=By=  STEVEN ARGUE

Just treacherously fulfilling NATO’s deceitful, imperialist agenda, as per Washington’s designs “to make Russia bleed” for her audacity in disputing Washington’s control of the region.

[Photo: Russian SU-24 shot down by Turkey. ]

NATO member Turkey has just shot down a Russian SU-24 fighter jet over Syrian airspace. The religious extremist rebels fighting against Assad have released video that appears to show one of the pilots dead as rebels gloat saying “God is Great!”. Rebels say they killed both pilots, shooting at them as they parachutedfrom the plane. Russian airstrikes, working directly with the Syrian government and Kurdish YPG have delivered severe blows to ISIS. As a result, ISIS has lost 20% of their former territory since Russian bombing began.

Turkey, a country that has carried out genocide against Kurds and which is presently under the leadership of an Islamic Brotherhood [megalomanic] prime minister, has long been seeking the overthrow of both Syria’s and the Kurdish YPG’s ‘s secular and pro-woman governments. They helped arm ISIS, have long aided the movement of foreign jihadist fighters crossing the border into Syria, shoot at and kill Kurdish fighters crossing the border to fight against ISIS, have been bombing some of the best fighters against ISIS in the Kurdish PKK, and are a major market for the oil looted by ISIS. Last year , Turkey also shot down a Syrian fighter jet. As has been clear for some time now, Turkey is mainly fighting on the side of ISIS and other religious extremists in Syria against the Kurds, against women, against religious minorities, and against secularism.

United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Other U.S. Allies out of Syria Now!

-Steven Argue for the Revolutionary Tendency

The Revolutionary Tendency
https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionaryTendency/

ADDENDUM 1

Russia deploys missile cruiser off Syria coast, ordered to destroy any target posing danger

A missile cruiser “Moscow” firing anti-aircraft missiles during the joint sailing of various fleets’ vessels for combat training. © Vitaliy Ankov / Sputnik

 

ADDENDUM 2: EYE ON THE MEDIA

Annotations by Patrice Greanville.

Turkey shoots down Russian warplane.

Putin calls downing of Russian jet by Turkey’s military ‘a stab in the back’

The Turkish military shot down a Russian SU-24 warplane near the Syrian border early  Tuesday after saying it had crossed into Turkey’s air space, an action Russia’s leader called a “stab in the back.”

According to a statement released by the Turkish Armed Forces Command, an unidentified jet was shot down by F-16 fighter jets after violating Turkish airspace in the southern province of Hatay. The plane was attacked in line with Turkey’s military rules of engagement, the statement said, after being warned 10 times in  five minutes that it had crossed into Turkish territory.

Turkey quickly called for a meeting with NATO allies to discuss the downing of the jet.

Russian President Vladimir Putin quickly and emphatically condemned the attack. He said the SU-24 was downed by an air-to-air missile from a Turkish F-16 despite having never strayed from Syrian territory, reiterating that “neither our pilots nor our jet threatened the territory of Turkey.”

What we know so far: Turkey shoots down a Russian Jet

“The loss today is a stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists,” he declared. “I can’t describe it in any other way.”

“Today’s tragic event will have significant consequences, including for Russia-Turkish relations,” he added. “Instead of immediately getting in contact with us, as far as we know, the Turkish side immediately turned to their partners from NATO to discuss this incident, as if we shot down their plane and not they ours.”

Both Turkey and Russia are involved in the multinational military campaign in Syria but often with conflicting goals. While saying it is battling international  terrorism, Russia’s intervention two months ago is largely seen as an effort to prop up the government of embattled President Bashar Assad. [“Largely seen“??? By whom? Who says, except the propagandists at State Dept., White House and multiple other centers of American disinformation covering up the truth about United States/NATO crimes in the Middle East, and the fact America created the terrorist monster in the first place, has supported it all along, and that its ally, Turkey, has been clearly and demonstrably helping ISIS recruits cross into Syria for a long time, and supports them with medical assistance, supplies, weapons, etc.?] 

