It’s been just over one year since the liberation of Aleppo from radical Islamist insurgent groups which were backed by the West as well as Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And this Christmas has witnessed huge public celebrations, tree lightings, concerts, and dances in a city which only a short while ago was associated with death, mortars, airstrikes, assassinations, and suicide bombings.
Over the past week, eastern Aleppo was completely brought back under control of the Syrian government. The population began to return to its homes, many of which were abandoned when al-Qaeda-linked rebels took over in 2012. As far as I know, the western mainstream media did not have a single reporter on the ground in Aleppo, but relied on “activists” to inform us that the Syrian army was massacring the civilian population. It hardly makes sense for an army to fight and defeat armed rebels just so it can go in and murder unarmed civilians, but then again not much mainstream reporting on the tragedy in Syria has made sense.Guest Post by Patrick J Buchanan
In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, said Henry Kissinger in 1968, but to be a friend is fatal.
The South Vietnamese would come to appreciate the insight.
So it is today with Aleppo, where savage reprisals against U.S.-backed rebels are taking place in that hellhole of human rights.
Yet, again, the wrong lessons are being drawn from the disaster.
According to The Washington Post, the bloodbath is a result of a U.S. failure to intervene more decisively in Syria’s civil war: “Aleppo represents a meltdown of the West’s moral and political will — and … a collapse of U.S. leadership.
“By refusing to intervene against the Assad regime’s atrocities, or even to enforce the ‘red line’ he declared on the use of chemical weapons, President Obama created a vacuum that was filled by Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.”
But the blunder was not in staying out of Syria’s civil war, but in going in. Aleppo is a bloodbath born of interventionism.
Submitted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb via Medium.com,
Juxtaposition. The way to analyze the situation is to look at the factions comparatively. You do not compare Assad’s regime to the Danish or Norwegian governments, but to the alternative. The question becomes if there is anything in the left column that is worse than the right column?
Continue reading “Nassim Taleb: The Syrian War Condensed (For Almost Dummies)”
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
A month ago I wrote a column , “He Who Hesitates Is Lost—And Russia Hesitated.” http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/09/24/he-who-hesitates-is-lost-and-russia-hesitated-paul-craig-roberts/ The consequences of this hesitation are now apparent:
1. A UN report orchestrated by Washington has accused Syria and Russia of war crimes in Aleppo. According to the report, “indiscriminate airstrikes across the eastern part of the city by Government forces and their allies [Russia] are responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties. These violations constitute war crimes. And if knowingly committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against civilians, they constitute crimes against humanity.” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20723&LangID=E
Continue reading “By Cooperating With Washington On Syria Russia Walked Into A Trap”
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Why do we hear only of the “humanitarian crisis in Aleppo” and not of the humanitarian crisis everywhere else in Syria where the evil that rules in Washington has unleashed its ISIL mercenaries to slaughter the Syrian people? Why do we not hear about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where the US and its Saudi Arabian vassal are slaughtering Yemeni women and children? Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Libya where Washington destroyed a country leaving chaos in its place? Why don’t we hear about the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, ongoing now for 13 years, or the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan now 15 years old?
The answer is that the crisis in Aleppo is the crisis of Washington losing its ISIL mercenaries to the Syrian army and Russian air force. The jihadists sent by Obama and the killer bitch Hillary (“We came, we saw, he died”) to destroy Syria are being themselves destroyed. The Obama regime and the Western presstitutes are trying to save the jihadists by covering them in the blanket of “humanitarian crisis.”
Continue reading “The Real Humanitarian Crisis Is Not Aleppo”
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
Washington’s media presstitutes are using the image of the child to bring pressure on Russia to stop the Syrian army from retaking Alleppo. http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/17/world/syria-little-boy-airstrike-victim/ Washington wants its so-called moderate rebels to retain Alleppo so that Washington can split Syria in two, thereby keeping a permanent pressure against President Assad.
As for the little boy in the propaganda picture, he does not seem to be badly injured. Let us not forget the tens of thousands of children that Washington’s wars and bombings of 7 Muslim countries have killed without any tears shed by CNN anchors, and let us not forget the 500,000 Iraqi children that the United Nations concluded died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq, children’s deaths that Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said were worth it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE