By Daniel Axelrod, Counterpunch, 3/5/25

The war in Ukraine may or may not be winding down with ongoing US/Russian negotiations, but this leads to a key question: what was the war really about in the first place? We were told by the US government (albeit without any documentary evidence) that Russian President Putin was on a power-hungry “unprovoked” campaign to take over much of Central Europe, like Hitler tried to do. Putin would thereby restore the former Soviet Union’s territory, putting the sovereignty of Ukraine and much of Europe at risk. On the other hand, numerous political historians and even former American officials cite a different cause: that Russia was indeed provoked by the clearly stated plans and actions to expand NATO up to the Russian border and emplace nuclear weapons there within a short striking distance of Moscow, putting Russia’s safety at stake.

But both viewpoints leave out an important feature of the war: the environmental resource feature. The war is a contention between the corporate oligarchs of both the US and Russia to control Ukraine’s vast natural resources. With Trump’s recent Oval Office made-for-TV show to bully Zelensky into an agreement that allows mineral extraction in order for private corporations to “cash in” on Ukrainian rare-earth deposits, we might ask: is the corporate zeal to seize rare earths just one aspect of a squabble over post-war spoils, or is it a root cause of the war from the beginning (and even before the beginning)? Activists would be advised to see environmental desecration as both a cause of war and an obvious outcome of war.

Ukraine holds huge deposits of critical elements and minerals. In an effort to attract investment and presumably military support from the West, the Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources and Ukrainian Geological Survey have published a report after the Russian invasion which claims that Ukraine has deposits of 22 of the 50 materials the U.S. has identified as critical and declares that: “Ukraine holds very competitive positions in five key ones: graphite, lithium, titanium, beryllium and uranium”.

This wealth is not new news. Even before the Russian invasion in February, 2022, a mainstream European business magazine in July, 2021 (before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) opens as follows: “Kyiv [the capital of Ukraine] will be invited on Tuesday (13 July) to join EU industrial alliances on batteries and raw materials, with a view to develop an entire value chain of the extraction, refining and recycling of minerals in Ukraine to supply the EU market for electric cars and digital equipment.”

Ukraine is rich in rare-earth minerals, essential in digital electronic devices and displays. The bulk of rare earth mineral presently comes from China and Russia, which are now targeted as “adversaries” in a future economics-motivated shooting war.

Until recently, the importance of rare earth minerals generally has been underplayed in the “mainstream” media. Instead, more emotive political terms like “self-determination” and “existential threat” and “freedom and democracy”, devoid of explicit economic interests, have been most frequently deployed. But even months ago, some US politicians did refer to the rare earths in a starkly positive light as an actual motive to continue the war. For example, here is what Sen. Lindsay Graham has said in November, 2024 in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News:

“Ukraine is still standing. This war is about money. People don’t talk much about it but you know the richest country in all of Europe for Rare Earth minerals is Ukraine. Two to seven trillion dollars worth of minerals that are Rare Earth minerals, very relevant to the 21st century. Ukraine’s ready to do a deal with us, not the Russians, so it’s in our interest to make sure that Russia doesn’t take over the place. It’s the Bread Basket of really the developing World. 50% all the food going to Africa comes out of Ukraine. We can make money and have a economic relationship with Ukraine that’d be very beneficial to us with peace. So Donald Trump’s going to do deal to get our money back to enrich ourselves with Rare Earth minerals, a good deal for Ukraine and us, and he’s going to bring peace and Biden’s been a disaster when it comes to containing bad guys.” (Thanks to Sen. Graham for supplying the title of this article.)

Apart from rare-earth metals, Ukraine is extremely rich in natural resources for energy (oil, gas, coal, and uranium) and other metal and non-metal minerals, as well as agriculture. But much of this natural wealth is in territories now under Russian control, which might explain why the West had been so keen to regain all of the invaded territory, and why Russia has been keen to hold it. And of course, Ukraine also has a great geographical position with year-round ocean access ports on the Black Sea, facilitating export to foreign markets.

A Ukrainian government website, working along with Ukrainian business interests, tries to pull in foreign investors to the natural wealth with the following leading statement: “Ukraine has extremely rich and complementary mineral resources in high concentrations and close proximity to each other. The country has abundant reserves of coal, iron ore, natural gas, manganese, salt, oil, graphite, sulfur, kaolin, titanium, nickel, magnesium, timber, and mercury.”

