Image courtesy of Dandelion Salad blog

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges takes an in-depth look at the 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan with Matthew Hoh, a Marine Corps veteran and diplomat who resigned his State Department post in Afghanistan in protest over the war. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the decades of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

Watch this important interview here:

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/chris-hedges-and-matthew-hoh-afghanistan-war-keeps-going-because-the-money-keeps-flowing-in/

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A few days ago, Jimmy Dore did a show deconstructing how misleading a recent CNN segment on what’s going on in Libya was.   CNN started it’s timeline after the overthrow of Qaddafi and conveniently left out how the various militias fighting for control of the country emerged and who has been backing them.

As Dore shows, it’s not like this important contextual information isn’t out there.  Hillary Clinton’s emails, which were voluntarily released at the beginning of 2016, revealed that the desire to overthrow the Qaddafi government (which had always allowed women’s rights and had achieved the highest standard of living in all of Africa with a welfare state that would put Scandinavia to shame) was primarily driven by then-French president Nicholas Sarkozy who wanted to acquire control of Libyan oil, maintain influence in the former French colonies of Africa, and to stop Qaddafi’s plan to establish a gold-backed currency that would have provided African economic independence.   The emails also show that western special ops agents were in country at the beginning of the protests, creating provocations.   Genocide by NATO-backed “rebels” against black Libyans who were considered to be loyal to Qaddafi are also documented.

Watch Dore’s brilliant critique of the CNN report here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECko3KDC2w8

Trump and Putin finally met for the first time at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany this past Friday.  And, while it can’t be characterized as a major breakthrough, it did manage to exceed the paltry expectations that many had, myself included.   First, it was noted by Tillerson that the two leaders seemed to have a good rapport and the meeting went well past the allotted time of 30 minutes, clocking in at around 2 hours and 15 minutes.   Reportedly, the issues of alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election, Ukraine, cyber-security, terrorism and Syria were all addressed.  The last of which resulted in a ceasefire in the southwestern area of Syria.  But those who rely upon the corporate media or even the pseudo-alternative media (e.g. Huffington Post) would be hard-pressed to know this since most of the coverage mentioned the allegations of Russian hacking being discussed but either omitted the part about the Syria ceasefire or buried it at the bottom of the article.

Did the editors of these outlets think that the ceasefire was not newsworthy?

One of the few outlets that did headline the Syria ceasefire development was the Associated Press:

HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — The United States and Russia struck an agreement Friday on a cease-fire in southwest Syria, crowning President Donald Trump’s first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is the first U.S.-Russian effort under Trump’s presidency to stem Syria’s six-year civil war.

The cease-fire goes into effect Sunday at noon Damascus time, according to U.S. officials and the Jordanian government, which is also involved in the deal.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who accompanied Trump in his meeting with Putin, said the understanding is designed to reduce violence in an area of Syria near Jordan’s border that is critical to the U.S. ally’s security.

It’s a “very complicated part of the Syrian battlefield,” Tillerson told reporters after the U.S. and Russian leaders met for more than two hours on the sidelines of a global summit in Hamburg, Germany.

Of the agreement, he said, “I think this is our first indication of the U.S. and Russia being able to work together in Syria.”

It should be remembered, however, that the Obama administration, working via then-Secretary of State John Kerry, also worked out a ceasefire deal in Syria with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov last September, which was later torpedoed by the Pentagon’s “accidental” bombing of a heavily monitored airbase where Syrian army troops had been stationed for a long period of time.

Given how zealous members of the deep state have been to sabotage any move by Trump toward detente by keeping the empty accusations of Russiagate at high pitch, folks should be very cautious in their optimism for the long-term success of this recently agreed ceasefire.   Attempts to sabotage it will likely become obvious in the near future.

Ex-CIA analyst and expert on Russia/Soviet Union, Ray McGovern, reminds readers of this in his analysis of the Putin-Trump meeting and the Syria ceasefire at Consortium News:

With the ceasefire in tatters, Kerry publicly complained on Sept. 29, 2016: “Syria is as complicated as anything I’ve ever seen in public life, in the sense that there are probably about six wars or so going on at the same time – Kurd against Kurd, Kurd against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sunni, Shia, everybody against ISIL, people against Assad, Nusra [Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate]. This is as mixed-up sectarian and civil war and strategic and proxies, so it’s very, very difficult to be able to align forces.”

