Best of the Web:


Dominoes

Best of the Web: Unintended consequences of the Soleimani assassination: Did Trump just gift the Middle East to China and Russia?

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:34 UTC
china iraq oil deal
After waiting 15 years too long, Iraqi PM Abdul-Mahdi signs over his country's reconstruction to China, October 2019
By the series of actions in recent months in Iraq and across the Middle East, Washington has forced a strategic shift towards China, and to an extent Russia, and away from the United States. If events continue on their present trajectory it could well be that a main reason why Washington backed the destabilization of Assad in Syria - to block a planned Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline - will now happen, unless Washington initiates full scorched-earth politics in the region. This is what we can call unintended consequences.

If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does geopolitics. When President Trump months ago announced plans to pull US troops out of Syria and the Middle East generally, Russia and especially China began quietly intensifying contacts with key states in the region.

Chinese involvement with Iraqi oil development and other infrastructure projects, though large, was significantly disrupted by the ISIS occupation of some one third of Iraqi territory. In September, 2019 Washington demanded that Iraq pay for completion of key infrastructure projects destroyed by the ISIS war - a war where Washington as well as Ankara, Israel and Saudi Arabia played the key hidden role — by giving the US government 50% of Iraqi oil revenues, an outrageous demand, to put it politely.
Read More...
Network

Best of the Web: Assassination of Soleimani Just One Shot in Battle of The Ages to Stop Eurasian Integration

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Sat, 18 Jan 2020 11:43 UTC
naval drills
© AFP / HO / Iranian Army officeIranian seamen salute the Russian Navy frigate Yaroslav Mudry while moored at Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman during Iran-Russia-China joint naval drills. The photo was provided by the Iranian Army office on December 27, 2019.
The Raging Twenties started with a bang with the targeted assassination of Iran's General Qasem Soleimani.

Yet a bigger bang awaits us throughout the decade: the myriad declinations of the New Great Game in Eurasia, which pits the US against Russia, China and Iran, the three major nodes of Eurasia integration.

Every game-changing act in geopolitics and geoeconomics in the coming decade will have to be analyzed in connection to this epic clash.

The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that China is already outpacing the "indispensable nation" economically and that Russia has outpaced it militarily. The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as "threats."

Comment: See also:

Read More...
Blackbox

Best of the Web: What Poland Has to Hide About The Origins of World War II

Michael Jabara Carley
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sun, 12 Jan 2020 10:15 UTC
nazi occupation poland
© Waldemar Engler/ Wikimedia CommonsA Nazi prepares to shoot a man during the Piaśnica massacres of 1939-1940, in which 12,000-14,000 Poles (intelligentsia, psychiatric patients, and others) were killed.
On 20 December 2019 President Vladimir Putin intervened very publicly to correct the West's fake history of the origins and waging of World War II. Four days later, obviously exasperated, he took aim at Poland, characterising the Polish ambassador in Berlin during the latter 1930s, Jósef Lipski, as "a bastard and anti-Semitic pig". The Polish governing elite was notoriously anti-Semitic, and in 1938 Lipski told Adolf Hitler that the Poles would "'erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw' if he carried out [a] plan to expel European Jews to Africa." In reaction, the Polish parliament, with a bipartisan majority, has indicated its intention "to pass a law that criminalizes lies about the causes of World War II." Putin's language about Lipski was not very presidential, but he was clearly outraged. He had reasons to be.

Last August the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, issued a statement lamenting the "infamous" Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, concluded on 23 August 1939. Trudeau equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany in bringing "untold suffering upon people across Europe". Obviously, Trudeau knows nothing about the origins and unfolding of World War II, but he is not alone. A few weeks later the European Parliament in Strasbourg (PACE) approved a resolution along the same lines as Trudeau's statement: the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact "paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War." The resolution appears to have originated with a group of Polish MEPs representing the right-wing, so-called ECR Group. For PACE and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), such resolutions are old hat. In 2008-2009 PACE established a bogus holiday on 23 August to commemorate the victims of fascist and communist "totalitarianism" and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. East Europeans and the NATO (read: the United States) Parliamentary Assembly were also behind the launch of the new "holiday". The Poles would do well not to raise questions about the origins of the World War II. It is rather like digging with a stick into a pile of manure. As soon as you stir it up, the manure begins to stink.
Read More...
Star of David

Flashback Best of the Web: Wikileaks Stratfor email: Israel behind blast that killed 36 IRGC troops at Iranian missile base in 2011

Raphael Ahre
The Times of Israel
Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:31 UTC

Comment: This interests us today because it's the same location from which missiles were fired at Ukraine Airlines Flight 752 last week - Shahid Moddares missile base, near the village of Bidkaneh, west of Tehran.

Then too, the Iranians insisted the incident was 'an accident'...


