Moderate rebels take Syria - Democracy and Pride parades coming soon!

Finally! There’s a whole lotta gloatin’ goin’ on today in certain circles. Washington, the Pentagon, Langley… What I’ve read at the JPost today is a little more nuanced. Yes, it’s a happy day in some ways, but… and there’s the rub. While it’s good that Assad has been vanquished, the Israelis know the “moderate rebels” better than anyone. Remember a few years ago when Canada rescued about 100 of those brave Syrian White Helmets that were trapped by Assad’s forces? Chrystia Freeland was even honored as an “Honorary White Helmet” by the White Helmets themselves! The White Helmets were first responders who worked exclusively in rebel held areas of Syria. That’s because they were rebels! And how moderate were those rebels? Moderate enough for Canada, but not nearly moderate enough for Israel. Although those humanitarian White Helmets escaped Syria via Israel, Israel was adamant that not a single one remain there. That’s because they know the truth, and the truth is, today’s moderate rebels are just the latest rebranding of the ISIS head-choppers and the Al Qaeda terrorists who allegedly brought down the twin towers. To my complete shock, CNN aired an interview with the HTS (latest acronym after AQ and ISIS for the usual head-choppers) leader that actually broached this subject! The CNN interviewer quizzed al-Julani on his remarkable path from terrorist Al Qaeda operative to ISIS leader to moderate rebel leader celebrated by CNN. It’s a stunning exercise in narrative management and well worth a look. She even brought up the fact that HTS is listed as a terrorist entity by the USA and its vassals, and brought up the $10 million bounty the FBI has on him. We’re supposed to believe all his terrorist activity was just youthful indiscretions, the Islamic fundamentalist version of an Amish kid out on their “rumspringa.” Sure… What we know for sure is Israel is now rid of Assad, and instead, has a collection of Islamic fundamentalist whackos next door. Good luck with that!

In praise of double standards

Thank goodness we in the West enjoy the blessings of a free press and unfettered TV news coverage. Unlike in Russia, where the benighted masses have access only to state propaganda, we are privy to the truth.

And the truth can be ugly, as the 24/7 saturation coverage of Putin’s war in Ukraine makes plain. Who can even imagine the sub-human barbarity of killing civilians, even women, children, and most shockingly, babies! If there was ever any doubt who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this world, is has been definitively put to rest for all time.

The people of Afghanistan must be relieved they spent twenty years occupied by USA/NATO, and not the barbaric Russians. We don’t talk about civilian deaths (100,000+) because, as Stalin once said, when you cut down a forest there’ll be a few wood chips. “Collateral damage,” we call it.

Last we heard, and we’ll hear nothing more while Putin hogs the news cycle, is after the good guys left, we seized Afghanistan’s gold and cash reserves from UK and USA banks. Afghan civilians, women, children, and yes, even babies, face certain starvation.

The ongoing Saudi war on Yemen, aided and abetted by UK/USA, has some collateral damage too. (100,000 +)

The carnage continues in Iraq, where US troops remain on the ground two years after the democratically elected government demanded they leave. (200,000+ civilian deaths)

Let’s not forget Syria (350,000 + civilian deaths) in a “civil war” that wouldn’t have lasted a month without the lavish support of the Nations of Virtue. American forces remain on the ground protecting Syrian petroleum resources from Syria.

So let’s not forget who is good and who is evil. NATO officially announced today that Ukraine can stop waiting for actual military support, because this war has nothing to do with it. After engineering the 2014 coup, after 30 years of vague promises of EU and NATO membership, after coddling and encouraging the most belligerent and reactionary elements recklessly and relentlessly for many years, the long-sought disaster unfolding today is not our problem.

That’s how we roll, here in the Nations of Virtue!

Top terror mastermind killed again!

Islamic State's top towelhead 'o terror is a gonner! The good news came directly from the lips of The Real Donald Trump, so obviously it must be true.

This is of course not the first time the good guys have killed Abu Bakr "Big Daddy" Baghdadi. Check out this accounting of his various deaths at International Business Times. That's from over two years ago and doesn't include his several assassinations since. This guy has more lives than Bin Laden!

So did they really actually get him this time?

Who knows? Maybe...

But consider this counter-narrative. It was a particularly hallucinatory week in US foreign policy. It began with Trump's announcement that he, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, was withdrawing American troops from Syria. This sent the entire US defence and foreign policy establishment into a collective shit-hemmorage.