Turkey’s aim is, at least in part, to prevent the strengthening of Kurdish forces, which are battling Assad’s government and also have made gains against Islamic State fighters. Turkey has been battling a Kurdish insurgency for decades.

Footage released by Turkey’s semiofficial Anadolu news agency showed the jet crashing into a wooded, mountainous area followed by a plume of smoke. Further footage from Anadolu showed the two pilots parachuting to the ground after having ejected.

According to Turkish news agency DHA, a Turkmen rebel brigade operating in that area fatally shot the two pilots after they reached the ground. The report could not be immediately verified. [The paper should explain that the “innocent” Turkmen are de facto allies of ISIS, and are also committing atrocities in Syria in an effort to topple president Assad.]

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights [a notorious propaganda front set up by Washington’s underground disinformation apparatus] reported that a Russian helicopter apparently searching for the crew members in a nearby area was hit by an anti-tank missile after being forced to make an emergency landing. A YouTube video uploaded in the afternoon by a rebel group known to be operating in the area shows an American-supplied anti-tank TOW missile striking a helicopter after it had landed. [Who are these rebels that America is so generously supporting with advanced weaponry if not the same ISIS/al Nusra fanatics Obama claims to be trying to destroy? The notion that “moderate, pro-democracy rebels” are fighting Assad is a complete fiction created and propagated by the American press and its multiple branches around the world.]

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu defended the actions of the Turkish military, stating it was their duty to defend Turkish territory. “The world needs to know that it is our international right and our national duty to take measures against anybody who violates our borders on the land and in the air, in spite of our many warnings,” he said. [Turkey is a nation famous for its genocides, including its ongoing attempt to stamp out the Kurdish minority. The Russians have no desire nor necessity to invade or fight the Turks; they are engaged in battling and wiping out ISIS, which America and its many allies should have done long ago but didn’t.]

The downing of the Russian jet comes after over nearly two months of escalating tension between Turkey and Russia over the sovereignty of Turkish airspace. One week after Russia began its air campaign, Russian airplanes twice violated Turkish airspace and harassed Turkish fighter jets patrolling the Turkish-Syrian border with anti-aircraft radar.

Plane shootdown complicates fight against Islamic State as French president visits White House

On Oct. 16, an unidentified drone was shot down on the Turkish-Syrian border. Davutoglu stated that the drone was of Russian origin but that Russia had denied that they were operating the drone.

The Russian bombing campaign in Syria further raised the ire of Turkish leaders several days ago when Russian bombs hit targets in the northwest Syrian province of Lattakia. The area targeted by Russian strikes is heavily populated by the Turkmen ethnic group. Turkey has traditionally supported and expressed solidarity with Syria’s Turkmen population, which is of Turkish descent. [This is baloney.The Turkish leadership has no inherent love nor respect for the Turkmen or any other ethnic group as Erdogan is primarily interested in a Greater Turkey project which includes dismembering Syria. Plus the Turkmen are actively involved in collaborating with the Jihadist fanatics bent on destroying Syria as an independent state.]

Davutoglu quickly condemned the strikes saying they were strikes against civilians and “against our Turkmen siblings.”

According to the Turkish Newspaper Hurriyet, the attacks led to Turkey summoning Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov and stating that Turkey “has every right to retaliate and take necessary measures in the event its border security is threatened as a result of the Russian military’s operations targeting civilian Turkmen Syrians on the Turkish-Syrian border.”

Speaking from Jordan after meeting King Abdullah, Putin continued to escalate his rhetoric with Turkey, accusing it of supporting terrorism.  [Tendentious wording. The Turkish spokesmen and officials “say” or “state” but Putin engages in “rhetoric.” Not to mention that the LA Times, if it is worth anything as a major newspaper, knows that Turkey is engaged in active support of the Jihadists Obama claims to be fighting. Therefore Putin is simply stating the truth. It is scum media like these that help precipitate world wars.]