In a particularly brazen pro-corporate pitch, Ukraine’s Geological Survey report boasts that “To facilitate large-scale critical raw materials development, Ukraine streamlines regulatory approvals” (italics emphasis added). Environmental rules in the US and in Europe are intended to benefit the health of local populations, but they can be a real hassle to extractive industries. The appeal of environmental rule evasion in Ukraine was even cited by Trump himself in his contentious press conference with Zelensky on Feb. 28 (although he consistently misidentifies rare earth as “raw” earth):

“As you know, our country doesn’t have much raw earth. We have a lot of oil and gas but we don’t have a lot of the raw earth. And what we do have is protected by the environmentalists, but that could be unprotected. But it’s still not very much. They [Ukraine] have among the best in the world in terms of raw earth” (italics emphasis added).

Essentially, Trump is saying that rare earth mineral resources are not that rare. The goal is to extract them in places with little environmental oversight.

Ukraine is hoping to offer rare earth elements, essential for many kinds of technology, but it insists it must be traded only in exchange for continued military aid. The offer is appealing to right-wing opinion-makers such as columnist and CIA apologist Marc Thiesson of the Washington Post, who frames it all as part of a struggle against Russia and China:

“One of the main reasons Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine (aside from his delusional historical fantasies about how Ukrainians and Russians are ‘one people’) was to seize these natural resources, which are valued at an estimated $26 trillion…”.

Of course, Thiesson does not mention that this “main reason” works the other way too: the incorporation of Ukraine into NATO would provide the West a great opportunity to seize those natural resources. Russia has consistently opposed that incorporation for decades, and it considered the West’s plans for Ukrainian NATO membership to be a deliberate military provocation, which it arguably was. Even Trump has admitted, “As far as NATO is concerned, from many years before President Putin, I will tell you that I’ve heard that Russia would never accept that. So that’s the way it is, and I think that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”

The attraction of mining interests and their governments to rare earth deposits is not limited to Ukraine. Greenland has a rich supply of rare earths and other valuable minerals. This fact led Trump to declare that taking over Greenland is in our “economic” interest. Who is “our”? Among the people most interested in Greenland is Trump’s commerce secretary nominee and Wall Street investment banker Howard Lutnick. Mr. Lutnick is the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which has a financial stake in the island’s mining prospects through an investment in a company called Critical Metals Corp. Critical Metals plans to start the mining process as soon as 2026, according to company executives. Lutnick says he promises to divest his personal interest.

The underlying story is the same concerning the proposed (but still unlikely) annexation of Canada. Canada’s Premier Justin Trudeau was caught by an accidentally “hot mic” saying, “I suggest that not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state.”

We are told repeatedly – and we are supposed to believe – (1) that Putin is a madman intent on taking over all of eastern and central Europe to restore the Soviet sphere, and (2) that the US opposes any countries invading other countries (!) and merely strives to protect democracy and stability. This line is reminiscent of the State Dept. propaganda during the Vietnam War: that China was out to invade all of SE Asia nations, which would “fall like a row of dominoes” unless we blocked them in S. Vietnam. In both the cases of Ukraine and Vietnam, that statement has been very effective in rousing up public support for a war, but it is chanted with very little actual factual backing. What we are NOT supposed to believe is that, behind many imperial wars, lurks an international competition among capitalist oligarchs for valuable natural resources.

One might argue that the cost of these wars far exceeds the value of the ore to be mined. But this view is too simplistic because it ignores the socioeconomic class structure of US society. Ordinary working taxpayers in the US are the ones who do the paying (and sometimes dying) for the wars, with their tax money going to the pockets of corporate military industrial contractors. And of course, ownership, control, and profits from the mining operations will accrue – not to the US taxpayers – but directly to corporate mining companies. So which class gains and which class loses in an imperial war are entirely different classes.

US government efforts to separate Ukraine from the USSR (of which Ukraine was a founding member) and later from Russia have a long history. Even as early in the Cold War as 1949, the CIA air-dropped 85 agents into Ukraine to acquire intelligence to covertly support nationalist (and often fascist) movements that, it was hoped, would trigger a Soviet breakup. Zbigniew Brzezinski (Pres. Carter’s Secretary of State and prominent US Cold Warrior theoretician), in his famous book “The Grand Chessboard” (1997), emphasized over and over the geostrategic centrality of Ukraine “with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea”. The economic value of Ukraine was recognized, by both the US/NATO and by Russia. Brzezinski in his book also emphasized how NATO dominance in Ukraine would be an unacceptable provocation to Russia, decades before Russia’s “unprovoked” attack in 2022.

