WAR CRIMES & CRIMINALS

ERIC ZUESSE—Biden has the same holier-than-thou ‘policy’ on Iran: he demands that though the U.S. — under Trump — broke the Iran deal, America won’t even negotiate for a return to it unless Iran will first come back into full compliance with it and (in addition) reduce its missile forces (which weren’t part of that deal). On March 19th, the Washington Post headlined “Biden’s window with Iran is starting to close”.

The big bully, the U.S., under its new President, is having a big tantrum. So: What’s new? How will he respond when the nations that he hates and demands to conquer reject what he ‘offers’ for their capitulation? Will it be yet more invasions by the U.S.? Whom will that benefit, except, perhaps, corporations such as Lockheed Martin?

As regards Putin’s offer to have a live telecast debate with Biden, the White House promptly said that the U.S. President is too busy to do that.

CALEB MAUPIN—After a hiatus, Caleb returns with a rich discussion covering many topics. Caleb argues that Biden’s [recent] gratuitous insult (Putin is a “killer”) was simply a staged event to erase Trump’s admission that the US, too, has engaged in pretty sordid and criminal acts. (see appendix). Of course, Caleb does not say Russia goes around the globe committing the same type of criminality that makes the US so singularly despised.

ERIC ZUESSE—If Ukraine becomes a NATO-member, then Ukraine will have the right to demand that America join its war to grab back the former Donbass region and also the former region of Crimea. The U.S. Government would then be put into the position of having to either fulfill its NATO commitment to the new NATO member (presuming that restoration of both Crimea and Donbass to Ukraine would be accepted as being a part of that commitment to what then would be a fellow-NATO-member) or else become very embarrassed by not doing so. If such a NATO commitment would be fulfilled, the world as it has always been known would end very fast — less than an hour.

The other great problem with this fantasy is the terrible relationship the Trump administration had with the truth. This president’s lies surpassed a list  of more than 20,000 false “facts”, which ended with the assault on the Capitol building in Washington because he and his followers opposed the verifiable reality of an election that Joe Biden won.

SCOTT RITTER—From the moment Russia dispatched its armed forces to Syria in September 2015 to prevent the collapse of the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad at the hands of US-backed Islamist terrorists, it has found itself at the nexus of competing geopolitical games. One of the main issues confronting Russia was avoiding conflict in its airspace between its air force and the anti-Islamic State coalition headed up by the United States. This task was complicated by the fact that the US was really using the campaign to counter Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) as a cover for training and equipping Islamist forces dedicated to the removal of President Assad. The US also sought to leverage its influence with Syrian Kurds to create an autonomous region in northeast Syria that operated outside the control of Damascus.