Exclusive: The Saudi-Israeli alliance has gone on the offensive, ramping up a “regime change” war in Syria and, in effect, promoting a military victory for Al-Qaeda or its spinoff, the Islamic State. But the consequences of that victory could toll the final bell for the American Republic, writes Robert Parry.
Part 1 of a two part series — This interview with Professor Stephen Cohen provides a very useful, and I believe largely accurate, portrayal of why our policy toward Russia has gone off the rails and could lead to a 2nd Cold War that is even more dangerous than the first — with one serious omission, IMO. Cohen's discussion of the reasons for NATO’s expansion, while accrurate, does not include the influence of the arms manufacturers in promoting that expansion. The MICC had a huge interest in NATO expansion, because adding new countries to NATO had the obvious potential for opening up huge arms markets in the name of NATO’s policy of standardization and interoperability. That the market has turned out less than predicted in the 1990s does not obviate the power of the motive. It is part of the mosaic of domestic political impulses to expand NATO that Cohen describes as being so dangerous. CS
Exclusive: R2Pers say America has a “responsibility to protect” endangered people around the world, but this R2P moral imperative is selective, often indistinguishable from neocons tolerating some slaughters and choosing to wage war against certain enemies — just dressed up in liberal rhetoric, reports Robert Parry.
More than thirteen years after the U.S. intelligence community named the prevention of terrorism its number one goal, it seems to have little understanding of what drives terrorism, or how to counter it. And, if the recently increasingcriticism is correct, the government’s investment in academic terrorism research isn’t helping. It may be because the government is continuing to fund research supporting discredited theories of terrorist radicalization, rather than objective empirical analyses.
As one researcher in this report states: the problem is official politics: they demand that we should not count the dead. She was not able to get funds for her research from any academic institution or government organization.