said.

One woman recounted how she was given white burial shroud to wrap herself up in and then told to lay on the ground and smear her mouth with toothpaste, Grigoriev said.

Another recalled being told to "close his eyes" as he was filmed being taken to a medical center by members of the White Helmets.

“Amar Al Mustafa Ibn Mohammad from Aleppo saw with his own eyes how they simulated a chemical attack, they brought children, laid them down, put civilians away and filmed children as if they died in the chemical attack,” Grigoriev said. 

Read more

See also: White Helmets Preparing New Provocations in Syria — Russian Envoy to UN

Death of Free Speech: Criticizing Israel Will Land You in Prison

Kurt Nimmo

Soon, this blog will be illegal.

No, I’m not selling drugs or peddling child pornography. I write about America’s wars and the primary objective of those illegal and immoral wars—to make Israel the hegemon of the Middle East along with Saudi Arabia. All US foreign policy in that region centers on those two nations.

The following may soon be classified as hate speech and anti-semitism (as increasingly criticism of the Jewish state and its Zionist political ideology are considered crimes). 

Jewish neocons found their way into the Reagan administration and later the Bush Junior White House and Pentagon. Huddled under the wing of Vice President Dick Cheney, they plotted to attack and destroy Israel’s enemies. Neocon ideologues strategized and published papers on these manufactured wars, most notably a paper presented to then Israeli president Bibi Netanyahu. It called for taking out Iraq and Syria. Israeli academics have written on this subject for decades. The nation’s early leaders engineered border provocations and false flag attacks (the Lavon Affair) to destabilize the region. Southern Lebanon is considered a valuable asset primarily for its water resources (e.g. “Operation Litani”) and the Golan Heights in Syria was occupied for its strategic value. 

Israel, of course, is unable to destroy its enemies, so that task is left to America and its neocons. The American people were lied into a war on Iraq. Both Israel and the US knew Saddam Hussein didn’t have the capability to threaten Israel militarily. Beyond its oil, Iraq held little strategic value for the US and its corporatocracy. However, it did have the ability to cause trouble, especially in regard to the Palestinians. 

Syria’s relationship with its Lebanese neighbor and its stubborn refusal to simply handover the occupied Golan to the Israelis is also a problem. It was one of several objectives behind a manufactured color revolution in Syria under the aegis of the “Arab Spring,” an objective that has thus far resulted in the murder of around 600,000 Syrians. 

The Bush era neocons (including John Bolton, now national security adviser, and Elliot Abrams, a key Bush coconspirator) had an ambitious laundry list of nations to be destroyed—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and importantly Iran, the only serious challenger to Israel. The Obama administration added Libya and began covert operations in Africa. 

Trump took the baton from Obama after he told us he wasn’t into “nation-building” and was a populist “America First” noninterventionist. The American people were lied to again, but then this is now normal behavior. 

After 9/11 and years of aggressive war propaganda, it is now common for the American people to believe these lies. Meanwhile, endless diversion in the form of super-hyper and potentially violent partisanship between factions of the establishment political class keep most Americans distracted from larger issues—war and the bankster-rigged economy. It should be noted that criticism of central banks and monetary policy are also considered hateful antisemitism. 

In short, US foreign policy, directed by high-level neocons, is not conducted in the interest of the American people. It benefits Israel, which also takes billions every year from the American taxpayer.

Read more

Rogue State? – Britain Railing Against International Norms and Laws

truepublica.org.uk

Leaving aside Britain’s past, most particularly that of empire, the country is not just continually moving towards authoritarianism it is beginning to demonstrate all the early signs of a rogue state. These are strong words but the actual definition of a rogue state is – “a nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.” Examples such as the illegal invasion of Iraq, Syria and latterly Libya are very clear. Irrespective of the technicalities, they all broke the rules of International laws or norms. But other examples demonstrate how lawless Britain as a state really is.

Chagos

Here, an entire population were forcibly removed from their island homeland at British gunpoint to make way for a US Air Force nuclear base, the people were dumped destitute over a thousand miles away, their domestic animals gassed by the British army, their homes fired and then demolished. To achieve this, Britain maliciously threatened the Mauritian government into ceding the Chagos Islands as a condition of its Independence.