What!? That's treason! Nobody, not even the President, pulls US troops out of a foreign country they were illegally occupying! This just IS NOT DONE!!!

By the end of the week, forces higher up the food chain than the Commander-in-Chief had over-ruled Trump. US troops weren't leaving Syria after all; they were merely re-locating within the country to "protect the oil," which like all oil globally, pines for the protective umbrella of Uncle Sam.

Having exposed Trump as an ineffectual puppet president and American foreign policy as a bankrupt farce, the folks behind the curtain needed some catchy headlines to take our eyes off this shit-show.


Voila, there we have it; US Special Ops kill top terrorist in daring mission!

True fakery, fake truthiness, fake news, true fake news, and fake news that might be true...

I see where the White Helmets are in the news again. Well, obliquely, anyway.

As regular readers will know, I'm more than a little skeptical of the official story. You know, those plucky volunteers who work exclusively in areas of Syria held by the "rebels," meaning ISIS/al Qaeda, and their affiliates.

Ya, I'm fully aware Assad is a bad dude and all that, but...

That plucky band of Syrian volunteers was originally organized by James Le Mesurier, a non-Syrian, non-Arab, non-Muslim white guy with deep connections to the UK military. And, for "volunteers," they've managed to hoover up an incredible amount of money from the same constellation of foreign state actors who have been behind the Syrian "civil war" from even before the get-go.

So here's the latest story.  Some version of it has been on virtually every "fake" news channel on the internet (although I believe it's absent from Glenn Greenwald's "The Intercept"). This of course is where things get dodgy. How do we know what's fake news on the internet? That original Propornot disinformation piece at the WaPo, advising us what was fake and what was not, turned out to be more fake than true itself.

Our official media, on the other hand, has not even acknowledged the existence of this story.

Anyway, this alleged report from the OPCW (the folks who are charged with investigating alleged chemical weapons attacks) was allegedly deep-sixed by the OPCW itself. If that is the case, and if that allegedly quashed report is indeed the real deal, then the entire "White Helmets are heroes" narrative goes down the shitter, as does the credibility of the OPCW itself.

That would be a huge story.

The allegedly quashed OPCW report was leaked to an outfit called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a bunch of mainly Brit academics who you'd think would know enough to put a comma after Propaganda. I'm not sure what their fakery rating might be, but they've done some yeoman work on the faker-than-fake Integrity Initiative (lots of initiative, a little light on integrity).

So, who/what to believe? Let me know if you figure it out.

We'll drown you in 24/7 Trump till you beg for mercy

September has been all Trump all the time on the news networks. It kicked off with that nauseating McCain funeral carnival. Did you notice the media made that more about Trump than McCain?

Apparently Mr. President was not invited to the show and played a round of golf instead. Anytime I can avoid a funeral to play golf instead I figure I'm way ahead of the game, but this was treated as a major snub of the Orange Ogre.

Not that Senator McCain wasn't a "great American." Born into wealth and privilege, McCain used his advantages to his own advantage all his life, as great Americans generally do. The one courageous stand he took during his career was against torture, and he was more or less cornered into that to maintain the myth that had grown around his status as a one-time victim of torture.

Then it was the Woodward book. By God, somebody told Woodward that somebody in the White House referred to it as "Crazy Town!" I've never worked anywhere that at least a few folks didn't consider "Crazy Town," but I guess it's supposedly a different thing when you work at the White House.

By the way, do you ever wonder why a journalist whose career peaked over forty years ago is treated as a living legend of investigative journalism, while working journalists like Sy Hersh, who has at least as significant a track record, have been effectively de-platformed in US media?

Then came the infamous NYT op-ed...


When I'm having that much Trump waved at me to the exclusion of virtually all other news, I get suspicious. What's going on? Has The Empire really given up on regime change in Syria?

I think not.

Notice the impeccable timing of the lame-duck May government's latest allegations regarding the so-called Skripal affair. Other than being a convenient excuse to work the words "gas attack" and "Russia" into the same narrative, that story remains as dodgy as it ever was.

Notice too that this comes as the US, UK, and France have all vowed retaliation should Assad "use gas against his own people."

