That headline appeared in my inbox earlier and I have been dreading it. The Syrian civil war has spilled over into Lebanon, it’s encroaching on Turkey’s territory, and it’s set off troubles in neighboring Iraq, which are now merging into an end to end regional threat.
Let’s take a look at how things got this way. The Ottoman empire laid claim to Syria and Iraq between 1512 and 1566.
Phi Beta Iota: A well illustrated historical overview with an itemization of current country by country one liners.
The Syrian Arab Army seized 281 barrels with chemicals from insurgents at a farm in Banias, Tartus.
Syria: According to Syria media, and reported by Xinhua, the Syrian armed forces discovered a factory for manufacturing and storing toxic chemical weapons inside a “terrorists'” hideout near Damascus.
An official source told the state news agency, SANA, that “the army unit seized amounts of toxic chemical materials, in addition to seizing chlorine substances in containers, some of them foreign-made, while others were Saudi-made (sic).”
The source said that the haul included weapons and scores of mortar shells which were prepared to be filled with chemical materials. SANA published a photo of the captured materials to accompany the report.
Foreign chemicals seized near Damascus. Some of the chemicals originate in Saudi-Arabia
Comment: The published report did not identify which opposition group's hideout was captured. This could be a media stunt, but in publishing photos, the government has made itself vulnerable to demands for independent verification. It would be easy to expose, if it is a hoax.
It is a mistake to look on what has become endless wars, first centering in the Middle East, as struggles over religion, political theories, sectarian struggles or post-colonial realignments. Each hypothesis fails.
Increasingly, intelligence analysts are agreeing on one thing, there is clear evidence of “game theory/chaos theory” with one clear purpose, to reduce populations in specific areas where key resources are in abundance.
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The first hard evidence hit with the discoveries of Dr. Chris Busby, researching the effects of depleted uranium use in the Fallujah region of Iraq. It took several years to get access to the area. There was a reason.
Not only was it found that fertility had been suppressed and the region plagued with the onslaught of horrific birth defects but that samples taken from the local population indicated that it wasn’t just depleted uranium but pure, weapons-grade U-235 that was found.
Not only were nuclear weapons used in Iraq but purposefully “dirty” weapons, not the more modern MRR (Minimal Residual Radiation) 3rd and 4th generation nukes developed at Livermore Labs in California after 1991.
It was at that time that their weapons program not only bifurcated into a highly classified area but largely went “dark” with top weapons physicists being kept “out of the loop.”
Thus, we find the use of dirty weapons, never meant to win a battle or reduce an enemy stronghold but to destroy a race.
Then, of course, there is still the issue of the endless tons of depleted uranium, not just Iraq but Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and perhaps even Syria.
This is the new warfare. It is the obvious next step in asymmetrical conflict. Lower risk for Americans, and probably cheaper. But, I wonder, is it making more enemies than it is eliminating? If I lived in a little village in the Afghan mountains and, in the middle of night, a drone strike blew up one of the houses, killing a neighbor family, I might have some serous attitude about it.
There is a growing anti-American attitude taking root in Europe, one already well-established in the Islamic world, and parts of Asia. The long term consequences of this are not going to be happy. But our foreign policy barely deals with it.
More and more judicial decisions, particularly those of Republican appointed judges, overwhelmingly favor corporations over people. These decisions get almost no coverage in the media, but they have real and far-reaching consequences. Here's an example of what I mean.
On June 24th the “Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev” passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute “the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s,” expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.
The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognized’ by the Israeli government must be moved.
The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens—usually referred to by the government as mere “structures”—were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.
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Phi Beta Iota: A well illustrated historical overview with an itemization of current country by country one liners.