So why does a settlement in Ukraine now appear more likely of late, as the US under Trump appears to be backing away from supplying Ukraine militarily and financially, reversing the prior Biden policy? Is Biden a warmonger but Trump a peacemaker? No, both are pro-capitalist warmongers acting in the interests of their wealthiest backers. The switch of policy toward end-stage negotiation is simply a matter of “facts on the ground”. Russia has successfully invaded eastern Ukraine (the section with a largely ethnic Russian population) and is able to deploy a large military to hold it. US/NATO rulers had always recognized this inherent Russian military superiority but had hoped that strict economic sanctions would weaken Russia. Unfortunately for US/NATO, that hope did not work out at all; the Russian economy is growing, saved by its trade within the rapidly growing “BRICS” economic consortium of non-Western European, non-North American nations . In this escalating war of attrition, the US/Ukraine already started launching advanced ballistic missiles into Russia. The next escalatory step by either side could easily go nuclear. Biden and Blinken were willing to play nuclear chicken; Trump is not so willing, at least not over Ukraine.

But still, why is there a difference in Ukraine policy between Trump and Biden, if they are both pro-corporate puppets? This is because western corporate networks that essentially buy government policy are not monolithic; different networks have some overlapping interests but also some very divergent ones. One split appears to be whether the circle of Russian oligarchs are included vs. excluded in the corporate array of holdings. Another split follows along the global (“globalist”) vs. national (“America first”) investments divide. The different networks then push different politicians and governmental policies according to which policies will directly benefit themselves at the expense of the others. This clash of interests is usually hidden, played out only in secret meetings and corporate boardrooms and lobbyist bribery. But these days, some of the clashes have broken out into the public. For example, in the case of Biden, some of his wealthy backers and family members allegedly were deeply invested in Ukraine government-connected energy exploration holding corporations (for example, Burisma). Trump allegedly appears to have owed a debt to the Russian oligarch networks which launder money through his real estate towers and which have bailed him out of bankruptcy when his New Jersey casinos failed.

The underlying lesson here is that questions of war and peace are integrally related to questions of environmental extraction and destruction. It is a two-way street. Environmental desecration both results from war and causes war. Such matters go far beyond the usual media focus about smart vs. stupid or stable vs. defective personalities of the leaders. The problem is systemic. The pumping heart of the two-way street is corporate capitalism, which by its fundamental nature, is “all about money”.

Dr. Daniel Axelrod (daxelrod@umich.edu) is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and coauthor of “To Win a Nuclear War” (1987, South End Press) with Dr. Michio Kaku. He has taught a “Science and Strategy in the Nuclear Arms Race” course at U. Michigan, and has been active in environmental and antiwar groups.

YouTube link here.

By Patrick Armstrong, Website, 3/3/25

Patrick Armstrong was an analyst in the Canadian Department of National Defence specialising in the USSR/Russia. He started in the time of Chernenko and watched the whole thing develop. He was a Counsellor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow 1993-1996. He retired in May 2008 and has been writing on Russia and related subjects on the Net ever since.

There’s a longstanding apothegm about war that says that amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics. To this I would add that beginners talk weapons (remember Saint Javelin, M777s, Leopard tanks, F-16s? Seen a lot of game changer weapons come and go haven’t we?)

Logistics is the really hard part of planning: it is the business of making sure that the fighting end of the effort has all the things that it requires where it needs them when it needs them. The end comes when your guy kicks in the door of the enemy’s leader’s office. Everything else: aircraft carriers, tank armies, artillery, air fleets, medical support, planning is about getting him there. Here’s the photo. If the infantryman at the tip of the spear doesn’t have rations and ammunition he’s useless and will soon be out of the game. Getting these (and many other things) to him is extraordinarily difficult and many popular accounts of wars leave this somewhat boring aspect of the war business out of the story.

But war is a combination of many things all of which have to work together. All are necessary but none is sufficient. It is, I believe, the most complicated thing humans do (and, depressingly, history shows that it’s our favourite outdoor sport.) Saying one part is the most important is plain wrong. War without purpose (grand strategy and strategy) is just killing people and smashing things. Soldiers without training are dead men walking. Tactics without logistical support is just Brownian movement. And so on. Everything has to be planned and coordinated and carried out hampered by what Clausewitz called “friction”; against an enemy who’s doing everything to upset and counter you. Once you’ve planned it all out, you have to start all over again on the fly because “No plan survives contact with the enemy“.

