NAZRALLAH—Israel says it cannot bear the presence of Iran in Syria because Iran holds a rope around its neck, and represents a strategic and existential threat to Israel, etc., etc. A small number… Because of course there is not a large number of Iranians in Syria. A limited number of Iranians in Syria are considered (as an existential threat) by Israel.
IMPERIALISM
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PEPE ESCOBAR—On the Syrian front, Damascus is regarded as an indispensable ally of both Moscow and Beijing. China will invest in the reconstruction of Syria and its revamping as a key Southwest Asia node of the BRI. “Assad must go” is a non-starter; Russia-China see Damascus as essential in the fight against Salafi-jihadis of all stripes who may be tempted to return and wreak havoc in Chechnya and Xinjiang. A week ago, at an SCO ministerial meeting, Russia-China issued a joint communiqué supporting the JCPOA. The Trump administration is picking yet another fight against the very pillars of Eurasia integration.
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PATRICK COCKBURN—An Israeli-Iranian confrontation in Syria, would add yet another battle front to the conflict there that already has multiple fronts. If sustained, it could draw in Hezbollah in Lebanon which has been an important ally of Assad. The US may back a more aggressive Israeli posture in Syria, but the single-minded obsession of the Trump administration with Iran as the source of all instability in the Middle East is dangerously simple-minded and injects more instability into a region already deeply unstable.
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OPINION: Trump and Netanyahu, the Con Artists Cooking Up Cataclysmic Conflict With Iran
20 minutes readDAVID ROTHKOPF—The problem with all the anti-JCPOA efforts, like most frauds, is that they depend on the victims not really thinking through the consequences of the con. It is called a confidence game because the gullible buy into a premise that is plausible, which has some truth to it. In this case, it is that the JCPOA is actually a flawed deal.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The real change that the new law introduces is to transfer Israel’s war-making decisions away from both the Knesset and the less-invasion-prone members of Israel’s Cabinet, to only the two most invasion-seeking officials: Netanyahu and Lieberman — in other words, actually, to Netanyahu alone.