Only in December 2016, in an interview with Matt Viser of the Boston Globe, did Kerry admit that his efforts to deal with the Russians had been thwarted by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter – as well as all those forces he found so difficult to align.

“Unfortunately we had divisions within our own ranks that made the implementation [of the ceasefire agreement] extremely hard to accomplish,” Kerry said. “But it … could have worked. … The fact is we had an agreement with Russia … a joint cooperative effort.

“Now we had people in our government who were bitterly opposed to doing that,” he said. “I regret that. I think that was a mistake. I think you’d have a different situation there conceivably now if we’d been able to do that.”

….As the new U.S.-Russia agreed-upon ceasefire goes into effect on Sunday, Putin will be eager to see if this time Trump, unlike Obama, can make a ceasefire in Syria stick; or whether, like Obama, Trump will be unable to prevent it from being sabotaged by Washington’s deep-state actors.

According to Democracy Now!, so far the ceasefire appears to be holding since it went into effect on Sunday afternoon:

Monitoring groups say a ceasefire brokered by Trump and Putin for parts of southwest Syria does appear to be holding, as a new round of U.N.-sponsored peace talks open today in Geneva. The territory covered by the ceasefire includes rebel-held areas of Daraa, where opposition officials say weeks of intense bombing by the Syrian government stopped after the ceasefire took effect Sunday. However, fighting continues in other parts of the country, including in Raqqa, where the journalistic group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently says 23 civilians were killed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and shelling by U.S.-backed forces over the weekend.

As journalist and geopolitical analyst, Pepe Escobar, pointed out in his thoughts on the meeting, this was actually only one in a series of diplomatically critical meetings that Putin participated in.  Several days earlier Putin met with Chinese leader Xi on which they agreed upon several important geopolitical points:

And then, there’s the big story of the G-20 in Hamburg, which actually started three days earlier in Moscow, in a full-fledged official summit between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi repeatedly extolled the “strategic alliance”, or “the fast-growing, pragmatic cooperation”, or even the “special character” of China’s ties with Russia.

Alexander Mercouris has posted the entire Joint Statement by Russia and China on the North Korean situation, along with his own comments, here.

Just prior to Xi’s meeting with Putin,  the Chinese leader proclaimed the best period of Sino-Russian relations in history in an interview with the Russian state media outlet TASS.   The comments were reported in the Chinese media outlet Xinhua as follows:

BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday said China-Russia relations are at their “best time in history,” and expressed hope the Group of 20 major economies (G20) will continue their support for multilateral free trade and leadership in innovation-driven growth.

….China and Russia have built high-level political and strategic mutual trust, Xi said, noting that China and Russia have completely resolved their border issues left over from history, turning the 4,300-km boundary line into a bond of friendship between the two peoples.

“Our two countries have built a high level of political and strategic trust,” Xi said, adding that the two nations are each other’s most trustworthy strategic partners.

“I believe the visit will lend new impetus to the growth of bilateral relations,” said Xi.

Xi said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin both think China and Russia should deepen economic and trade cooperation so as to reinforce their interests bond and better benefit the two peoples.

“Economic cooperation and trade is the most wide-ranging area in our practical cooperation and enjoys great potential,” Xi said, adding that the structure of China-Russia economic cooperation and trade continues to improve and quite a few new areas of growth have emerged.

China is also set to play a dominant role in the re-construction of Syria as reported yesterday by Syria’s state media outlet SANA:

Syrian Ambassador in Beijing Imad Mustafa said that Chinese companies are expected to play a big role in the reconstruction phase in Syria after the end of the crisis, pointing out that the Syrian government will give top priority to Chinese companies in investment and reconstruction opportunities.

Media Recklessness

Stephen Cohen gives his commentary on the Hamburg meeting in an interview with Tucker Carlson, lamenting the corporate media’s narrative of constantly demonizing Putin and Russia and creating an atmosphere in which any attempt by President Trump to constructively work together with Russia on mutual interests and to decrease tensions between the world’s nuclear superpowers is either pilloried and sabotaged or ignored.   Watch the 5-minute video here

The excellent foreign policy journalist Max Blumenthal goes over the history of the corporate media’s dangerously disingenuous coverage of the war in Syria as well as U.S.-Russia relations.  Watch the video or read the transcript here.