The stage is now set; Syria, and those well-known gassers in Russia, are poised to clean out Idlib. Inevitably, there will be claims that Assad and his Russian backers have resorted to using poison gas, because that's what those people do. Then the Nations of Virtue will rise as one, remove Assad from the scene once and for all, and put Putin on notice that the next time his minions run wild gassing retired Russian spooks in England we're coming for him too.

With Assad gone and Putin's fingers burned, Iran will be isolated. What a perfect opportunity to restore the pre-'79 liberal democracy in that benighted land!

The same crowd in DC who have convinced themselves that they are the shapers of history are about to shape some more.


What could go wrong?

Speaking of fake news...

Whatever happened to Guevara, the world-famous-for-a-month "first female sniper of the Syrian Free Army?"

She was another overnight sensation who got saturation coverage in the msm. Maybe when al Nusra took over the SFA they put her in a managerial role?

Maybe not...

Beware the "rules based world order"

I ran into that phraseology more than once in my journey through my Globe and Mail this Saturday. (Ya, still six dollars and thirty cents from the Korean extortionist.)

Generally speaking, you'll find that morsel when you're reading the ubiquitous apologists for American Empire.

And they're everywhere!

Of course they are... when every media outlet is owned by apologists for American Exceptionalism, did you imagine you would find something else?

But just to mess them up a bit, ask them what rules in the rules based world order allow US forces to be building military bases in Syria today.

Why Israel will avoid a direct show-down with Hezbollah

Much has been made of the alleged "increased tensions" in the Middle East, due in no small part to both Israeli and US meddling in Syria. The more paranoid factions of the punditocracy see an Israeli or combined Israel-US assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon as imminent, especially in light of Mr. Netanyahu's dire straits vis-a-vis those various corruption investigations.

It won't happen, and here's why. That number is from two years ago. Unofficial estimates have the Hezbollah arsenal at well over 200,000 rockets today, and we're not talking about the homemade stuff the Gaza rocketeers lob into the Negev on a regular basis. We're talking about the real deal.

If you assume a best case scenario wherein the various Israeli anti-missile defences, Iron Dome, David's Sling, and the Arrow program, all function flawlessly, they could be expected to be effective against an initial barrage of a few hundred incoming. They'd be less effective going forward, and they'd essentially be a non-factor after a few thousand, which in the case of all-out war would be a matter of hours.

Then what? Even if the IAF managed to take out half the Hezbollah arsenal in a massive first strike, that'll leave a hundred thousand missiles and Israel with it's missile shield spent. Political rhetoric aside, IDF leadership will never permit this.

What we're looking at is a regional case of MAD lite. There may be proxy battles here and there, but there will not be a head-on confrontation.

Plagiarism or not?

Here's a story that appeared in an Abu Dhabi newspaper and online in March 2012;

The Syrian schoolboys who sparked a revolution.

Here's a story from the Globe and Mail from December 2016;

The graffiti kids who sparked the Syrian war.

I briefly noted the similarities in a blog post at the time, Propornot, and then forgot about it.

Today on the back page of the front section of my Globe and Mail I noticed a full page congratulatory message from the Globe to itself. That story won Story of the Year from the Foreign Press Association! Here's what Globe editor-in-chief David Walmsley has to say; "This global win is a recognition of what happens when you ask a simple question - how did the Syrian war begin? - and allow a journalist to follow the thread through all its twists and turns."

Hmm...

So how did the Syrian war begin?

Answering that question would entail a close look at events in Daraa in February and March of 2011. About ten thousand of the twelve thousand words in the Globe story are given over to historical background, what's happened to the protagonists since, and editorializing about who the good guys and the bad guys might be.

 Insofar as the story is about the nuts and bolts of how the Syrian war actually began, the Globe's story is virtually identical to the story published in Abu Dhabi almost five years before.

What I find more than a little precious is that Mark Mackinnon, the writer of the Globe story, claims he spent six months getting to the bottom of the events of February and March, when all he had to do was read the Abu Dhabi story, which takes five minutes or less to find online.

Like I said; hmm...

Climate Barbie goes off-script

I see where Environment Minister Catherine McKenna had herself a "my-face-is-red" moment when one of her minions inadvertently sent out a tweet praising Syria for joining the Paris climate accord.

Can't be having any of that now, can we! We must never forget that the eye doctor from Damascus is a blood-drenched monster who delights in gassing his own people, especially children! And suddenly we've got our Environment Minister high-fiving him for joining the fight against green-house gasses?

