The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Are America's Wars Just and Moral?
by Pat Buchanan
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Russia Colludes With Ecofascists to Oppose
Fracking
With the mainstream media's continuous churning of the Donald Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy, one can easily become callous toward any news related to allegations of actual Russian collusion. But to do so would be to ignore the reality that Vladimir Putin does indeed pose a credible threat to Western nations. And it's not beyond reason to recognize that Putin is still invested in pushing the message of Russian election interference if only to further sow the seeds of division and distrust among Americans regarding the integrity of our electoral system. Leftmedia propaganda outlets are his willing accomplices.
Another of Putin's most effective propaganda tools turns out to be environmentalist groups.
For several years now the Russians have invested heavily in the anti-fracking crusade, but not out of any high-minded concerns over the environmental impact. Lacking their own resources or technological development, many Eastern European countries have been forced to look to Russia for their fuel needs. But with the development of fracking technology, several European nations have explored using the technology to reach previously untapped energy reserves on their own soil. This poses a threat to Moscow's near monopoly over the regional energy market.
For example, in 2012, Bulgaria issued a permit to allow Chevron to engage in fracking. Environmental activists protested, presenting dubious claims of contaminated drinking water and other pollution. Eventually, the Bulgarian government caved to the ecofascists and voted to ban fracking. Guess who swooped in to offer a 20% discount for a 10-year natural gas contract — Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company.
Putin played a similar game in Romania in the funding of environmentalist groups that were successful in stopping any fracking there. In 2014, several European nations banned fracking after protests prompted then-NATO Secretary General Fogh Anders Rasmussen to warn, "Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas."
Even liar-Hillary Clinton noted that while she was at the State Department, "We were up against phony environmental groups. And I'm a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand up against any effort. 'Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,' and a lot of that money supporting that effort was coming from Russia."
Russia hasn't stopped its anti-fracking campaign. In 2015, Russia's state-run media outlet produced no fewer than 60 anti-fracking stories purporting to show studies that determined fracking was "dangerous." Recently, two Republican representatives wrote a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanding that he investigate a shell company accused of funneling millions from the Russian government to a private environmentalist group — the Sea Change Foundation. The tip of the proverbial iceberg.
This is the real Russian meddling story that Congress should be investigating. ~The Patriot Post
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Trump Plans to Decertify Iran, Sidelines State Dept
by Cathy Burke
{newsmax.com} ~ President Donald Trump angrily sidelined the State Department and assigned trusted White House staffers with making the potential case for withholding certification at the next review of the Iran nuclear deal, Foreign Policy reported... The decision came after a "contentious meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson," according to the article. "The president assigned White House staffers with the task of preparing for the possibility of decertification for the 90-day review period that ends in October — a task he had previously given to Secretary Tillerson and the State Department," an unnamed source told FP... http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/President-Donald-Trump-Secretary-of-State-Rex-Tillerson-Iran-certification/2017/07/23/id/803289/.
The Myth of ISIS's Strategic Brilliance
The remains of Al-Nuri Grand Mosque in Mosul
by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
{meforum.org} ~ As Mosul is finally freed in its entirety from the Islamic State (ISIS) and the offensive in Raqqa continues, the predictable question becomes: What's next for the group?... Without control of territory, its complex state administration project cannot function. This project was probably ISIS's biggest selling point in relation to its rivals in the global jihadist movement. The end of ISIS as a functioning state project on the ground clearly does not herald the end of ISIS as an entity. In many areas long since cleared of ISIS control, the organization has continued to function as an effective insurgency with both small and large-scale attacks. Around the world, ISIS will remain a terrorist threat, as illustrated by events from Europe to the Philippines. The ISIS footprint on the internet is large and unlikely ever to be removed in its entirety...http://www.meforum.org/6832/the-myth-of-isis-strategic-brilliance?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=5600622cd1-tamimi_aymenn_2017_07_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-5600622cd1-33703665&goal=0_086cfd423c-5600622cd1-33703665The remains of Al-Nuri Grand Mosque in Mosul
by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
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Paul Manafort subpoenaed
by Senate Judiciary Committee
by Brooke Singman
{foxnews.com} ~ The Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena late Monday to compel former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s appearance at a public hearing on Wednesday... The abrupt move comes after lawmakers and Manafort apparently were unable to reach an agreement for a private, transcribed interview. “While we were willing to accommodate Mr. Manafort’s request to cooperate with the committee’s investigation without appearing at Wednesday’s hearing, we were unable to reach an agreement for a voluntary transcribed interview with the Judiciary Committee,” Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a joint statement Tuesday... http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/07/25/paul-manafort-subpoenaed-by-senate-judiciary-committee.html.
