#iraq
Drought has devastated the Iraqi marshlands known as the ‘Garden of Eden’, putting wildlife and people’s livelihoods at risk
#Iraq #Draught #ClimateChange #ClinateCrisis #ClinateEmegency #Economy #Hunger
What Saddam failed to do, the global warming has managed to accomplish. Millions of people in raw dépend on farming and fishing in those regions of the country.
Draught means inability to feed their families, forced displacement because of the conditions and life as day traders, beggers and in worse case target of trafficers in big cities like Basra and Baghdad.
https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1560959845645180929?s=20&t=L1-wa-mpiqfA8DtW33lIlQ
Today I interviewed #TimothySnyder, an American historian and expert on the #history of Eastern #Europe. We discussed the war in #Ukraine, arms shipments from #Germany, whether #Pushkin and #Dostoyevsky were imperialist writers, and of course the terms " #fascism," " #schizofascism," and " #rashism”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3JE4ucX2A #imperialism #nationalism #dugin #iraq #afghanistan #war #russia #belarus #weapons #usa #trump #culture #india #colonialism
ANTI-US PROTESTERS IN #IRAQ STORM US #MILITARY BASE WITH BULLDOZERS AND EXCAVATORS TO TEAR DOWN THE BASE.
The armed protesters are actively using #bulldozers and have destroyed US military fortifications, demonstrating their intention to occupy US-held territory in #Baghdad.
Internationalists from many countries around the world are fighting in defence of the #Rojava #revolution or helping to build it. One of them is Heval Agit (Jozef Krol), an internationalist from #Poland. Agit is 33 years old and joined the ranks of #YPG -International in 2018. He told the daily Özgür Politika that he was confronted with the Kurdish #freedom struggle for the first time during the #war for #Kobanê. Then, when Afrin was attacked, he said, he decided to take part in the defence of the region." The war crimes committed by the Turkish #state and the silence of the world public opinion about it are unbearable," Agit said in view of the occupation of #Afrin and criticised the support of the invasion by the #EU, #Russia and the #UN through their approval and silence.
https://anfenglishmobile.com/rojava-syria/polish-fighter-in-rojava-it-is-an-internationalist-duty-to-defend-the-revolution-61366 #turkey #women #ecology #capitalism #isis #genocide #iraq
Iran announces activation of hundreds of new centrifuges
#Biden could have reversed #Trump's decision by a simple signature, but instead he is choosing to side With nuclear power nation of #Israel (not a signatory of NPT and one of the 3 countries in the world who shared the knowledge of creating a nuclear bomb with others, the other 2 are #France who helped Israel and #Pakistan who sold it to #Libya and #Iraq).
The announcement comes just hours after the US announced new #sanctions against Iran's petroleum trade.
#Politics #JCPOA
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-713663
bonk!
Second time in months an #IRGC official has been reportedly kidnapped. In May, #Iran International published video of an IRGC official named Mansour Rasouli admitting to alleged #Mossad agents that he had been ordered to establish a cell to assassinate a worker at the Israeli Consulate in #Istanbul, a #US general stationed in #Germany and a journalist in #France.
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-712731 #israel #syria #lebanon #yemen #iraq
It was early 2016, and I had gone to #Trinidad to report on Trinidadian #ISIS foreign fighters for The Atlantic. Between 2013 and 2016, some 240 Trinis travelled to #Syria and Iraq to join the caliphate, making Trinidad one of the world’s biggest exporters, per capita, of ISIS foreign fighters. I wanted to know how a country famed for #calypso, rum and carnival could incubate something so profoundly unTrinidadian.
https://unherd.com/2022/07/the-jihadists-of-the-caribbean/ #is #islamism #war #corruption #religion #violence #iraq
#Breaking: The number of people who were martyred in the massacre carried out by the Turkish occupation state in the Shengal Region with a drone was 7. Two of the martyrs are women. #Kurdistan #Iraq
via @RojavaAzadi@twitter.com
#bashur #Shengal #yazidigenocide https://t.me/c/1623545990/761
Article by Chris Hedges back in 2019:
Our Invisible Government
It details the sickening, unspeakable violence and depravity of the CIA and other US "intelligence" agencies.
Highly recommend a read and saving the link - and being grateful you aren't among the victims of such terrifying evil.
#AbuGhraib #BlackSites #CIA #GinaHaspel #government #iran #iraq #military #national #spying #usa #vietnam #war #abuse #evil #HumanRights #torture
The new package may not be the decisive blow to Russia’s oil and gas revenues that many wished for. But It is still hefty. Up to 90% of European imports of Russian crude are covered by agreements to phase them out by year end while allowing pipeline-dependent importers to continue to buy. All seaborne imports are banned. A Joint #UK - #EU move also bans insurance firms from insuring and reinsuring Russian crude shipments, threatening exports to non-European markets with a limited availability of experienced insurers confident of how to manage #sanctions risks.
Even this watered-down import ban is a huge gamble for #Europe. Eurozone #inflation surpassed 8% year-on-year in May, about half of which can be attributed to energy and food. Brent crude is trading above $ 120 a barrel with every expectation that prices will continue to rise. Europe is committed to rewiring global flows of crude oil despite the economic pain. #Russia cannot readily redirect all affected production elsewhere to offset these incoming losses. Nor can it maintain its geopolitical influence as an #oil power at this rate.
https://ridl.io/europe-s-gamble-and-the-end-of-russia-s-oil-power/ #usa #iraq #saudiarabia #iran #economy
Welcome to a Science-Fiction Planet
How George Orwell's Doublethink Became the Way of the World
Tom Dispatch
(...) Let’s start with President George H.W. Bush’s assurance to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east” — and that pledge has been verified. My question to you is, why didn’t Gorbachev get that in writing?
Noam Chomsky: He accepted a gentleman’s agreement, which is not that uncommon in diplomacy. Shake-of-the-hand. Furthermore, having it on paper would have made no difference whatsoever. Treaties that are on paper are torn up all the time. What matters is good faith. And in fact, H.W. Bush, the first Bush, did honor the agreement explicitly. (...)
Clinton in his first couple of years also adhered to it. What the specialists say is that by about 1994, Clinton started to, as they put it, talk from both sides of his mouth. To the Russians he was saying: Yes, we’re going to adhere to the agreement. To the Polish community in the United States and other ethnic minorities, he was saying: Don’t worry, we’ll incorporate you within NATO. (...)
From 2014, the U.S. and NATO began to pour arms into Ukraine — advanced weapons, military training, joint military exercises, moves to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command. (...)
In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming majority — I think about 70% of the vote — on a peace platform, a plan to implement peace with Eastern Ukraine and Russia, to settle the problem. He began to move forward on it and, in fact, tried to go to the Donbas, the Russian-oriented eastern region, to implement what’s called the Minsk II agreement. It would have meant a kind of federalization of Ukraine with a degree of autonomy for the Donbas, which is what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium. He was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort.
Well, he’s a courageous man. He could have gone forward if he had had any backing from the United States. The U.S. refused. (...) The U.S. was intent on this policy of integrating Ukraine step by step into the NATO military command. That accelerated further when President Biden was elected. (...)
On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home.
The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. (...) So, had there been any statesmen within Putin’s narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States. (...)
Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.
There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It’s explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia. (...)
Barsamian: In the media, and among the political class in the United States, and probably in Europe, there’s much moral outrage about Russian barbarity, war crimes, and atrocities. No doubt they are occurring as they do in every war. Don’t you find that moral outrage a bit selective though?
Chomsky: The moral outrage is quite in place. There should be moral outrage. (...)
When people in the Global South hear this, they don’t know whether to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals. In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion, strongly opposed by world opinion. (...) George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq. (...)
Or take probably the major war criminal of the modern period, Henry Kissinger. We deal with him not only politely, but with great admiration. This is the man after all who transmitted the order to the Air Force, saying that there should be massive bombing of Cambodia — “anything that flies on anything that moves” was his phrase. I don’t know of a comparable example in the archival record of a call for mass genocide. And it was implemented with very intensive bombing of Cambodia. We don’t know much about it because we don’t investigate our own crimes. (...) Then there’s our role in overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and instituting a vicious dictatorship there, and on and on. (...)
Barsamian: I’ve got a little puzzle for you. It’s in two parts. Russia’s military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy’s and Spain’s. That’s one part. The other part is Russia is a military colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons. Let’s expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory thoughts?
(...) George Orwell had a name for that. He called it doublethink, the capacity to have two contradictory ideas in your mind and believe both of them. (...)
Such doublethink is, for instance, characteristic of Cold War thinking. You go way back to the major Cold War document of those years, NSC-68 in 1950. Look at it carefully and it showed that Europe alone, quite apart from the United States, was militarily on a par with Russia. But of course, we still had to have a huge rearmament program to counter the Kremlin design for world conquest. (...)
Russia, [diplomat George Kennan] thought, would ultimately collapse from internal contradictions, which turned out to be correct. But he was considered a dove all the way through. In 1952, he was in favor of the unification of Germany outside the NATO military alliance. That was actually Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin’s proposal as well. Kennan was ambassador to the Soviet Union and a Russia specialist.
Stalin’s initiative. Kennan’s proposal. Some Europeans supported it. It would have ended the Cold War. It would have meant a neutralized Germany, non-militarized and not part of any military bloc. It was almost totally ignored in Washington. (...)
Barsamian: In an article in Truthout, you quote Eisenhower’s 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech. What did you find of interest there?