IRGC base Bidganeh Iran
© APIn this image taken from amateur video, smokes rises from an explosion at a Revolutionary Guard ammunition depot outside Bidganeh village, west of Tehran, last November
Israeli agents were responsible for a devastating blast last November that damaged an important Iranian military facility, according to an email written by the head of a leading private American intelligence company that was revealed Wednesday on Wikileaks.

Claiming to have spoken to multiple "good" Israeli sources, the CEO and founder of Texas-based intelligence company Stratfor, George Friedman, told his colleagues that he believes Israeli operatives were behind the explosion at a base of Revolutionary Guards on November 12. The blast killed more than 15 soldiers, among them at least one general.


Comment: In subsequent days, that death toll more than doubled to 36. And among the dead was General Hasan Moghaddam, described by the IRGC as "a key figure in Iran's missile programme."
moqaddam
General Hasan Moghaddam

"Everything I'm hearing from Israel is that they did it," Friedman wrote in an e-mail on November 15. While it isn't clear whether the explosion, which took place about 40 kilometers from Tehran, was caused by a special military operation or submarine-launched cruise missile, his Israeli contacts claim they were responsible for it, Friedman wrote.

Comment: WhatEVER it takes...

Was Iranian Missile Operator Tricked Into Shooting Down The Ukrainian Airlines Plane Over Tehran?

Read More...
Caesar

Best of the Web: Finding a 'Benedict Option' for the Humanities

Rod Dreher
The American Conservative
Fri, 17 Jan 2020 17:52 UTC
tourists greek ruins parthenon
© Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis via GettyImages
The University of California Santa Barbara wants to hire a professor of woke alchemy:
politically correct sjw woke university course queer migration
Can you imagine wasting your money, your mind, and your life studying this garbage? As a Twitter follower of mine said:
tweets swj college course woke university
Ross Douthat writes an extremely sobering column about the collapse of the academic humanities (this "queer migrations" position sounds like social science, not humanities, but the general theme is applicable). It begins:

Comment: Further reading:

Read More...
Eye 2

Flashback Best of the Web: Heshmat Alavi wrote DOZENS of anti-Iran articles for MSM. Turns out he's an M.E.K. sockpuppet

Murtaza Hussain
The Intercept
Sun, 09 Jun 2019 18:48 UTC

Comment: The vast majority of what you hear about Iran is Fake News, literally...


fake person mask
© Soohee Cho/The Intercept
In 2018, President Donald Trump was seeking to jettison the landmark nuclear deal that his predecessor had signed with Iran in 2015, and he was looking for ways to win over a skeptical press. The White House claimed that the nuclear deal had allowed Iran to increase its military budget, and Washington Post reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly asked for a source. In response, the White House passed along an article published in Forbes by a writer named Heshmat Alavi.

"Iran's current budget is funded largely through 'oil, taxes, increasing bonds, [and] eliminating cash handouts or subsidies' for Iranians, according to an article by a Forbes contributor, Heshmat Alavi, sent to us by a White House official," Rizzo and Kelly reported. The White House had used Alavi's article — itself partly drawn from Iranian sources — to justify its decision to terminate the agreement.

Comment: MEK has a long and terrifying history. The fact that neocon hawks like John Bolton are supporters only makes it worse. Naturally Israel is mixed up in it, as they view Iran as their principal threat to regional hegemony.

Read More...
Health

Best of the Web: Pentagon admits there WERE U.S. casualties from Iranian airstrikes, but 'only 11 injuries'

Frank Miles
Fox News
Fri, 17 Jan 2020 11:01 UTC

Comment: The Pentagon's P.R. operation regarding the damage Iran inflicted on its largest airbase in Iraq, and regarding U.S. casualties, continues...


us troops assad airbase
© Emiliene Malfatto/WaPoU.S. troops walk by a crater caused by Iranian airstrikes inside al-Assad Air Base near Anbar, Iraq, on Jan. 13, 2020.
Eleven U.S. service members were flown out of Al- Assad Air Base in Iraq and treated for concussion symptoms after Iran's rocket attack targeting two Iraqi military bases earlier this month, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command revealed Thursday night.

President Trump and U.S. officials had said earlier that no Americans were killed or injured in the Jan. 8 attack.

Several U.S. troops "were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed. As a standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury, and if deemed appropriate are transported to a higher level of care," Capt. Bill Urban, the Central Command spokesman, said Thursday.

He said that although no U.S. service members were killed in the attack on Al Assad Air Base, "in the days following the attack, out of an abundance of caution, some service members were transported... to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, others were sent to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, for follow-on screening. When deemed fit for duty, the service members are expected to return to Iraq following screening. The health and welfare of our personnel is a top priority and we will not discuss any individual's medical status. At this time, eight individuals have been transported to Landstuhl, and three have been transported to Camp Arifjan."