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The Duran reports , along with other media outlets, that the Iraqi government has now regained full control over the ISIS stronghold of Mosul:

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Reason Magazine has written an article about an academic study done by a political science professor at Boston University and a law professor at University of Minnesota, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen, showing that Hillary Clinton’s support of war policies cost her support in areas that were most affected by military casualties in America’s myriad wars:

A new study attributes Donald Trump’s victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an “opportunity to express that anger at both political parties.”

The paper—written by Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Boston University, and Francis Shen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota—provides powerful lessons about the electoral viability of principled non-intervention, a stance that Trump was able to emulate somewhat on the campaign trail but so far has been incapable of putting into practice.

 

The study, available at SSRN, found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered “even a modestly lower casualty rate,” all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton, making her the president. The study controlled for party identification, comparing Trump’s performance in the communities selected to Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. It also controlled for other relevant factors, including median family income, college education, race, the percentage of a community that is rural, and even how many veterans there were.

“Even after including all of these demographic control variables, the relationship between a county’s casualty rate and Trump’s electoral performance remains positive and statistically significant,” the paper noted. “Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Seymour Hersh

Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has published a report detailing how President Trump ordered the Tomahawk missile strike in Syria this past April even though he received reporting from his intelligence and military advisers that stated there was no concrete evidence at the time that the Assad government was guilty of a sarin (or any intentional chemical) attack in the rebel town of Khan Sheikhoun.  Hersh wrote:

The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“

…..To the dismay of many senior members of his national security team, Trump could not be swayed over the next 48 hours of intense briefings and decision-making. In a series of interviews, I learned of the total disconnect between the president and many of his military advisers and intelligence officials, as well as officers on the ground in the region who had an entirely different understanding of the nature of Syria’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun. I was provided with evidence of that disconnect, in the form of transcripts of real-time communications, immediately following the Syrian attack on April 4. In an important pre-strike process known as deconfliction, U.S. and Russian officers routinely supply one another with advance details of planned flight paths and target coordinates, to ensure that there is no risk of collision or accidental encounter (the Russians speak on behalf of the Syrian military). This information is supplied daily to the American AWACS surveillance planes that monitor the flights once airborne. Deconfliction’s success and importance can be measured by the fact that there has yet to be one collision, or even a near miss, among the high-powered supersonic American, Allied, Russian and Syrian fighter bombers.

Read Hersh’s full article at Die Welt.   While nothing in this article should be a surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time, it is nonetheless important to have the details and confirmation from a reputable journalistic source like Hersh.   It’s a sad commentary that this kind of investigative reporting has become so rare in the U.S.  One must ask themselves why, after the Bush administration ended, Hersh has had to publish at the London Review of Books and Die Welt.

Moving right along on the topic of pathetic mainstream (corporate) media in the U.S., Glenn Greenwald has written another great primer on the latest installment of horrible reporting on Russia and “Russiagate.”  Since it never ends, the few good journalists have to keep track of the misinformation and counter it on a regular basis.   In this latest piece, Greenwald discusses the larger context of the recent resignations of 3 journalists at CNN – one a Pulitzer Prize winner who was formerly a regular for the NYT – due to sloppy journalistic practices in writing an article that relied on one anonymous source with respect to allegations that Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci was tied to a Russian investment bank that was being probed by Congress.  The story turned out to be bogus and, as I noted previously, the concept of due diligence in contemporary corporate reporting is apparently considered to be out of fashion, something only pedantic un-hip nerd types and old maids who purse their lips would insist on.

From Greenwald:

In announcing the resignation of the three journalists — Thomas Frank, who wrote the story (not the same Thomas Frank who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”); Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times; and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit — CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci.

….BUT CNN IS hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

Read Greenwald’s entire skewering of the corporate media’s reporting here.

But, as a producer at CNN admitted in a recent video, there is no proof of any of the Russiagate accusations but it is constantly hammered on at the media outlet because it gets great ratings.  Watch the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdP8TiKY8dE

But CNN isn’t the only mainstream outlet that’s finally being forced to acknowledge it’s less than stellar journalistic record on “Russiagate.”  As Robert Parry reports, the New York Times just issued a retraction of its repeated claim that all 17 intelligence agencies signed off on the “assessment” – note that an assessment is not at all the same thing as an intelligence estimate.  In fact, only the CIA, NSA, FBI and the DNI signed off on the estimate earlier this year about Russia’s supposed hacking of the election.  Furthermore, only a handful of cherry-picked analysts from those few agencies contributed to the assessment.