What’s going on in Ukraine is an industrial war which is consuming enormous amounts of ammunition and weapons with tremendous destruction and hundreds of thousands of casualties. NATO is used to flying over a target with no air defence and dropping bombs, or small infantry groups who call in air or artillery when somebody shoots at them. And, in the end, NATO loses the war anyway and goes home. Alex Vershinin got it right at the beginning in June 2022 in The Return of Industrial Warfare.

The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.

And, it should be clear it could be much more: Moscow calls it a “special military operation” and therefore Kiev looks like this; if it were a full-scale war Kiev would look like this.

What do we hear from NATO? More money. Must get to 2% of GDP. That’s not enough, 3% is needed. Maybe 5%. Money.

NATO’s money talk and boasting (remember “taking chips from refrigerators” and “Russia’s industry is in tatters“; Russia is running out of weapons?) has been replaced by some recognition of reality. In January the current NATO GenSek told us “When you look what Russia is producing now in three months, it’s what all of NATO is producing from Los Angeles up to Ankara in a full year“. Russia is four-to-one against the whole enemy coalition.

It’s production, not money. You don’t fight wars by firing bundles of dollars at the enemy. One of the primal errors of Western intelligence was measuring Russia’s economy using the ruble to USD exchange rate. (NATO GenSek still believes it though: “Russia is not bigger than the Netherlands and Belgium combined as an economy“.) In 2017 I wrote Exchange Rating Russia Down and Out which I concluded by saying Russia had a “full service economy”. And, whatever the GenSek may imagine, the World Bank tells us that “the Netherlands and Belgium combined” with its “industry in tatters” has become the fourth-largest economy in the world.

There is nothing that money can do to remedy the four-to-one ratio except with a lot of investment in production over a long time. Thanks to offshoring manufacturing, the Western industrial base mostly has to be built from the ground up. Is that even possible? If you think about it, an apprentice machinist on an assembly line fifty years ago was being taught how to do it by a master machinist who had been taught by a previous master and so on back to the middle of the 1700s when industrial production was invented. Each in the series advanced the technique, of course, but it’s still a chain you could trace back, machinist by machinist, for all that time. If that sequence of teacher-learner-teacher is broken, if the teacher has retired or died leaving no apprentices, how long will it take to get it back? Putting a pallet of engraved paper in the floor of an empty building and hoping it will turn into a pallet of artillery rounds is magic thinking. We know this from history. By winter 1914 it was evident that artillery ammunition consumption far exceeded anybody’s expectations and Britain, a manufacturing giant then, started tooling up. Even so it took a year and a half to manufacture the vast number of artillery rounds for the Somme offensive and about a quarter of them did not explode because the fuses weren’t properly made. How far away is the West from meeting the real demand?

Meanwhile, the EU economy isn’t doing so well and, with a stagnant or shrinking economy, just keeping the same amount of money flowing means that the percentage will have to grow. So the planned 3-4-5-whatever percent GDP increase they’re all calling for may turn out to be just enough to maintain the existing inadequate amount. As the Red Queen told Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!“

The ends of “Last Summer’s Ukraine“, NATO and the EU are visible, don’t you think?

Beginners talk weapons;

Amateurs talk tactics;

Professionals talk logistics;

Idiots talk money.

National Security Archive, 3/19/25

Washington D.C., March 19, 2025 – On the day of President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”—intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as Controlled American Sources, White House aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported in a Top Secret memorandum on “CIA Reorganization.” In the U.S. Embassy in Paris, 123 “diplomats” were actually CIA undercover agents; in Chile, 11 of the 13 Embassy “political officers” were CIA undercover operatives. “CIA today has nearly as many people under official cover overseas as [the] State [Department]—3900 to 3700,” Schlesinger reported to President Kennedy. “About 1500 of those are under State Department cover (the other 2200 are presumably under military or other non-State official cover).” (Document 1)

The memorandum, declassified in full for the first time yesterday, is part of a final release of records on the Kennedy assassination under the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Pursuant to a directive from President Trump on January 23, the National Archives released 2,182 records (63,400 pages) in two tranches on the evening of March 18 and noted that more would be released as they were digitalized.