Well, she's obviously WAY off the script there, and it didn't take the men behind the curtain long to yank her leash. She's realized the error of her ways and is back on track.

The Syria script has always been a little dodgy to my way of thinking. On the one hand, we're constantly told Assad is unfit to inhabit this planet etc, and on the other hand the Canadian security establishment used to outsource their torture operations to the Assad regime. We don't do that stuff ourselves of course, but we're not above sending a few recalcitrant towel-heads over there to get their just desserts.

The ones who lived to tell the tale are subsequently made multi-millionaires by our guilt-ridden government. The ones who didn't, and there had to be more than a few, we never hear about.

And another dodgy aspect to the Syria script; let's assume for a moment that Assad is every bit the butcher we're constantly told he is. Then why do we arrest idealistic young Canadians on their way to Syria to join the fight against him? How does that make any sense?

Given how famous Canadians are (at least in Canada) for "punching above our weight," these idealistic young Canadians could have made all the difference.  Assad might very well be inhabiting the dustbin of history by now had we let them go. But no, we charged them with terror offences and locked them up, and Assad has all but won the war.

Were we yet again secretly in cahoots with Assad?

These are secrets known only to the script-writers.

Putting the "fake" into real news

Doug Saunders' journalism has been gracing the pages of Canada's newspaper of record for about twenty years now. His current position is "opinion writer on international affairs" or something along those lines. As such, he's more on the analysis and commentary side of things. In other words, his job is to spin the facts into a narrative that his employer is comfortable with. 

The print version of his column today is titled "The fall of Aleppo:Four sobering lessons." His four sobering lessons also appear in the online version of the story, and I have copied them verbatim below. My comments are italicised. 

Doug Saunders' four sobering lessons from the fall of Aleppo

Did Aleppo "fall" or was it retaken by legitimate government forces?

1. The Islamic State was never the main problem. The territorial ambitions of the ultra-Islamist militia have ruined lives, imprisoned regions and showered terrorist outrages on Western cities. But the newly redrawn map of Syria makes the basic fact more clear: the Islamic State (also known as IS, ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) was purely a product of Mr. al-Assad’s decision to resist a mass uprising against his rule. It only remains a threat as long as he continues his fight.

ISIS was "purely a product of Mr. al-Assad's decision to resist a mass uprising against his rule." It was? Virtually any mainstream explanation of the rise of ISIS posits its roots in the US invasion of Iraq. ISIS evolved out of the radical Islamist insurgency that grew out of that invasion. That's the consensus position on virtually every news site. Mr. al-Assad is not responsible for the creation of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. America is.

The Islamic State will not fade away soon. It just used the chaos of the assault on Aleppo to retake the historic city of Palmyra. But the Islamic State is a symptom, not the disease: Nine out of 10 deaths have been delivered by Mr. al-Assad’s state forces. The Islamic State appeared when he lost legitimacy, and will not disappear until he loses power.

"Nine out of ten deaths have been delivered by Mr. al-Assad's state forces."

They have? Not if you consult the Wikipedia entry for Casualties of the Syrian civil war. The article cites various sources including some that are prominently anti-Assad to come up with estimates of approximately 100,000 government combatant casualties and a similar number of opposition combatant casualties. That takes care of about half the casualties right there. The idea that 90% of the casualties have been innocent civilians targeted by Assad is rubbish.

2. Puppet states are back. Post-Aleppo Syria is a manufactured product of Russian and Iranian military and economic aid, period. Not since the Cold War has a satellite state combined a total lack of public legitimacy with total repression of its people in such a horrendous way. Let us not allow this to become a model.

Mr. al-Assad has a "total lack of public legitimacy?" That's not the opinion of Jonathan Steele in this story at the Guardian titled "Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media."  Nor is Saunder's claim supported by this story at Foreign Policy titled "Assad's Sunni foot soldiers" from 2015. Or this story from The National Interest from earlier this year. These are mainstream sources that Mr. Saunders must be very well acquainted with in his capacity as the Globe's number one foreign affairs commentator. The "total lack of public legitimacy" chestnut is a total fabrication.