On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

The Times’ grudging correction was vindication for some Russia-gate skeptics who had questioned the claim of a full-scale intelligence assessment, which would usually take the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a product that seeks out the views of the entire Intelligence Community and includes dissents.

The reality of a more narrowly based Russia-gate assessment was admitted in May by President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan in sworn congressional testimony.

Parry has just been awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism for his steady and astute reporting and analysis at Consortium News.   He was awarded the prize in London on June 27th by another iconic journalist (whom I’ve admired since reading his book Heroes in college), John Pilger.  Here is an excerpt of Pilger’s comments when he presented Parry with the award:

There are too many awards for journalism. Too many simply celebrate the status quo. The idea that journalists ought to challenge the status quo — what Orwell called Newspeak and Robert Parry calls “groupthink” — is becoming increasingly rare.

 

More than a generation ago, a space opened up for a journalism that dissented from the groupthink and flourished briefly and often tenuously in the press and broadcasting. Today, that space has almost closed in the so-called mainstream media. The best journalists have become – often against their will – dissidents.

The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism recognizes these honorable exceptions. It is very different from other prizes. Let me quote in full why we give this award:

“The Gellhorn Prize is in honor of one of the 20th century’s greatest reporters. It is awarded to a journalist whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth – a truth validated by powerful facts that expose what Martha Gellhorn called ‘official drivel.’ She meant establishment propaganda.”

Martha was renowned as a war reporter. Her dispatches from Spain in the 1930s and D-Day in 1944 are classics. But she was more than that. As both a reporter and a committed humanitarian, she was a pioneer: one of the first in Vietnam to report what she called “a new kind of war against civilians”: a precursor to the wars of today.

She was the reason I was sent to Vietnam as a reporter. My editor had spread across his desk her articles that had run in the Guardian and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A headline read, “Targeting the people.” For that series, she was placed on a blacklist by the U.S. military and never allowed to return to South Vietnam.

She and I became good friends. Indeed, all my fellow judges of the Martha Gellhorn Prize  – Sandy and Shirlee Matthews, James Fox, Jeremy Harding — have that in common. We keep her memory.

She was indefatigable. She would call very early in the morning and open up the conversation with one of her favourite expressions – “I smell a rat.”

Martha Gellhorn – this is what a real journalist looks like

When, in 1990, President George Bush Senior invaded Panama on the pretext of nabbing his old CIA buddy General Noriega, the embedded media made almost no mention of civilian suffering. My phone rang. “I smell a rat,” said a familiar voice.

Within 24 hours Martha was on a plane to Panama. She was then in her 80s.  She went straight to the barrios of Panama City, and walked from door to door, interviewing ordinary people. That was the way she worked – in apartheid South Africa, in the favelas of Brazil, in the villages of Vietnam.

She estimated that the American bombing and invasion of Panama had killed at least 6,000 people.

She flew to Washington and stood up at a press conference at the Pentagon and asked a general: “Why did you kill so many people then lie about it?”

Imagine that question being asked today.  And that is what we are honoring this evening. Truth-telling, and the courage to find out, to ask the forbidden question.

Robert Parry is a very distinguished honorable exception.

Read the full speech here.

Speaking of war reporting.   Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has written a great piece on how corporate media outlets all characterize the U.S. as being the hapless humanitarian that is constantly being “sucked into” or “stumbling into” wars against its will.   They are mediasplaining to us rubes how the political class in Washington consists of a bunch of well-meaning clowns who bumble around not knowing what to do with all that humanitarian concern welling out of them so they are slipping and sliding around and if others get hurt, well, gee shucks, we’re just a great big well-meaning dufus.

“Sliding,” “stumbling,” ”sucked into,” “dragged into,” ”drawn into”: The US is always reluctantly—and without a plan—falling backward into bombing and occupying. The US didn’t enter the conflict in Syria in September 2014 deliberately; it was forced into it by outside actors. The US didn’t arm and fund anti-Assad rebels for four years to the tune of $1 billion a year as part of a broader strategy for the region; it did so as a result of some unknown geopolitical dark matter.

When US empire isn’t reluctant, it’s benevolent. “Initially motivated by humanitarian impulse,” Foreign Policy‘s Emile Simpson (6/21/17)  insisted, “the United States and its Western allies achieved regime change in Libya and attempted it in Syria, by backing rebels in each case.”