The new release includes hundreds of CIA records as well as White House and NSC documents relating to covert operations abroad, particularly in Latin American nations such as Cuba and Mexico which are fixtures in the history of the Kennedy assassination. Most of them were released before but with key redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods and covert operations abroad from being revealed. For the first time, these records on CIA covert operations are being released uncensored.

Among the revelations are completely unredacted copies of:

• A key document from the CIA’s famed “Family Jewels” series describing “examples of activities exceeding the CIA’s charter,” including a CIA counterespionage operation against the French embassy in Washington, D.C., that included “breaking and entering and the removal of documents from the French consulate” and DCI John McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, which “could and would raise eyebrows in some quarters.” (Document 4)
• The CIA Inspector General’s report on the 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, revealing the names of CIA officers and others who assisted in the plot. (Document 6)
• A series of summaries of briefings by DCI John McCone to members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) that provide more details about known CIA political action programs and previously unknown details about “the Agency’s covert financial support to political parties in the fight against communism” around the world. (Document 2)
• A CIA inspector general report on the workings of the CIA station in Mexico City providing one of the most detailed views of how the CIA organizes its operations on the ground. (Document 3)
• A history of CIA operations in the Western Hemisphere covering 1946-1965, including expenditures by CIA stations in Latin America, and details on CIA payments and influence operations in Bolivia to orchestrate the election of their chosen candidate General René Barrientos. (Document 5)

“There is no doubt that the JFK Records Act has advanced public knowledge of CIA covert operations – who they targeted, how they were conducted and who conducted them – more than any other declassification in the history of access to information,” said National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, who has studied CIA operations for decades. “Without this law and its implementation over the last 27 years, these operational CIA files would likely have stayed Top Secret for eternity.”

The JFK Records Act

Congress passed the 1992 JFK Act in the wake of a public uproar over Oliver Stone’s popular conspiratorial movie, JFK. The film, starring Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison, who mounted a failed, conspiracy-driven prosecution of a local businessman for killing Kennedy, finished with a statement that over five million pages of records on the assassination remained secret. “The suspicions created by government secrecy eroded confidence in the truthfulness of federal agencies in general and damaged their credibility,” noted the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in its final report. “Finally, frustrated by the lack of access and disturbed by the conclusions of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Act), mandating the gathering and opening of all records concerned with the death of the President.”

After the JFK Act was passed, the National Security Archive played a role in advising the five-member oversight board and its staff to establish a broad definition of an “assassination-related” document. The ARRB mandated the full release of thousands of documents related not only to the immediate crime, but on covert action and espionage operations in Cuba, and Mexico, among other countries, and on FBI operations and the mafia. To date, the documents have produced countless revelations of the CIA and FBI’s operational histories.

“The Review Board has worked hard to obtain all records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and to release the records to the fullest extent possible to the American people,” the Assassination Records Review Board members wrote in a letter to President Clinton in September 1998, when they turned in their final report. “We have done so in the hope that release of these records will shed new evidentiary light on the assassination of President Kennedy, enrich the historical understanding of that tragic moment in American history, and help restore public confidence in the government’s handling of the assassination and its aftermath.”

The National Security Archive is just starting to sort through this treasure trove of new revelations. Watch this space for future postings on CIA operations and much more.

To read the documents click here.

Dissident Voice, 1/11/25

Peter Ford served in the UK Foreign Ministry for many years including being UK Ambassador to Bahrain (1999-2003) and  then Syria (2003-2006).  Following that, he was representative to the Arab world for the Commissioner General of United Nations Relief and Works Agency.  He was interviewed by Rick Sterling on Jan 6, 2025.

Rick Sterling:  Why do you think the Syrian military and government collapsed so rapidly?

Peter Ford: Everybody was surprised but with hindsight, we shouldn’t have been. Over more than a decade, the Syrian army had been hollowed out by the extremely dire economic situation in Syria, mainly caused by western sanctions. Syria only had a few hours of electricity a day, no money to buy weapons and no ability to use the international banking system to buy anything whatsoever. It’s no surprise that the Army was run down. With hindsight, you might say the surprise is that the Syrian government and Army were successful in driving back the Islamists. The Syrian Army forced them into the redoubt of Idlib four or five years ago.But after that point, the Syrian army deteriorated, became less battle ready on the technical level and also morale.