3. The refugee camps will become permanent cities. Turkey’s Gaziantep and Sanliurfa camps and the surrounding cities each contain around 300,000 Arabs and Kurds (of 2.5 million now living in Turkey) who have fled Mr. al-Assad’s vengeance. Jordan’s Zaatari and Azraq refugee camps contain more than 140,000 people. As long as the Assad regime remains in control, they cannot return; nor can the much smaller numbers of refugees who have fled to Europe and North America. It is time to start acknowledging these new cities, and populations, as long-term realities that could exist for a decade.

A decade? The Palestinian refugee cities scattered about the Middle East have been around for well over half a century. The reverberations from our failed regime change policy with respect to Assad can be expected to last at least as long. Had Turkey and Jordan not connived with the US "regime change" agenda from the beginning, they wouldn't be facing this refugee burden today.

4. The Libyan option was preferable. The decision by the United States (and Canada) to avoid a full-scale military intervention in Syria in 2012 and 2013 was based largely on recent precedent: The long-term invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic failures, leaving little appetite for another. But why, after the gas-attack nightmare of 2013 crossed every red line, didn’t we lend our military strength to unseat Mr. al-Assad? The answer, by then, was Libya: The same thing was done there in 2011, when NATO forces lent air support to the popular move to overthrow their own dictator – and now look at the place. A disaster.

But that’s the less horrific option. Libya is an unstable mess verging on a civil war of its own. But it is not the site of the sort of enormous-scale monstrosities, involving hundreds of thousands of deaths, that it would have become if Moammar Gadhafi had been kept in power and permitted to mete his revenge.

We also have to remember, when contemplating U.S. President Barack Obama’s fateful failure to take action (and Justin Trudeau’s promise not to get involved), that the best possible outcome “getting tough” could have produced would have been something resembling current-day Libya. He would be under attack by media and Republicans for provoking this outcome, and Western militaries would be caught in an impossible position. But hundreds of thousands would likely still be alive.

Just wrecking Syria the way we did Libya would be preferable? Libyans enjoyed the highest standard of living in all of Africa under the "despot" Gadhafi. What are they enjoying today? The disgusting arrogance on display here is utterly despicable. How is it our business to decide what's right for Libya or what's right for Syria?

WTF is up with those "moderate rebels?"

Who invented the category of "moderate rebels" anyway?

Can you imagine the headlines if "moderate rebels" were trying to foist an armed rebellion on America?

But apparently it's A-ok if "moderate rebels" attempt a coup in Syria... especially if those "moderate rebels" have been trained and armed by the USA from the get-go.

Armed insurrection would not be tolerated for five minutes in the USA.

But when the armed insurrection in Muslim lands is trained and funded by that most exceptional nation, everything is hunky-dory.

America remains a long way from an honest look in the mirror.

Thank God Trump was not President this week!

Stop for a moment and reflect on what this week would have been like had Donald Trump been president - the carpet bombing he'd have ordered in the Middle East...

Yup, for sure that's what would have happened this week, and lots more. Mosques firebombed... US embassies around the world firebombed too! That's according to NYT journo supreme Thomas Friedman in today's New York Times International Weekly.  The NYTIW is a few pages of filler the folks at the Sunday Star throw in with their paper, possibly to give us Hicksville hayseeds a taste of big-time journalism, or more likely because it's way cheaper than producing original copy with their own professional journos.

Friedman's article is grandly titled "lessons of Hiroshima and Orlando." At first I thought there must have been a copycat attack on a gay club in the Japanese city, but no, he really is referencing the attack in Orlando last weekend and the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima, in the same headline, because apparently both are somehow related to a Donald Trump presidency. Or something...

And TLF isn't the only NYT deep thinker with Trump, Islam, and Orlando (although apparently not Hiroshima) on his mind this week. Roger Cohen begins his take on the state of the universe with this howler; 

Omar Mateen, the Florida shooter who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just ushered Donald Trump to the White House, Britain out of the EU, Marine Le Pen to the French presidency, and the world into a downward spiral of violence.

He did??? That'd be a decent night's work for one dude with an assault rifle, were it not such outlandishly overblown hyperbole.

Ya, the world is a tinderbox set to explode, and driving all this mayhem is the fact that "Islam is in epochal crisis." There is something about Islam that makes those folks hate modernity, women, freedom, gays, Americans, and each other. And Donald Trump is just riling them up even more. Or something...