“At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy,” the New York Times editorial board (2/7/17) swooned.

Johnson goes on to contrast this with how other nations’ actions are characterized, like Russia.

Russia isn’t “drawn into” Crimea; it has a secret “Crimea takeover plot” (BBC, 3/9/15). Putin doesn’t “stumble into” Syria; he has a “Long-Term Strategy” there (Foreign Affairs, 3/15/16). Military adventurism by other countries is part of a well-planned agenda, while US intervention is at best reluctant, and at worst bumfuzzled—Barney Fife with 8,000 Abrams tanks and 19 aircraft carriers.

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I’ve noted a lot of polls, surveys and statistics that have come my way recently that readers may find interesting or enlightening about the Russian economy or Russian attitudes toward various things.

1) According to Russia’s Finance Ministry, Russians’ real incomes rose by 3% in May;

2) Despite that increase – and Russia’s official exit from recession this year – many Russians still worry about wages, the economy overall, and health care – which is undergoing a process of streamlining and reform that has prompted dissatisfaction in some quarters;

3) After suffering one of the worst mortality crises of any nation in peacetime during the 1990’s, Russia is enjoying its 3rd year in a row of natural population growth;

4) The vast majority of Russians – 86% – have no desire to leave Russia and relocate to another country;

5) Russians view the U.S. and Ukraine as the most hostile nations toward them and just over half see no sign of improvement in U.S.-Russia relations on the horizon.

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At the close of Ramadan recently, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, declared that the main obstacle to peace in his country was the U.S. occupation:

“Americans should understand that continuation of war in Afghanistan, upsurge of bombardment … will never usher in success for them. The Afghans are not a people to kowtow to someone,” he said.

The fact is, all occupiers eventually pack up their tents and go home. The only variable is how long the occupier continues his folly and how much death and destruction he is going to be responsible for before the light bulb goes on.

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(Photo: mashleymorgan/flickr/cc)

On Sunday, a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Syrian military plane over Raqqa.  In response, Russia has severed the deconfliction channel between the U.S. and Russian militaries and said any threatening and unauthorized aircraft in Syrian airspace could be targeted.  As Commondreams reports :

In what is being characterized as an act sure to further escalate already alarming tensions between the United States, Syria, and Russia, an American fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane over Raqqa on Sunday, prompting Moscow to cut off its deconfliction channel with the U.S.

“As of June 19 this year, the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation has ended its interaction with the U.S. side under a memorandum for preventing incidents and providing for safe flights during operations in Syria and demands that the U.S. command carry out a careful investigation and report about its results and the measures taken,” a statement from Moscow reads.

The Defense Ministry continued:

The shooting down of a Syrian Air Force jet in Syria’s airspace is a cynical violation of Syria’s sovereignty. The US’ repeated combat operations under the guise of ‘combating terrorism’ against the legitimate armed forces of a UN member-state are a flagrant violation of international law, in addition to being actual military aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.

The U.S. decision to shoot down the Syrian warplane—which, according to American officials, was retaliation against the plane’s bombing of nearby U.S.-backed ground troops—came “on the same day that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps launched several midrange missiles from inside Iran at targets in Syria, hoping to punish Islamic State forces responsible for last week’s terrorist attacks in Tehran,” the New York Times reported.

• The move, the Times noted, marks “the first time the American military has downed a Syrian aircraft since the start of the civil war in 2011.”

• The Pentagon issued a statement: “The coalition does not seek to fight Syrian regime, Russian, or pro-regime forces partnered with them, but will not hesitate to defend coalition or partner forces from any threat.”

• According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon’s efforts to de-escalate following the strike do not appear to have been successful: “Russia says it will treat US-led coalition planes in Syria, west of the Euphrates, as targets after US downed Syrian jet.”

• Here is what the Russian Defense Ministry said: “Any aircraft, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected in the operation areas west of the Euphrates River by the Russian air forces will be followed by Russian ground-based air defense and air defense aircraft as air targets.”

Since then, CNN has reported that the U.S. has also shot down an Iranian drone near At Tanf in Syria.

