AIDAN O’BRIEN—The proof is in the numbers. A 2007 blog listed 113 US military bases in Italy. Everything from submarines to bombers, and from radars to grunts, fill up these bases. And in 2017 the Pew Research Center released the numbers (as of 2016) of active duty US military personnel based in foreign countries. Italy had the fourth highest number of US soldiers present on its soil: 12,088. Only Japan (38,818), Germany (34,602) and South Korea (24,189) had a greater US military presence inside their borders. The latter three countries, however, have been on the frontline of the Cold War for decades. Italy has not.
US MILITARY
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BILL VAN AUKEN—What the American general is “implying” is sheer nonsense, and he knows it. No evidence whatsoever has been presented of any Iranian presence whatsoever in Yemen, or of any significant military support from Tehran to the Houthis. Washington and Saudi Arabia, however, view the control of Yemen by anything other than a puppet regime under their tight control as a threat to their dominance of the region.
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The notorious warmomgering ATLANTIC COUNCIL is now in charge to detecting “prpaganda” and “fake news”, and “foreign influence” on Facebook. The Atlantic Council has frequently called for things like increased military engagement in Syria, militarily confronting the “Russian threat” in Eastern Europe, and now is advocating for Ukraine and Georgia to be allowed entry into NATO while calling for general territorial expansion of the Western military alliance. Further it has advocated on behalf of one of its previous funders, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and gave a “Distinguished International Leadership” award to George W. Bush, to name but a few actions of the think tank that has been given authorization to flag citizens’ Facebook pages for possible foreign influence and propaganda.
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MOA—After the short war Russia diligently analyzed its losses and failures. The war gave impetus to the development of new weapons and tactics. Russian airplanes were equipped with new electronics. Better communication and coordination within the ground troops was emphasized. The high operational capabilities the Russian military demonstrates in Syria would not exist to their extent had that little war not happened.
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Why They Fail – The Quintessence Of The Korengal Valley Campaign
16 minutes readMOA—Years before October 2004, before regular U.S. soldiers came into the Korengal valley, U.S. special forces combed through the region looking for ‘al-Qaeda’. They made friends with a timber baron in Pech valley, a Pashtun of the Safi tribe, who claimed that his main competitor in the (illegal) timber trade who lived in the nearby Korengal river valley was a Taliban and ‘al-Qaeda’. That was not true. Haji Matin was a member of a Nuristani tribe that spoke Pashai. These were a distinct people with their own language who were and are traditional hostile to any centralized government (pdf), even to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.