Chomsky: You should read it and you’ll see why it’s interesting. It’s the best speech he ever made. This was 1953 when he was just taking office. Basically, what he pointed out was that militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He — or whoever wrote the speech — put it pretty eloquently. One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals. Every time we’re building up our military budget, we’re attacking ourselves. (...)
Recently, in fact, Biden proposed a huge military budget. Congress expanded it even beyond his wishes, which represents a major attack on our society. (...)
The excuse: the claim that we have to defend ourselves from this paper tiger, so militarily incompetent it can’t move a couple of miles beyond its border without collapse. (...)
Meanwhile, we pour taxpayer funds into the pockets of the fossil-fuel producers so that they can continue to destroy the world as quickly as possible. That’s what we’re witnessing with the vast expansion of both fossil-fuel production and military expenditures.
If you imagine some extraterrestrials, if they existed, they’d think we were all totally insane. And they’d be right.
Tags: #ukraine #us #bush #clinton #nato #diplomacy #war #invasion #agression #russia #donbas #zelensky #minsk_II #biden #putin #blinken #food_shortages #hunger #europa #eu #european_union #afghanistan #iraq #global_south #cambodia #carpet_bombing #kissinger #chile #allende #coup #cold_war #kennedy #Khrushchev #eisenhower #military_industrial_complex #pentagon #doublethink
While Iranian #media often claims that attacks in #Iraq are targeting "Mossad headquarters," their latest claim squeaked out a series of memes on Thursday after they reported that a #Mossad commander named "Asa Flots" (which would mean "made a fart" in Hebrew) had been killed in a drone attack in #Erbil.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-709031 #israel #iran #hezbollah
The Ukrainian challenge is different than that facing the Russians. The Ukrainians are defending, and they have had deep experience in this type of operation in the #Donbas region since the invasion in 2014. Whether or not they can take the offensive at any scale in the future remains to be seen.
The Russo-Ukrainian War, as of May 24, is only three months old, which is short by the standards of any major #war. One could usefully recall that it took from July 7 to September 26 in 1941 for the German assault on the #SovietUnion in Operation Barbarossa to reach and take #Kyiv. The current war appears to be evolving into a protracted war of attrition. Therefore, the Russian strategy of limited maneuver and a heavy reliance on fires may yet be sound. They seem to be learning, as Russia analyst Michael Kofman pointed out in a recent War on the Rocks podcast. This protraction of major combat operations is also beyond the experience of serving Western officers.
At the beginning of the war, Russia’s active-duty personnel and major #weapons systems allocated to the invasion significantly outnumbered that of Ukraine almost two-to-one. Accurate casualty and materiel loss data is difficult to obtain, particularly from Ukraine, where the data is understandably considered a national secret. Nevertheless, if the numbers being reported by each combatant are in the ballpark, then these running estimates show both sides are suffering significant levels of attrition, most importantly in personnel.
If this is true, then Ukraine is potentially in serious trouble if the war continues much longer.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/would-we-do-better-hubris-and-validation-in-ukraine/ #military #army #iraq #afghanistan #serbia #kosovo #clausewitz #usa #nato #china
Sign the petition for Julian #Assange
https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/julian-assange-usa-justice/
#FreeSpeech #PressFreedom #WarCrimes #Wikileaks #ChelseaManning #Iraq #politics #UK #USA
Nearly four million refugees have fled #Ukraine since #Russia invaded. But these are hardly the only refugees fleeing war-torn countries today. Starting in 2021, the government of #Belarus has cynically used thousands of refugees displaced by wars in #Syria, #Afghanistan, #Iraq, #Ethiopia, and elsewhere as a weapon with which to exert pressure on the European Union. #EU governments have responded callously, leaving these refugees trapped in limbo between two militarized borders and establishing a restricted zone to ensure that observers could not see them dying. Despite this, anarchists organized in the #NoBordersTeam network have defied the restrictions to provide assistance to the refugees in the name of a world without borders. We spoke with anarchists mobilizing on the #border between #Poland and Belarus to learn more.
https://pl.crimethinc.com/2022/03/29/solidarity-in-an-age-of-war-and-displacement-anarchists-confront-the-weaponization-of-refugees-on-the-poland-belarus-border #migration #latvia #lithuania #lukashenko #Ryanair #violence #duda #yemen #ukraine #germany #france #Italy #czechrepublic #UK #minsk #refugees #police #acab
Navigating our #Humanity: Ilan Pappé on the Four Lessons from #Ukraine
Lesson One: White #Refugees are Welcome; Others Less So
Lesson Two: You Can Invade #Iraq but not the Ukraine
Lesson Three: Sometimes Neo-Nazism Can Be Tolerated
Lesson Four: Hitting High-rises is only a #War #Crime in #Europe
#question #moral #ethics #humanRights #politics #Russia #justice #problem #news #west #DoubleStandard #Racism #nazi #EU