China Is Planning For A
Crisis Along North Korean Border
by Tyler Durden
{shtfplan.com} ~ Despite Chinese officials reassurance that “military means shouldn’t be an option,” WSJ reports that China has been bolstering defenses along its 880-mile frontier with North Korea... and realigning forces in surrounding regions to prepare for a potential crisis across their border, including the possibility of a U.S. military strike. While all eyes in America are once again distracted by “Russia”-related narratives and the dismal GOP efforts to replace, repeal, re-who-knows-what liar-nObamacare, the threat of North Korea has not gone away… and neither has China’s preparations. As President Trump stepped up the rhetoric, pressuring China to do more to ‘solve’ the North Korean problem, and threatening military action to halt Kim’s nuclear weapons program ambitions, it is clear that China has used this crisis to not just prepare for potential problems with North Korea but to reinforce military forces elsewhere...http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/time-is-running-out-china-is-planning-for-a-crisis-along-north-korean-border_07252017.
Limbaugh Questions Why
Media Chose To Ignore A Huge Story
by Eric Lieberman
{dailycaller.com} ~ Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh voiced frustration that Democrats are sidestepping media attention due to potential improprieties... FBI agents recently seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator, according to sources. The Pakistani-born longtime IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman who resigned in disgrace has since tried to retrieve the hard drives. Limbaugh noted and lamented that many of the popular news outlets have hardly touched the story. “Here we got leaks, and here we’ve got ‘sources with knowledge of the investigation’ talking about Democrats,” Limbaugh said. “Well, The Daily Caller’s been the only ones on it. I mean, they’re the ones who did that story two weeks ago. They revived it a bit today. But nobody’s picking up on this. It makes sense. This is the exact kind of story the Democrats and the Drive-By Media would want to ignore.”... http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/24/limbaugh-questions-why-media-chose-to-ignore-a-huge-story/.
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by Pat Buchanan
{townhall.com} ~ "One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies," writes columnist David Ignatius.
Given that Syria's prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America's participation in this slaughter?
Columnist Eric Margolis summarizes the successes of the six-year civil war to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
"The result of the western-engendered carnage in Syria was horrendous: at least 475,000 dead, 5 million Syrian refugees driven into exile in neighboring states Turkey alone hosts three million, and another 6 million internally displaced. ... 11 million Syrians ... driven from their homes into wretched living conditions and near famine.
"Two of Syria's greatest and oldest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, have been pounded into ruins. Jihadist massacres and Russian and American air strikes have ravaged once beautiful, relatively prosperous Syria. Its ancient Christian peoples are fleeing for their lives before US and Saudi takfiri religious fanatics."
Realizing the futility of U.S. policy, President Trump is cutting aid to the rebels. And the War Party is beside itself. Says The Wall Street Journal:
"The only way to reach an acceptable diplomatic solution is if Iran and Russia feel they are paying too high a price for their Syria sojourn. This means more support for Mr. Assad's enemies, not cutting them off without notice. And it means building up a Middle East coalition willing to fight Islamic State and resist Iran. The U.S. should also consider enforcing 'safe zones' in Syria for anti-Assad forces."
Yet, fighting ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria, while bleeding the Assad-Iran-Russia-Hezbollah victors, is a formula for endless war and unending terrors visited upon the Syrian people.
What injury did the Assad regime, in power for half a century and having never attacked us, inflict to justify what we have helped to do to that country?
Is this war moral by our own standards?
We overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Moammar Gadhafi in 2012. Yet, the fighting, killing and dying in both countries have not ceased. Estimates of the Iraq civilian and military dead run into the hundreds of thousands.
Still, the worst humanitarian disaster may be unfolding in Yemen.
After the Houthis overthrew the Saudi-backed regime and took over the country, the Saudis in 2015 persuaded the United States to support its air strikes, invasion and blockade.
By January 2016, the U.N. estimated a Yemeni civilian death toll of 10,000, with 40,000 wounded. However, the blockade of Yemen, which imports 90 percent of its food, has caused a crisis of malnutrition and impending famine that threatens millions of the poorest people in the Arab world with starvation.
No matter how objectionable we found these dictators, what vital interests of ours were so imperiled by the continued rule of Saddam, Assad, Gadhafi and the Houthis that they would justify what we have done to the peoples of those countries?
"They make a desert and call it peace," Calgacus said of the Romans he fought in the first century. Will that be our epitaph?
Among the principles for a just war, it must be waged as a last resort, to address a wrong suffered, and by a legitimate authority. Deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
The wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen were never authorized by Congress. The civilian dead, wounded and uprooted in Syria, and the malnourished millions in Yemen, represent a moral cost that seems far beyond any proportional moral gain from those conflicts.
In which of the countries we have attacked or invaded in this century -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen -- are the people better off than they were before we came?