But he saves the best of his incoherent ramble for President Hopey Changey. Apparently the world would be less of a tinderbox had Obama got tough with Assad and Putin. Not invading Syria has been Obama's single deadliest foreign policy mistake.

What we need to make the world a safer place is more US invasions of Muslim countries!

Oy vey, these may be two of the most esteemed journalists in American letters, but even the pot-addled hillbilly realizes a few sentences in that they're full of shit.

German Foreign Minister Steinmeier calls out NATO warmongering

And just one day after fifty-one State Department nabobs in Exceptionalistan called for MORE warmongering! Yup, 51 drooling dickheads who truly believe America needs to be deeper into the muck of the Middle East went on the record demanding that US boots swarm into Syria, there to become targets for the Russian Air Force.

Not 24 hours later, there's Frank-Walter Steinmeier wagging his finger at the NATO gang and warning against needlessly antagonizing Russia.

Whoa! WTF is going on here?

You gotta love this line from the BBC story;

 Mr Steinmeier said that extensive Nato manoeuvres launched this month were counterproductive to regional security and could inflame tensions with Russia.

No shit!

This story tells us two important things.

1. The German polity is in no way united behind the "tough on Russia" US/NATO agenda.

2. Fifty-one warmongers at State will hear the words "you're fired" next January.

Dropping names, dropping bombs, and why Obama needs to put US boots on Syrian soil

That indefatigable cheerleader for war, Bernard-Henri Levy, solemnly informed us this week that, make no mistake, we are at war with Islamic State.

"A new kind of war," no less.

And please note that this is not a war of our choosing; this war has been forced on the US and France and their allies. Yes, the sordid history of France in Algeria and America's serial wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have nothing to do with the emergence of radical Islam.

They hate us for our democratic values, our openness, our tolerance...

Even the great BHL seems to be vaguely aware of what a putrid pile of shit he has concocted here. Perhaps that is why he has perfumed this outrageously dishonest dung-heap of a call to war with no less than twenty instances of name-dropping:

 Leon Blum

 Elie Halevy

 Georges Bataille

 Michel Leiris

 Roger Caillois

 Thucydides

 Clausewitz

 Carl Schmitt

 Saint Augustine

 Saint Thomas Aquinas

 Victor Hugo

 Paul Claudel

 Hitler

 Massoud

 Izetbegovic

 Mujibur Rahman

 Tariq Ramadan

 Abdelwahab Meddeb

 Churchill

 George Pitt-Rivers.

Wow! That's a staggeringly impressive level of erudition on display in one relatively brief essay! How is it possible that such a brilliant narrator could be lying to us?

And fear not, BHL already has a road-map to victory in the war that the forces of darkness have forced on the Nations of Virtue.

Yes, they've got us cornered, those "fascislamists" do, and we freedom-loving peaceable nations who have been ravaging and plundering and humiliating the Islamic world for generations have no choice but to fight a merciless war for our very survival...

And the very survival of Western Civilization depends on Mr. Obama putting American boots on the ground.

Now!

...at least according to that philosopher, war-monger, and imbecile-at-large, the esteemed Bernard-Henri Levy.

Having successfully brought freedom and democracy to Libya and Syria, France's Philosopher King casts his eye on Greece

I have no idea why, but today Canada's national newspaper of record gave an entire half page over to the international bon vivant and moron-at-large BHL.

The legend-in-his-own-mind BHL has it in for Tsipras and his referendum. Apparently holding a referendum on a matter that is life and death for the future of your country is anti-democratic.

Not only that, but it was an insult to 18 European countries, some of whom rolled over and cried "uncle" when they felt Frau Merkel's jackboot on their necks.

That's why Greece should roll over too...

That's pretty much the extent of the philosophical reasoning you're going to find here.

Obama's latest Syria initiative has found only 60 moderate rebels to train

It's been a PNAC wet dream to affect regime change in Syria for at least 20 years, but somehow the media still manage to fumble over the matter as though it's an idea Obama just came up with six months ago.

Hence the desultory reportage about the epic fail in the latest US "training" program of those imaginary moderate Syrian rebels.

Yup, they've only found 60 moderates in all of Syria to train up in their $500 million training program... and they'll be "moderates" till they get around the next corner with their US weapons and training, whereupon they'll hook up with their home crew of Nusra or ISIL homies.

