PAUL C ROBERTS—The inability of the Russian government to comprehend the US/Israeli/neoconservative alliance and what this means for the Middle East, together with the indecisiveness of the Russian government about supplying Syria with the S-300 air defense system, has enabled the crisis to escalate with last night’s as of yet unclaimed attack on Syrian military positions with what appears to have been “bunker buster” bombs, an escalation.
VASSAL STATES
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DMITRY ORLOV—Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Ghouta in Syria, where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.
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KOREAN PEOPLE WANT PEACE AND REUNIFICATION. UNCLE SAM DOES NOT. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND
26 minutes readJEFF J. BROWN—It is no understatement to say that Korea’s détente this week is the greatest chance for peace, so far, in the 21stcentury. After living with a US contrived ceasefire for 65 years, the two halves of the artificially divided Korean people are finally promising to sign a full peace treaty by the end of this year and create steps towards reunification (https://www.nknews.org/2018/04/two-koreas-agree-to-end-armistice-agreement-sign-peace-treaty/).
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BRIAN CLOUGHLEY—The missiles fired by the US, UK and France have not resulted in the slightest reduction in “humanitarian suffering” in Syria, although the British government declared that it is “permitted under international law, on an exceptional basis, to take measures in order to alleviate overwhelming humanitarian suffering. The legal basis for the use of force is humanitarian intervention” which is justified when there is “extreme humanitarian distress on a large scale, requiring immediate and urgent relief.”
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ALEX LANTIER—“The terrorist threat is even more dangerous when combined with the nuclear proliferation threat,” he said. “France supports fully the United States in its attempts to bring Pyongyang through sanctions and negotiations towards denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. As for Iran, our objective is clear: Iran shall never possess any nuclear weapons: not now, not in 5 years, not in 10 years, never.”