And we wonder why they hate us.
"Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return," wrote W. H. Auden in "September 1, 1939." As the peoples of Syria and the other broken and bleeding countries of the Middle East flee to Europe and America, will not some come with revenge on their minds and hatred in their hearts?
Meanwhile, as the Americans bomb across the Middle East, China rises. She began the century with a GDP smaller than Italy's and now has an economy that rivals our own.
She has become the world's first manufacturing power, laid claim to the islands of the East and South China seas, and told America to keep her warships out of the Taiwan Strait.
Xi Jinping has launched a "One Belt, One Road" policy to finance trade ports and depots alongside the military and naval bases being established in Central and South Asia.
Meanwhile, the Americans, $20 trillion in debt, running $800 billion trade deficits, unable to fix their health care system, reform their tax code, or fund an infrastructure program, prepare to fight new Middle East war. Whom the Gods would destroy...
Are America's Wars Just and Moral?
{townhall.com} ~ "One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies," writes columnist David Ignatius.
Given that Syria's prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America's participation in this slaughter?
Columnist Eric Margolis summarizes the successes of the six-year civil war to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
"The result of the western-engendered carnage in Syria was horrendous: at least 475,000 dead, 5 million Syrian refugees driven into exile in neighboring states Turkey alone hosts three million, and another 6 million internally displaced. ... 11 million Syrians ... driven from their homes into wretched living conditions and near famine.
"Two of Syria's greatest and oldest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, have been pounded into ruins. Jihadist massacres and Russian and American air strikes have ravaged once beautiful, relatively prosperous Syria. Its ancient Christian peoples are fleeing for their lives before US and Saudi takfiri religious fanatics."
Realizing the futility of U.S. policy, President Trump is cutting aid to the rebels. And the War Party is beside itself. Says The Wall Street Journal:
"The only way to reach an acceptable diplomatic solution is if Iran and Russia feel they are paying too high a price for their Syria sojourn. This means more support for Mr. Assad's enemies, not cutting them off without notice. And it means building up a Middle East coalition willing to fight Islamic State and resist Iran. The U.S. should also consider enforcing 'safe zones' in Syria for anti-Assad forces."
Yet, fighting ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria, while bleeding the Assad-Iran-Russia-Hezbollah victors, is a formula for endless war and unending terrors visited upon the Syrian people.
What injury did the Assad regime, in power for half a century and having never attacked us, inflict to justify what we have helped to do to that country?
Is this war moral by our own standards?
We overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Moammar Gadhafi in 2012. Yet, the fighting, killing and dying in both countries have not ceased. Estimates of the Iraq civilian and military dead run into the hundreds of thousands.
Still, the worst humanitarian disaster may be unfolding in Yemen.
After the Houthis overthrew the Saudi-backed regime and took over the country, the Saudis in 2015 persuaded the United States to support its air strikes, invasion and blockade.
By January 2016, the U.N. estimated a Yemeni civilian death toll of 10,000, with 40,000 wounded. However, the blockade of Yemen, which imports 90 percent of its food, has caused a crisis of malnutrition and impending famine that threatens millions of the poorest people in the Arab world with starvation.
No matter how objectionable we found these dictators, what vital interests of ours were so imperiled by the continued rule of Saddam, Assad, Gadhafi and the Houthis that they would justify what we have done to the peoples of those countries?
"They make a desert and call it peace," Calgacus said of the Romans he fought in the first century. Will that be our epitaph?
Among the principles for a just war, it must be waged as a last resort, to address a wrong suffered, and by a legitimate authority. Deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
The wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen were never authorized by Congress. The civilian dead, wounded and uprooted in Syria, and the malnourished millions in Yemen, represent a moral cost that seems far beyond any proportional moral gain from those conflicts.
In which of the countries we have attacked or invaded in this century -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen -- are the people better off than they were before we came?
And we wonder why they hate us.
"Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return," wrote W. H. Auden in "September 1, 1939." As the peoples of Syria and the other broken and bleeding countries of the Middle East flee to Europe and America, will not some come with revenge on their minds and hatred in their hearts?
Meanwhile, as the Americans bomb across the Middle East, China rises. She began the century with a GDP smaller than Italy's and now has an economy that rivals our own.
She has become the world's first manufacturing power, laid claim to the islands of the East and South China seas, and told America to keep her warships out of the Taiwan Strait.
Xi Jinping has launched a "One Belt, One Road" policy to finance trade ports and depots alongside the military and naval bases being established in Central and South Asia.
Meanwhile, the Americans, $20 trillion in debt, running $800 billion trade deficits, unable to fix their health care system, reform their tax code, or fund an infrastructure program, prepare to fight new Middle East war. Whom the Gods would destroy...
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