“We have long been recording the movement of a large amount of oil and petroleum products to Turkey from ISIS-occupied territories,” he said, using an acronym for Islamic State. “This explains the significant funding the terrorists are receiving.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was due to pay an official visit to Turkey on Wednesday to discuss regional security and energy issues, canceled his trip. Lavrov also advised Russian tourists not to visit Turkey, saying the threat of terrorism in Turkey was no less than in Egypt, where a Russian passenger jet was shot down Oct. 31, killing all 224 people on board.

The warning could have dire consequences for Turkey’s tourism industry; the country received over 1.4 million Russian tourists in the first seven months of this year.

Bailey-Hoover is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko in Moscow contributed to this report.

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=By= Eric Zuesse
(crossposted with strategic-culture.org)

On November 16th, the great journalist on international strategic and military issues, F. William Engdahl, headlined at journal-neo, “Do We Really Want a New World War With Russia?” and he documented that, with military expenditures one-tenth of America’s, Russia achieves at least parity with the U.S. in terms of war-fighting capability. It’s a remarkable article, even though it actually brings together into one place the recent disclosures in many media, regarding vital technologies where Russia far outpaces American capabilities. Of course, that’s what’s necessary to do in order to document the extent of Russia’s areas of clear military superiority.

As to the question of whether the areas where the U.S. surpasses Russia’s military technologies might be more or fewer than Russia’s, the key point to consider is, I think, that Russia has now (as Engdahl makes clear) so greatly exceeded U.S. capabilities in certain vitally important respects, so that, at the very most, the U.S., even with all of its alliances etc., would be merely equal to Russia — the Russian military’s areas of excellence are that crucial.

Russia is now preparing a new generation of strategic bombers, and China is following her lead. Tensions with the West, provoked by the latter, have prompted an acceleration in the arms development sector of both nations.

Engdahl quotes one high U.S. military official as saying that Russia’s technologies for disabling U.S. weapons are so shocking that it almost makes him cry. A recent article in Defense News went into even more depth about Russia’s superiority in that particular area — and this was published before the subsequent embarrassing U.S. military back-downs in Syria and elsewhere, which have more recently (especially since 30 September 2015) been necessitated by the uncompetitive U.S. position regarding those vitally important technologies.

Of course, all of this pertains only to America’s corruptness in the expenditures of ‘defense’ dollars (how ironic to use the word “defense” to refer to the military in the world’s most-aggressive nation. Globally, “The US was the overwhelming choice (24% of respondents) for the country that represents the greatest threat to peace in the world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%).” Honesty would surely dictate a name-change to “The U.S. Department of Aggression.” But in official U.S. Newspeak, Russia is, instead, by far, the most “aggressive” nation on the planet.)

According to other measures of corruption, the U.S. is probably less corrupt than Russia is. But everyone knows that that’s highly corrupt. America typically manages to hide its corruption more skillfully than Russia hides its — but that isn’t important; the overall reality of corruption in the two countries might be not much different in degree, but only in the kinds of corruption: more high-end in America, more low-end in Russia.

Back in 2013, I headlined “How the U.S. Performs in Recent International Rankings,”  and reported that:

Corruption seems to be a rather pervasive problem in the U.S. On “Diversion of Public Funds [due to corruption],” the U.S. ranks #34. On “Irregular Payments and Bribes” (which is perhaps an even better measure of lack of corruption) we are #42. On “Public Trust in Politicians,” we are #54. On “Judicial Independence,” we are #38. On “Favoritism in Decisions of Government Officials” (otherwise known as governmental “cronyism”), we are #59. On “Organized Crime,” we are #87. On “Ethical Behavior of Firms,” we are #29. On “Reliability of Police Services,” we are #30. On “Transparency of Governmental Policymaking,” we are #56. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Challenging Regulations,” we are #37. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Settling Disputes,” we are #35. On “Burden of Government Regulation,” we are #76. On “Wastefulness of Government Spending,” we are also #76. On “Property Rights” protection (the basic law-and-order measure), we are #42.