Recently, the International Court of Justice found that the British occupation of the Chagos Islands was unlawful by a majority of 13 to 1. Britain rejected this ruling.

Ex British ambassador Craig Murray wrote – “this represents a serious escalation in the UK’s rejection of multilateralism and international law and a move towards joining the US model of exceptionalism, standing outside the rule of international law. As such, it is arguably the most significant foreign policy development for generations. In the Iraq war, while Britain launched war without UN Security Council authority, it did so on a tenuous argument that it had Security Council authority from earlier resolutions. The UK was therefore not outright rejecting the international system. On Chagos it is now simply denying the authority of the International Court of Justice; this is utterly unprecedented.”

Read more

Trump's Neocons See Erdogan As Their Ticket To A Region-Wide MidEast War

Mike Whitney
The Unz review

Turkish troops and armored units are massed along Turkey’s southern border awaiting orders to invade northern Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to clear a ten mile-deep swath of land east of the Euphrates River in order to remove terrorist-linked militants (YPG) currently occupying the territory. The proposed offensive would put US Special Forces in the line of fire which significantly increases the likelihood of US casualties. If American troops are killed or wounded by the Turkish operation, Washington will respond in force leading to a potentially catastrophic face-off between the two NATO allies. The possibility of a violent clash between Turkey and the United States has never been greater than it is today.
 

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Turkey that any unilateral action in Syria would have “devastating consequences.” Pompeo’s comments were intended to intimidate Erdogan who stated on Tuesday that the military offensive would begin shortly after last weekend’s elections. If Erdogan proceeds with his plan, Pompeo will undoubtedly give the military the go-ahead for retaliatory attacks on the Turkish Army. This will either lead to a speedy retreat by Turkey or asymmetrical strikes on US strategic assets across the region. In any event, the fracas with Turkey is bound to widen the chasm between the two former allies forcing Erdogan to reconsider his commitment to the western alliance. Any further deterioration in relations between the US and Turkey could result in a dramatic shift in the global balance of power.

Washington’s problems with Erdogan began years before the current dust-up. The Turkish leader has always steered an independent foreign policy which has been a constant source of frustration for the White House. During the war in Iraq, Erdogan refused to allow the US to use Turkish air bases to conduct their operations. (Erdogan did not support the war.) Presently he is purchasing air defense systems from Russia (S-400), (which VP Mike Pence has strongly condemned), he has attended summits in Sochi with Moscow and Tehran in order to find a political settlement for the war in Syria, he has signed contracts with Gazprom that will make his country the energy hub of southern Europe, and he has been harshly critical of US support for the its Kurdish proxies in east Syria (the SDF) which is an offshoot of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), a group that is on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

Read more

Kurds in Fateful Triangle as US Moves to Redeploy IS Terror Groups

Finian Cunningham

Strategic Culture

Kurdish fighters have been used by the US to ostensibly defeat the remaining Islamic State holdouts in eastern Syria. But what is emerging is not a final defeat of the terrorists, more a redeployment to further destabilize the Arab country.

Potentially, the Kurds could wind up not with the regional autonomy they desire, but as part of a rebranded American dirty war army whose ranks include the very terrorist the Kurdish militias have been successfully battling against.

President Donald Trump has been lately crowing about how US-backed Kurdish forces have wiped out the IS self-proclaimed caliphate around Baghouz in eastern Syria. “They’re losers… they’re gone tonight,” he boasted about supposedly vanquishing the jihadists.

However, things are not that clear-cut. Syria’s envoy to the United Nations Bashar al Jaafari dismissed Trump’s victory celebrations as a “bluff”. He said that IS was not defeated in areas under US control, but rather were being shunted off to various camps for retraining.

There are credible reports that thousands of jihadists who surrendered or were captured in the fighting around Baghouz have since been relocated by US forces to its military base at al Tanf near the border with Iraq and Jordan, as well as to nearby refugee camps such as Rukban, where some 40,000 detainees are held. Suspiciously, the Americans are refusing international access to these camps, even for UN humanitarian relief agencies. As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out recently, the detention centers are being used by the Americans as a pretext for illegally occupying Syrian territory.

Read more