Boris Dolgov

The Syrian crisis is being actively affected from abroad. Various reports confirm that there is a plan aimed to divide Syria into several parts, with some areas annexed to Turkey, the Golan Heights going to Israel, and probably separate Kurdish and Druze territorial entities…

Anti-government protests in Syria have added more fuel to the fire of the Arab Spring.The unrest broke out in March, 2011, in the city of Daraa on the Israel-Jordan border, and soon spread to other districts, turning into clashes with the army.

On Match 29th tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Aleppo, Latakia, Homs and Hama to express their support to President Bashar Assad. However, the anti-government protests continued, mainly in areas bordering Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and grew even tenser. The bloodiest incidents took place in Jisral-Shughour with the population of 50,000, on the Turkish border: then some 120 police and army officers were killed. Some 10,000 residents of Jisral-Shughour fled their homes toward the Turkish border, fearing bloodshed as troops with tanks approached, under orders to hit back after the government accused armed bands there of killing its security men. Some of the refugees, however, returned home soon afterward.

As a member of the Russian delegation visiting Syria on 20-24 August, I could see the photos of the service men killed in Jisral-Shughour – many of the bodies were quartered and burnt. Witnesses said a group of armed men attacked cars 100 km outside Damascus, pulled out drivers and passengers and started beating them if the cars were decorated with Assad`s portraits or any other symbols of his regime.

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Bill Van Auken

Gen. Carter Ham, Pentagon’s Africa Command:

“The question for us now is how do we sustain that ["dropping bombs and Tomahawks, those kind of things"] so that if we would have to do this again, we’d start at a higher plateau.”

With their surprise visit to Tripoli Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron signaled that the scramble by the major powers for control of Libya’s oil wealth is in full swing.

The visit was unannounced and conducted under a massive security blanket. It included a brief visit to a Tripoli hospital and a joint press conference with Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the former Gaddafi justice minister who heads up the NATO-backed National Transitional Council, and Mahmoud Jibril, the US-trained economist and former Gaddafi official designated as the NTC’s “prime minister”.

Afterwards, the Sarkozy, Cameron and the chiefs of the NTC all left the Libyan capital under heavy guard for the eastern city of Benghazi, where the NTC leaders have said they will stay until the fighting with Gaddafi loyalists in several key cities is over.

The hasty departure from Tripoli suggested that neither NATO nor its Libyan clients are confident about security in the capital under conditions in which battles are still raging for control of the coastal city of Sirte and Bani Walid, about 90 miles southeast of the capital.

Undoubtedly even more troubling for Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s security details is growing evidence that the NTC’s control of Tripoli is tenuous at best. Islamist elements leading militias patrolling the capital’s streets have denounced the NTC leadership, calling for its resignation.

In his speech in Tripoli, Cameron stressed that the NATO war on the country would continue. “There are still parts of Libya under Gaddafi’s control, Gaddafi is still at large, and we must make sure this work is completed,” said Cameron. “We must keep up with the NATO mission until civilians are all protected and this work is finished.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

As an economist I have never had much patience with Paul Krugman’s economics, stuck as he is in 1940s-era Keynesian demand-side economics. I have sometimes concluded that Krugman had rather denounce Ronald Reagan that to acknowledge that supply-side economists have established that fiscal policy has supply-side, not just demand-side, effects.

However, Krugman does display at times a moral conscience. He did so on September 11 in his New York Times column, “The Years of Shame.” Krugman wrote that 9/11 was hijacked by “fake heros” who used the event “to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight” and that “our professional pundits” lent their support to the misuse of the event.

The stuck pigs, of course, squealed loudly. The war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, publicly cancelled his New York Times subscription, and the complicit presstitutes in Washington’s wars of aggression jumped on Krugman with spikes and hatchets.

Perhaps Krugman meant to use the plural and say “unrelated wars.” The US government has made war on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, resulting in massive destruction of homes, infrastructure, and lives of civilians, all in the name of one lie or the other. In addition, the US government is conducting military operations against the populations of three more Muslim countries--Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, with extensive loss of civilian life in Pakistan, a US ally. Drones are sent in week after week that blow up schools, medical centers, and farm communities, and each time Washington announces that they have killed “militants,” “al Qaeda,” “Taliban leaders.”

Thanks to what Krugman calls “our professional pundits” and Gerald Celente calls “presstitutes,” the American people know little if anything about the murder of countless civilians and displacement of millions of others in these six Muslim countries, which the Bush/Obama governments regard as “security threats,” or habitats of small elements that are “security threats,” to the single super-power.

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Ellen Brown

“War! Good God, ya’ll. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’!”

So went the anti-Vietnam War protest song popularized by Edwin Starr in 1970 and revived by Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s.

The song echoed popular sentiment. The Vietnam War ended. Then the Cold War ended. Yet military spending remains the government’s number one expenditure. When veterans’ benefits and other past military costs are factored in, half the government’s budget now goes to the military/industrial complex.

After 9/11, the pop hit “War” was placed on the list of post-9/11 inappropriate titles distributed by Clear Channel.

Protesters have been trying to stop the military juggernaut ever since the end of World War II, yet the war machine is more powerful and influential than ever. Why? The veiled powers pulling the strings no doubt have their own dark agenda, but why has our much-trumpeted system of political democracy not been able to stop them?

The answer may involve our individualistic, laissez-faire brand of capitalism, which forbids the government to compete with private business except in cases of “national emergency.” The problem is that private business needs the government to get money into people’s pockets and stimulate demand. The process has to start somewhere, and government has the tools to do it. But in our culture, any hint of “socialism” is anathema. The result has been a state of “national emergency” has had to be declared virtually all of the time, just to get the government’s money into the economy.

Other avenues being blocked, the productive civilian economy has been systematically sucked into the non-productive military sector, until war is now our number one export. War is where the money is and where the jobs are. The United States has been turned into a permanent war economy and military state.

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