Russia performed even worse, averaging around 110 over all those factors. 144 nations were ranked.

However, as regards corruption in the expenditure of military dollars, the U.S. is simply gigantic — and certainly far worse than Russia. On 13 May 2014, Stars and Stripes  bannered, “Decades Later, Military Still Unable to Account for Its Spending,”  and reported that: 

The military is still running behind in its decades-long quest to audit its spending and rein in waste, Department of Defense comptrollers testified Tuesday to the Senate.

Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps financial managers will be unable to fully meet a midpoint deadline set by the secretary of defense this year for mandated accounting benchmarks. Meanwhile, “serious continuing deficiencies” remain in the accounting efforts, according to a Government Accountability Office report issued Tuesday.

Nearly three decades after U.S. taxpayers gasped over $640 toilet seats and other Cold War military waste, the Department of Defense remains the last federal department still unable to conduct a financial audit despite laws passed in the 1990s that require the accounting.

The Defense Department’s Comptroller admits, in the Department’s latest available financial report: “The Department cannot produce auditable financial statements.”

In other words: that’s a dark hole, down which trillions of federal taxpayer dollars have gone, without so much as a reliable financial record having been kept regarding where and to whom and how it went down into that darkness.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]asically, the U.S. government now has been largely contracted-out, to privately controlled corporations (which collectively spend billions lobbying the U.S. Congress and financing political campaigns); and this is especially true with the Pentagon. It’s the result, since 1981, of increasing application of ‘capitalism’ (the dictatorial not  the democratic version of that) such as existed in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany, when governmental functions and assets first began to become privatized and the arms-makers became vastly enriched by the resultant asset-sales and the pouring of that money into armaments — to extend the German and Italian aristocracies’ control by conquering countries. Fascist nations are incredibly corrupt; they expand by international theft; and the US DOD (Department of ‘Defense’) is legendarily corrupt.

That’s more than half of U.S. discretionary federal spending — U.S. military expenditures: a dark hole, of corruption.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd here’s how corrupt are the aristocracies of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — the three main U.S. allies in America’s war to remove Syria’s secular, non-sectarian, and consistently anti-jihadist, Shiite leader Bashar al-Assad. To talk about an alliance like that, a pro-Sunni jihadist operation, as constituting ‘the free world,’ or ‘a fight for democracy,’ is to address the public as being not merely fools but stupid fools (suckers), because there is no real freedom in aristocratic-theocratic dictatorships; there is only mind-control, and aristocrats raking in billions from the public through taxes, so as for aristocrats to become enabled to use those public dollars in order to expand their personal empire by international conquest, in conjunction with the U.S. aristocracy — the master-aristocracy (Obama repeatedly refers to it as “the one indispensable nation”), which coordinates the entire fraudulent international business enterprise.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Israeli government can be added to this list because it receives annually from U.S. taxpayers $3 billion in order to buy yet more weapons from U.S. armaments-makers, and is pushing in the U.S. Congress to increase that to $5B annually. That’s yet more money pouring into firms such as the profoundly corrupt Lockheed Martin. One of Lockheed’s top salesmen was the notorious Adnan Khashoggi, alias Adnan Kasogi. Further in that example, Lockheed is itself controlled by State Street Corporation, which is tagged in one major study as the #5 power-holder globally, and is itself controlled by Joseph L. Hooley, who meets occasionally with other ‘Wall Street’ executives and the U.S. President privately at the White House, to discuss such things as, perhaps, whether the U.S. annual donation to Israel should be increased. Is that, too, “corruption”? How can it not  be? Those people are obliged to their investors, not to the public. Because most of these operatives aren’t generally known to the public, major international business (including war-propagation) can easily be transacted amongst themselves, in private. And, normally, people such as Hooley are merely agents for a few of the three thousand or so billionaires who actually control international relations and decide whether the path will be war or no-war. Almost all of the soldiers and civilians who then bleed and die in those wars own nothing but their blood and guts. But maybe some of them vote in a democracy — the bane of all aristocrats, because democracy threatens to get in the way of aristocrats’ choices — their ‘free market,’ in which such blood and guts are valued hardly more than they are in a slaughterhouse. It’s just ‘business.’ But all international business is also very much politics, and governments. They blend into one-another.

The odd thing is that, whereas Russia, with all its low-end forms of corruption, is notoriously corrupt, the U.S., with its massive corruption at the very top — and increasingly legal there now, after the U.S. Supreme Court has done virtually eveything possible to grease its skids even more — might actually be even more so (just not as visibly  so).

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Russian system of military expenditures is diametrically opposite to America’s. Whereas the U.S. has privatized, Russia kept its military industries within the Federal Government. Any profits from weapons-sales go to the Russian government, not to mega-corporate CEOs, etc. The weapons-manufacturers are part of the government. Just like in the U.S., there are no published financial reports on its operations; but, there are financial reports every year that are reviewed by the Ministers of Defense, and, above that, by the President and the Prime Minister — these being people who are accountable to the voters, not merely to some aristocracy of corporate stockholders. In the U.S. there are no such financial reports at all. Instead, America’s politicians just see the dollars flowing into their ‘election’ (more like aristocratic selection) campaigns. War-profits are private, and the buying of politicians is just another business-expense. 

Russia is getting a far bigger bang for their military bucks — that’s for sure. As the Obama Administration tries now increasingly to strangle Russia, not just economically but also militarily, this lesser-seen component of America’s vast corruption is coming more and more to light, even if the financial operations behind it are not.

And yet, the American public think that the ‘Defense’ Department and all its contractors, and the associated national-security operations such as CIA, Homeland Security, etc., exist primarily in order to protect the American people, rather than to protect and to expand the empire of, America’s aristocracy, who, via their investment funds and ‘nonprofits,’ own the press, the military firms, etc. It’s a network of power, which benefits the more, to the extent that the public are in fear and contempt, against ‘those aliens,’ or ‘those foreigners,’ not of their own nation’s aristocracy, who are actually pulling the strings and destroying everyone else’s security and lives.

They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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Nauseated by the
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By= Eric Zuesse

Francois Hollande after visiting a Mistral-class helicopter carrier ex Vladivostok at the STX Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard site in Saint-Nazaire, France, October 13, 2015. [REUTERS/Stephane Mahe.]

French President Francois Hollande this week possesses more power than anyone else in the world, because he will be the key decision-maker shaping the future world-order when he meets separately on Tuesday and Thursday privately with the two men — American President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who stand on opposite sides in the great decades-long subterranean war that the U.S. aristocracy have been waging to win control over Russia and its vast natural resources such as oil, gas, timber, and crucial rare-earth minerals. The deal that Hollande will make for France is going to be crucial for the future of the entire world.

Russia is by far the world’s most resource-rich nation, which might naturally be expected to be the case since Russia is also by far the world’s largest nation in terms of its sheer physical expanse. The world’s second-most resource-rich nation, the United States, is, of course, already controlled by America’s aristocracy; but those people want their heirs to dominate Russia as well. This explains the ongoing U.S.-Russia war, even after the end of communism, the war that was begun by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 just as the Soviet Union and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact were ending, and the United States and its military alliance NATO continued and has since expanded right up to Russia’s very borders — the equivalent of Russia’s Warsaw Pact having absorbed Mexico or Canada and placed nuclear missiles right on America’s own border. 

Gorbachev: supremely, almost criminally innocent when dealing with the most ruthless mafia the world has ever seen.