Nobody ever imagined things would turn out any other way.

Those vile Islamic head-choppers are an American fabrication from start to finish.

They are labelled "moderates" for training purposes only.

Saudi Arabia and Iran: The things that didn't add up two years ago still don't add up today

Check this out.

Saudi is all in to kill the global fracking industry. They are committed to eliminating competition...

Think about it for a moment.

Who else benefits by getting the frackers out of the market?

Iran?

But aren't Iran and Saudi mortal enemies?...

Check this out again.

Some thoughts on the international refugee crisis

There's a minor flap afoot in Canada about our shameful response to the Syrian refugee crisis. At this point in time, Canada has admitted a grand total of 750 or thereabouts Syrian refugees.

For all of our grandiose talk of human rights, we pull up lame when it comes to delivering.

Right now well over a million Syrian refugees are holed up in both Turkey and Lebanon. Well over half a million in Jordan. There are almost a quarter million Syrian refugees in Iraq!

How desperate would you have to be to seek refuge in Iraq? Iraq is itself a major source of refugees in the global refugee equation.

The news that Canada is cherry-picking potential refugees based on their religious affiliation should give pause for thought too. A refugee is a refugee. A human being is a human being. Politicizing the refugee process makes Canadian government bureaucrats no different than the Nazi operatives who were charged with deciding who goes to a work camp and who goes to a death camp.

Here's another thing about the refugee crisis. All the top refugee source countries are countries in which the Nations of Virtue (EU, NATO) have been heavily meddling. Until we decided on regime change in Syria, the top source countries were Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria now tops the list. It's not hard to see what these nations have in common.

Here's a policy suggestion that I hope somebody in Ottawa will read; lets eliminate the Temporary Foreign Worker program entirely, and meet our labour needs by bringing in refugees! That's a win-win and win again.

Out with 400,000 TFWs, in with 400,000 refugees.

We have every reason to believe that a Syrian or Iraqi refugee, allowed into Canada, would be every bit as productive a worker as the TFWs from Mexico or Bangladesh. And this would ease the pressure on countries like Lebanon and Jordan, allies who are groaning under their refugee burden, and who are at considerable risk of becoming adjunct states to the Caliphate.

The only downside is this; if the Harper government actually instituted such a humane and sensible policy, those 400,000 new refugee-immigrants might be inclined to vote for him...

Who's fighting who in Kobani?

I don't know about you, but I'm a little confused by all the space the supposed ISIS siege of the Syrian border town of Kobani has been getting in the news.

For the most part it's a story spun to champion the valorous Kurds and demonize Turkey, because Erdogan refuses to go along with the plan, very popular among beltway strategists at the moment, to supply the Kurds with US weapons.

ISIS already have plenty of US weapons, which at the moment are being targeted by US bombs.

We know that the Kurds are the good guys here, because they are fighting ISIS, although they were never fighting the evil Assad all that hard, and remain on the official US terror list.

The evil Assad, by the way, was not considered all that evil until very recently.

Evil Assad has chit-chat with John Kerry

Evil Assad meets her Maj

So now Assad is a bad guy, and the ISIS moderates we trained and armed have morphed into even badder guys, so we have to fly over Syria to bomb the Syrian petroleum infrastructure, which apparently hurts ISIS, who are really really bad because they do not respect the rights of women, whereas the Kurds are the good guys who although they are a culture that practices female genital mutilation, are otherwise all aboard for the equal rights of women.

Or something like that.

Meanwhile, even though this Kobani deal has been spun as the evil ISIS vs. the hard-pressed Kurds, today it emerges that while Kobani may have been a predominantly Kurdish city, it's not just Kurds fighting ISIS, but other Islamist groups fighting ISIS as well.

Like the al-Raqqa Brigades, who are sometimes linked to al Qaeda and sometimes not, and possibly the al-Nussra Front, who are also sometimes al Qaeda, and sometimes not and sometimes associated with ISIS... gosh, it's confusing!

It would probably be just as true to spin Kobani as an al-Qaeda attack on ISIS, with the Kurds throwing their lot in with Qaeda for the moment, and the US Air Force serving, at least for the moment, as the al-Qaeda Air Force.

At least there's one thing not confusing; every bomb and bullet flying in either direction was paid for directly or indirectly by the US taxpayer!

That's got to warm the hearts of the war profiteers.