Comment: When US media was first allowed on the base about 4 days after the strikes, reporters heard Lt Col Staci Coleman, the U.S. air force officer who runs the airfield there, say:
"It's miraculous no one was hurt. Who thinks they're going to have ballistic missiles launched at them and suffer no casualties?"
Clearly, the brass, rank-and-file, their families and the media CAN and DO effectively engage in 'conspiracies of silence' about such things.

Maybe "11 concussions" is all there is to it, but maybe the Pentagon is in the process of walking back its initial claim because it was much worse than that.

See also: Iraqi TV network: Iranian airstrikes on al-Assad airbase resulted in hundreds of US casualties and extensive damage - UPDATE: 'Letter is fake'

Read More...
Books

Best of the Web: 75th anniversary: Newly-released wartime docs debunk modern Polish myths about Soviet liberation of Warsaw


RT
Thu, 16 Jan 2020 21:33 UTC
poland warsaw liberation
A Polish soldier waves the national flag in Warsaw, after it was liberated by the Soviet Union and its Polish allies on January 14-17, 1945.
Warsaw was liberated by Soviet forces 75 years ago today — and Polish officials have cloaked the pivotal event in myths ever since. Yet, newly-released historical documents help shed some light on the truth.

Official Warsaw had no plans to celebrate this date — but it is not the first time that Poland has ignored the liberation of its state capital. Since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s, politicians across Eastern European have pushed the notion that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were equally responsible for instigating World War II — and the idea that Red Army soldiers led a brutal occupation, instead of liberating Poland, has firmly found its place in the nation's history books.

That view continues to prevail in some other European states, too — but a trove of recently-declassified wartime documents, published by the Russian Defense Ministry, tells a different story.

Myth 1: 'Only the Home Army were true heroes'

With Poland under Nazi occupation, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa/AK), which supported the country's London-based government-in-exile, became a dominant resistance movement. Decades on, the AK are lionized by many in modern Poland as the true heroes and patriots of history, while Poles who helped Soviet forces are often demonized as traitors.

The AK are hailed in annual ceremonies around a white obelisk erected in the 90s in downtown Warsaw to honor their efforts. In 2019, President Andrzej Duda honored surviving AK members as role models and a "precious treasure of history."

Comment: Poland is so far gone into delusion that it isn't even commemorating this event. 200,000 Soviet soldiers died to liberate Warsaw... for what?

Even Poland's 'democratic revolutionary leader' in the 1980s, Lech Walesa, thinks Putin should have been invited to attend something.

Read More...
Eye 2

Best of the Web: Ukraine Airlines Flight 752: Iran shot it down, but there may be more to the story

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D
The Unz Review
Wed, 15 Jan 2020 21:31 UTC
debris Ukraine crash 752 Iran
© PANA
The claim that Major General Qassem Soleimani was a "terrorist" on a mission to carry out an "imminent" attack that would kill hundreds of Americans turned out to be a lie, so why should one believe anything else relating to recent developments in Iran and Iraq? To be sure, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 departing from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on the morning of January 8th with 176 passengers and crew on board was shot down by Iranian air defenses, something which the government of the Islamic Republic has admitted, but there just might be considerably more to the story involving cyberwarfare carried out by the U.S. and possibly Israeli governments.

To be sure, the Iranian air defenses were on high alert fearing an American attack in the wake of the U.S. government's assassination of Soleimani on January 3rd followed by a missile strike from Iran directed against two U.S. bases in Iraq. In spite of the tension and the escalation, the Iranian government did not shut down the country's airspace. Civilian passenger flights were still departing and arriving in Tehran, almost certainly an error in judgment on the part of the airport authorities. Inexplicably, civilian aircraft continued to take off and land even after Flight 752 was shot down.
Read More...
Cow

Best of the Web: Backlash over meat dietary recommendations raises questions about corporate ties to nutrition scientists

Rita Rubin
JAMA
Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:01 UTC
meat vs veg
It's almost unheard of for medical journals to get blowback for studies before the data are published. But that's what happened to the Annals of Internal Medicine last fall as editors were about to post several studies showing that the evidence linking red meat consumption with cardiovascular disease and cancer is too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it.

Annals Editor-in-Chief Christine Laine, MD, MPH, saw her inbox flooded with roughly 2000 emails — most bore the same message, apparently generated by a bot — in a half hour. Laine's inbox had to be shut down, she said. Not only was the volume unprecedented in her decade at the helm of the respected journal, the tone of the emails was particularly caustic.

"We've published a lot on firearm injury prevention," Laine said. "The response from the NRA (National Rifle Association) was less vitriolic than the response from the True Health Initiative."

Comment: If you ever needed more evidence that the anti-meat brigade are, at the top echelons, a bunch of crazy people, here it is. That academics, who one would hope would be open to contradictory evidence and opinions in the pursuit of truth, would go into overdrive using such under-handed tactics to censor evidence that runs counter to their position is truly eye-opening. And as pointed out above, the old adage to "follow the money" never fails to bring a blurry picture into focus.

See also:

Read More...