Due to the recent progress that the Syrian army is making, with help from Iran and Russia, to retake most of the country from jihadists, this is likely a provocation designed to get Russia to overreact in the hopes that it will take its eye off the ball and the progress will be sabotaged.  Of course, the Russian leadership is not that stupid and Washington should know this by now.  Washington simply can’t accept that its unquestioned hegemony is coming to an end and consequently is flailing around dangerously.  For more context, Mike Whitney provided the following analysis over at Counterpunch:

On June 10, the Syrian Army blitzed across an arid stretch of countryside in southeastern Syria to reach the Iraqi border for the first time in three years. The move,  which caught US war-planners off guard, prevents US-backed rebels from moving north from al Tanf to join the fight against ISIS in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. More important, the move makes it impossible for Washington to achieve its broader strategic objective of consolidating its territorial gains into a contiguous landmass along the Euphrates River.  Washington wants to control the eastern part of the country so it can continue its attacks on the regime while overseeing the construction of gas pipelines from Qatar to Turkey. The prospects of that plan succeeding are now greatly in doubt due to the surprise advance of the SAA.

Aside from the humiliation of being caught flat-footed by a Syrian Army that has been battered by 6 consecutive years of war,  Washington has allowed loyalist troops to seize a swath of land that splits US proxies on the ground and establishes a critical land corridor connecting Damascus to Baghdad to Tehran, a Shia superhighway that allows for the transport of commercial goods, people and weapons from east to west. Washington wanted to avoid that linkage at all cost, but simply wasn’t prepared to respond. Now any attempt to reverse the situation will involve crossing SAA lines which increases the probability of a direct confrontation with Russia. This is why it is essential to pay attention to events on the ground as they take place. The US and Russia are basically cheek-to-jowl on a topsy-turvy battlefield where any miscalculation could have grave consequences.

This latest move by the Syria Army has only added to Washington’s frustration. Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the creation of four “de-escalation zones”  on May 5, the so called Axis of Resistance (Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah) has been marching eastward along three parallel tracks with the clear intention of liberating cities captured by ISIS and reestablishing Syria’s sovereign borders.  It’s been a hard-fought slog, but the progress has been steady and ISIS has been pushed back or beaten wherever they’ve been met.

At the present pace, the fight against ISIS could be over in a matter of months, but that doesn’t mean the hostilities will end. No one really knows whether the Turks,  the Kurds or the US-backed militias will agree to withdraw from the territories they’ve captured during the war, but the general consensus seems to be that they won’t. In fact,  the US has actually  accelerated its operations in order to grab as much land as possible before ISIS is defeated. Here’s a clip from an article in the New York Times that helps to explain what’s going on:

“American-backed forces have begun an assault on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s hub in northern Syria, and signs are that they could capture the long-sought target with relative ease. Yet the militant group’s commanders, who have already withdrawn their toughest forces from the city, and most everyone else in Syria’s multifaceted war are looking ahead to an even more decisive battle in the south.

There, a complex confrontation is unfolding, with far more geopolitical import and risk. The Islamic State is expected to make its last stand not in Raqqa but in an area that encompasses the borders with Iraq and Jordan and much of Syria’s modest oil reserves, making it important in stabilizing Syria and influencing its neighboring countries.

Whoever lays claim to the sparsely populated area in this 21st-century version of the Great Game not only will take credit for seizing what is likely to be the Islamic State’s last patch of a territorial caliphate in Syria, but also will play an important role in determining Syria’s future and the postwar dynamics of the region.

With the stakes so high, the United States, Iran and Russia are all scrambling for advantage. They are building up their forces and proxy fighters and, increasingly, engaging in inflammatory clashes that threaten to escalate into a larger conflict…..

What is really at stake are even larger issues. Will the Syrian government re-establish control of the country all the way to its eastern borders? Will the desert straddling the Syrian-Iraqi border remain a no man’s land ripe for militant control? If not, who will dominate there — forces aligned with Iran, Russia or the United States? Which Syrian factions will wield the most influence?” (“Beyond Raqqa, an Even Bigger Battle to Defeat ISIS and Control Syria Looms”, New York Times)

Repeat: The outcome of the battle for east Syria will determine “the postwar dynamics of the region.”