Bush double-crossed the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev then, and started the post-communist U.S. war against Russia, which is now soaring toward its climax, perhaps even to World War III, under U.S. President Barack Obama’s leadership. Obama has been overthrowing Russia-allied world leaders, such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, and has been struggling to overthrow Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, but Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has now drawn the line against that, as a consequence of which the nations of Europe will now need to choose which of those two sides to ally themselves with.

Hollande’s decision, which will be made this week or else soon thereafter, following his meeting on Tuesday with Obama, and his meeting on Thursday with Putin, will determine whether France will remain in alliance with the U.S., as has been the case ever since 1776, or instead switch now to ally itself with Russia, which would transform international relations and might even cause the European Union to break up.

Thus far in Hollande’s Presidency, he has been reversing his predecessor’s (the Gaullist French President Nikolas Sarkozy’s) moves toward independence from America, and he has even gone along with President Obama’s demand for France not to send to Russia the Mistral aircraft carrier ships that it had just built for Russia and to refund Russia’s advance-payments for them.

The millions of refugees from Islamic countries, especially from Syria and Libya, who are flooding into the European Union as a result of the U.S alliance’s invasions of Syria and support for Islamic jihadists who are trying to overthrow the secular non-sectarian government of Bashar al-Assad there, have created an unprecented crisis throughout the European Union, and President Hollande will be making the most important decision in all of Europe, regarding whether to remain with the U.S. overthrow-Assad alliance, or instead switch to become an ally of Russia and go aggressively against the jihadists, to destroy them and rebuild the Syrian infrastructure that the U.S. and its allies have bombed and otherwise eliminated. This ambitious program of post-jihadist Syrian reconstruction, put forward by Putin, needs European partners, and would be the only way possible to enable the millions of refugees from Syria to be restored back to their homeland and continue their lives in peace. 

If Hollande decides to continue France’s alliance with the U.S. and their participation in America’s anti-Russia military club NATO, then the EU still might break up, but the likelihood of continued expansion of the U.S.-Russian war and of its surging millions of refugees could then force some other EU member nations to leave the EU; and, so, other EU leaders will then come to the fore, as being the key decision-makers in this ongoing crisis.

If, however, Hollande decides to abandon the U.S. and choose Russia, that will constitute the beginning of a new era after the end of World War II: the post-post-post-WW-II era.

The post-WW-II era ended when the Soviet Union did.

The post-post-WW-II era began when George Herbert Walker Bush double-crossed Mikhail Gorbachev, and it is rising now toward its climax — whatever that will turn out to be.

The post-post-WW-II era, if it ever arrives, will be the end of global dominance by the U.S. aristocracy. This ‘Pax Americana’ has turned out to be instead an ever-escalating worldwide war of American global conquest, America the fascist international superpower, but merely changing Hitler’s “Deutschland über alles” into Obama’s “America the one indispensable nation.” 

Perhaps Hollande will decide that his country isn’t “dispensable,” after all. 

They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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//

//

 By  Eric Zuesse

Warren: “Nyet” to any possibility of collaborating with Russia in the hunt for barbaric jihadists.

On Wednesday November 18th, a Defense Department spokesman at a Pentagon press briefing was repeatedly asked by reporters whether there is any possibility of the U.S. working with Russia to defeat jihadists in Syria. And the answer was clearly no, each time:

Q: Is the U.S. military leadership there — either there or here in the Pentagon, as far as you know — prepared to fly side-by-side with the Russians.

COL. Steve WARREN: … We right now have no plans to conduct coordinated operations with the Russians.

Q: Actually working together in combat flight operations, side-by-side with the Russians at this point?

COL. WARREN: Yeah, we’re — right now, we have no plans to do that. … We’re not coordinating with the Russians, we’re not conducting operations with the Russians, nor are we planning to do any of those things.