Syrian soldiers are mainly conscripts and they suffer as much as any ordinary Syrian from the really dreadful economic situation in Syria. I hesitate to admit it, but the Western sanctions were extremely effectively in doing what they were designed to do: to bring the Syrian economy down to its knees. So we have to say, and I say this with deep regret,  the sanctions worked. The sanctions did exactly what they were designed to do to make the Syrian people suffer, and thereby to bring about discontent with what they call the regime.

Ordinary Syrians didn’t understand the complexities of geopolitics, and they blamed the Syrian government for everything: not having electricity, not having food, not having gas, oil, high inflation. Everything that came from being cut off from the world economy and not having supporters with bottomless pockets.

Syria was being attacked and occupied by major military powers (Turkey, USA, Israel). Plus thousands of foreign jihadis. The Syrian army was so demoralized that they really were a paper tiger by the end of the day.

RS:  Do you think the UK and the US were involved in training the jihadis prior to the December attack on Aleppo?

PF:  Absolutely. The Israelis also. The leader of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS),  Ahmed Hussein al Sharaa (formerly known as Mohammad abu Jolani) almost certainly has British advisors in the background.   In fact, I detected the hand of such advisors in some of the statements made in impeccable English. The statements had Americanized spelling, so the CIA are in there too.  Jolani is a puppet, a marionette saying what they want him to say.

RS:  What’s is the current situation,  a month after the collapse?

PF:  There are skirmishes here and there, but broadly, the Islamists and foreign fighters are ruling the roost. There are pockets of resistance in Latakia where the Alawite are literally fighting for their lives.  Much of the fighting is about the attempts by HTF, the present rulers to  confiscate weapons. The Alawites are resisting and there are pockets of resistance in the South where there are local Druze militias.

HTS is spread thinly on the ground. They are facing problems in asserting themselves. Although they had a walkover against the Syrian army, they never actually had to do much fighting.  I would guess they only have about 30,000 fighting men and spread across Syria, that is not a lot. There’s an important pocket of resistance in the Northeast where the Kurds are. The Kurdish American allies are resisting. The so-called Syrian National Army, which is a front for the Turkish army, may  go into a fully fledged war against the Kurdish forces. But that’s going to depend partly on what happens after the  inauguration of the new US president, how Trump deals with the situation.

RS:   What are you hearing from people in Syria?

It is not a pretty story. HTS and their allies have been parading showing their dominance, flying ISIS and Al-Qaeda flags. They have been bullying, intimidating, confiscating and looting. Surrendering Christian as well as Alawite soldiers have been given summary justice, roadside executions being the norm.  Christians in their towns and villages are just trying to hunker down and pray. Literally. I’m sorry to say the senior Christian clerics, with one or two noble exceptions, have opted for appeasement and effectively betrayed their communities. The senior leadership at the Orthodox Church, in particular Greek Catholic church, have had themselves photographed with dignitaries of the jihadi regime.

They are turning the other cheek. It’s quite a contrast with the Alawite. But they have no choice. You may remember that the slogan of the jihadi armies during the conflict was, “Christians to Beirut, Alawite to the grave.”  HTS  is going through the motions of having meetings with clerics and making soothing noises. All the while their henchmen are driving around in trucks flying ISIS flags. What I’m hearing is very depressing.

The regime is leaving the Alawites totally abandoned. You barely read a word in the west in media about the plight of the Alawite and not much more about the Christians.

RS:  Western media have demonized Bashar al Assad and even Asma Assad.   What was your impression of Bashar and Asma when you met them? What do you think of accusations they accumulated billions of dollars?

PF: The accusations are completely spurious. I know some members of the Assad family, some of them have lived for many years in Britain. They lived in very modest personal circumstances. If Assad had been a billionaire, like they’re saying, some of that would’ve trickled down. I can guarantee you that has not been the case.  These accusations also go against the impressions that I picked up when I was seeing the Assads when I was an ambassador there. They appreciated the good things of life the same as everybody else, but they didn’t come across as the Marcos type. Nothing at all like that.  It is all lies,  made up to serve the deeper agenda.

The media kicking of Bashar and Asma  is really distasteful. It’s pointless.He’s disappointed his few remaining followers, although it was unrealistic, I believe, for them to expect more. But the fact is that he ran when others were not able to run, and many of those have been killed, or they’re hiding or they’ve escaped to Lebanon in some cases where they’re also hiding. He did get out with his skin, but to beat up on him as the media are doing is really distasteful and pointless. It is akin to this new genre of political pornography, Assad porn, the torture stories, the hyped up narrative about prison and graves being opened up. Actually, by the way, most of those graves are war dead. They were not people who’d been tortured to death as the media pretends. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the conflict over more than a decade, and many of them were buried in unmarked graves. But the western media are reveling in this new genre of Assad porn.