Robert Parry, with his usual sharp eye, points out that not only is this an incredibly reckless move by the Pentagon but it is not in the U.S.’s long term interests:

The [recent Wall Street] Journal editorial criticized Trump for having no strategy beyond eradicating ISIS and adding: “Now is the time for thinking through such a strategy because Syria, Russia and Iran know what they want. Mr. Assad wants to reassert control over all of Syria, not a country divided into Alawite, Sunni and Kurdish parts. Iran wants a Shiite arc of influence from Tehran to Beirut. Mr. Putin will settle for a Mediterranean port and a demonstration that Russia can be trusted to stand by its allies, while America is unreliable. None of this is in the U.S. national interests.”

As you may have heard, Oliver Stone did a lengthy and in-depth interview with Putin which aired as a 4-part series recently on Showtime.  As you may also have heard, Stone has taken a lot of heat for even attempting to allow Putin to speak at length for himself, put it out for public consumption and allow Americans to draw their own conclusions without the usual gatekeepers of how to think inserting themselves into it.  Of course, that is exactly what the NYT, Washington Post, and a plethora of talking heads who are passed off as journalists on the network and cable news shows did by shrieking condemnations of the series either through editorials or hostile interviews of Stone.  The subtext was always “if you’re a right-thinking person you will not bother watching this at all.  And if you do watch it, you should be ashamed to admit it in polite company.  It would sort of be like admitting you’re a pedophile or a long-time celibate.  Just don’t.”

One of the more serious and respectful interviews of Stone was by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!.   You can watch or read the transcript here:

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/14/oliver_stone_interviews_putin_on_us?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=f0ae52757f-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-f0ae52757f-191485825

You can also watch the entire 4-part series by Stone here:

Part one https://vimeo.com/222012543

Part two https://vimeo.com/221567261

Part three https://vimeo.com/222016191

Part four https://vimeo.com/222019557

Transcript of The Putin Interviews here:
http://skyhorsepublishing.com/titles/13188-9781510733428-putin-interviews

Official Showtime series site:
http://www.sho.com/the-putin-interviews#/closed

Earlier this month, Robert Parry and Consortium News awarded Stone the Gary Webb award for courage in taking the flack for making controversial but necessary documentaries, including interviewing several leaders that Washington opposed (Huge Chavez, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, etc.) and allowing the other side of the story to be told.  Video and transcript of Stone’s remarks can be viewed here:

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/14/oliver-stone-receives-gary-webb-award/

Last week, congress passed a new round of sanctions on Russia (and Iran) for interfering in the election, actions in Syria and Ukraine, the heat wave in the southwest, Mickey Rourke’s bad plastic surgery….oh, wait.  Sorry.  In any event,  Austria and Germany wasted no time in crying foul, stating that the U.S. had no right to interfere in Europe’s economic affairs with Russia, especially in regards to its energy deals with its neighbor.   Zerohedge had more details:

Less than a day after the Senate overwhelmingly voted to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin, on Thursday Germany and Austria – two of Russia’s biggest energy clients in Europe – slammed the latest U.S. sanctions against Moscow, saying they could affect European businesses involved in piping in Russian natural gas.

Gabriel and Kern also accused the U.S. of having ulterior motives in seeking to enforce the energy blockade, which they said is trying to help American natural gas suppliers at the expense of their Russian rivals. And they warned the threat of fining European companies participating in the Nord Stream 2 project “introduces a completely new, very negative dimension into European-American relations.”

In their forceful appeal, the two officials urged the United States to back off from linking the situation in Ukraine to the question of who can sell gas to Europe. “Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe, and not for the United States of America,” Kern and Gabriel said. The reason why Europe is angry Some Eastern European countries, including Poland and Ukraine, fear the loss of transit revenue if Russian gas supplies don’t pass through their territory anymore once the new pipeline is built.

Alexander Mercouris commented on Merkel’s remarks the next day reinforcing the criticisms of the sanctions:

Looks again like NYT didn’t do due diligence like real journalists are supposed to do.  Instead, they just took the word of government officials (anonymous ones at that) and ran with it as though it were correct.  Where have we seen this before?  How about with claims that Iraq had WMD?  How about the genocide that was claimed to be going on in Yugoslavia in 1999?  How about the Gulf of Tonkin incident?  How about Qaddafi ordering Libyan troops to commit mass rape while pumped up on Viagra and targeting civilians in 2011?  All of these turned out be bogus and in not one of these instances did the NYT sufficiently question the government narrative and rush to war.   Hey, it only resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of entire countries.   Easy come, easy go when you’re the “newspaper of record.” 

Photos from my trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg last month have now been posted and can be viewed here:

Photos II