Colonel Warren went further, to denigrate Russia’s military capabilities:

As you noted, you know, the Russians are using dumb bombs. Their history has been both reckless and irresponsible. You know, I know there was some discussion that the Russians had a large air armada flying into Raqqa to conduct these operations. And it was notable to us that, you know, those are antiquated tactics. We don’t even use those type of tactics anymore. The idea of putting, you know, ten ships in the air at one time, or 12 or even more, are very old fashioned. And those are the type of tactics needed only if you don’t possess the technology, the skills and the capabilities to conduct the type of precision strikes that our coalition conducts.

During another Pentagon press briefing, the day before, spokesman Peter Cook had similarly been asked, “The U.S. and Russia have a common enemy in Syria in the form of ISIL, so why is it so difficult for — to find an area where there’s a common goal and to work together?” Mr. Cook said: “Up to this point the Russian actions have been largely in support of the Assad regime which we believe is counterproductive to the end result of trying to end the Syrian civil war. It has been like pouring gasoline on the fire, in the words of Secretary Carter.” 

When asked whether there are “any additional thoughts toward cooperating more with Russia?” he replied: “We are not cooperating with Russia, as you know. … and there’s been no additional talk of further cooperation or — or coordination with the Russians. … Their policies of supporting the Assad regime continue, in our view, to be counterproductive — ‘backwards’ is the word that the secretary has used. And so until they alter that policy, we don’t see much of an area for — for further cooperation.”

In other words: The United States demands Russia’s assurance that Assad will be removed from power, or else the U.S. will provide whatever assistance is necessary to bring to power in Syria whatever jihadists can do the job of removing him, because his non-sectarian and decidedly secular government is “pouring gasoline on the fire” there, and because it is “backwards,” not forward-looking, like a Syrian government controlled by U.S-approved jihadists would be.

Although all polls, even Western-sponsored ones, in Syria, show that Bashar al-Assad would easily win any free and fair election in Syria, the U.S. government demands his removal, before there can be any cooperation with Russia’s war against jihadists in Syria.

The media scoundrels, naturally, never let up in their campaign to demonize Syria’s leader-regardless of what the Syrian people really want. The pretentious Anglo-American rag, The Economist, is among the filthiest.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ll of the groups that are fighting to remove Assad are Sunni groups, and not just Sunnis but very religious Sunnis; and, so, if they succeed in overthrowing him, then there will be a jihadist state in Syria, because all jihadists are Sunnis, and the Sunnis who are waging war against the secular Shiite Assad are all jihadist Sunnis — that’s what they are fighting for there: a Sunni Sharia law state. The non-religious government would be replaced by a Sunni Sharia law government. This is what the United States is actually demanding — and selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to the fundamentalist Sunni Saudi government in order to use not only in Syria but in Yemen to slaughter Shiites in those countries.

The efforts of French President Francois Hollande to bring together a France-U.S.-Russia coalition against the jihadists, cannot succeed unless either the U.S. drops its demand for Assad to be removed from power, or Russia drops its insistence upon killing not only the jihadist groups that the U.S. opposes, but the jihadist groups that the U.S. supports in Syria.

America’s insistence upon supporting [non-existent] “moderate” jihadists to replace the current Syrian government is unlikely to draw Russia’s support. And Russia’s insistence that only a free and fair internationally overseen election among the Syrian citizenry should decide whether he remains in power, is equally unlikely to draw America’s support (since it would produce a continuation of Assad’s government there).

France’s military effort in Syria will therefore ultimately be on either the U.S. side or the Russian side; it’s highly unlikely to be able to be on the side of both.

France will therefore become compelled to choose between being allied with the United States, as it is and has been, or else being allied with Russia, which would constitute a major break away from the current alignment of world powers. 

In other words: Is France, just as its ally the U.S. is, more concerned to remove Assad from power, than it is to kill all of the jihadists — and all of them are Sunnis — regardless of whether a particular jihadist group happens to enjoy the support of the U.S.? That is the question, which only Francois Hollande will answer.

They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?