This is all being whipped up to make Western audiences more accepting of the way the West is getting into bed with Al-Qaeda. The more they demonize Assad and harp on the misdeeds of the Assad regime, and the more likely we are to swallow and be distracted away from the  hideous atrocities being carried out right now.

Western leaders are kissing the feet of a guy who’s still a wanted terrorist and who has been a founder member of ISIS for God’s sake, as well as a founder member of Al-Qaeda in Syria. It is morally distasteful and shaming.

Joulani needs the west desperately now. Otherwise, he will face the same fate as Bashar Asad. If the economy continues on its trajectory of the years, then Joulani will be dead meat in fairly short order. He has to deliver massive rapid economic improvement to survive as leader. And this is what it’s all about. His strategy, obviously, is to milk his status as a puppet of the West in order to secure not just reconstruction aid, but that’s for the long term, but more immediately sanctions relief, the electricity flowing again, the oil.

Let”s not forget that the oil and gas of Syria is still effectively in the hands of the United States, which through its Kurdish puppets, controls a segment of the economy, which used to be worth, I think, 20% of serious GDP and provide essential oil for fuel, cooking, everything. He’s got to get his hands on that and get sanctions lifted. That’s what so much of it is about. But he has one major problem: Israel. Israel’s not buying it. Israel is the exception. All the western front is tumbling over itself to go and kiss the feet of the sultan of Damascus. But the Israelis are sucking their teeth, saying they don’t trust the guy.

Israel is destroying the remnants of the Syrian army and its infrastructure. Meanwhile they grab more Syrian land. They want to keep Syria on its knees indefinitely by insisting that Western sanctions not be lifted.  I sense there’s a battle royal going on in Washington between what we might call the deep state, which would favor lifting sanctions and the Israel lobby, which is resisting that for selfish Israeli reasons. Given that the Israeli lobby wins these tussles nine times out of 10 , the outlook may not be that great for the Jolani regime.

RS:   What are your hopes and fears for Syria? What’s the nightmare scenario and what’s the best possible?

PF: I’m very pessimistic. It is very hard to see a silver lining in what has happened. Syria has been taken off the table as a Middle East player. The old Syria has died effectively. Syria was the last man standing among the Arab countries that supported the Palestinians. There was no other. There were militias like Hezbollah plus Yemen but there were no states other than Syria. Syria is now gone, and the jihadis are saying, telling the world they don’t care. By the way, this is an example of how the Israelis will not take yes for an answer. The jihadis keep telling the world, “We love Israel. We don’t care about the Palestinians. Please accept us. We love you.”  And the Israelis won’t take yes for an answer.

The best hope for the Syrian people is that they may get some respite. It is possible to imagine a scenario where the Syrian people are able to recover, at least economically a scenario under which sanctions are lifted, under which Syria, the central government recovers control of its oil and grain, where fighting has stopped, where it doesn’t have to pay anything to keep up an army because it’s not trying.They might be able to put everything into reconstruction.

So it is possible to imagine a scenario where Syria loses its soul, but gains more hours of electricity. That is possibly the most likely scenario. But there are major obstacles as we discussed, Israel standing in the way of sanctions, lifting pockets of resistance in discipline among the jihadi ranks, Turkey rampaging against the Kurds and ISIS which is still not a completely spent force. So the outlook is obviously cloudy. We should take stock in a month’s time when we see the early days of the new regime in Washington on which so much will depend.

RS:  In Trump’s first term he tried to remove all US troops from east Syria but his efforts were ignored. Perhaps that could have made a big  difference?

PF: Yes, it could have been a total game changer.  If Syria had  access to its oil, it wouldn’t have had the fuel problem, the electricity problem. It could have changed the history of the region.

Now, the US is increasing the number of soldiers and bases in Syria.  And they recently assassinated a ISIS leader which might have played a role in sparking the recent terrorist attack in the US. All of this makes it much harder now for Trump to withdraw US forces because it will seen as a retreat, a reward for ISIS.

I argued for years that the sanctions were manifestly not working. But in the end they did. It’s like a bridge. It gets undermined and then suddenly it breaks. There was no single cause. It was just the culmination and things reached a tipping point.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com.