Right on schedule:
Events of the recent days clearly show the emergence of a new alliance in the Middle East that is willing to work in close cooperation to seek the solution to the Syrian conflict.
This fact is not only evidenced by Russia starting to use the Hamedan Air Base in Iran to launch strikes against ISIS targets in Syria, but also by the development and strengthening of bilateral cooperation between Ankara and Tehran. Moreover, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has officially announced his intentions to visit Tehran with an official visit.
According to Iran’s Fars news agency, this visit is extremely important for the establishment of a new level of relations between Tehran and Ankara. It’s been announced that the meeting will partially be focused on the organization of the cross-party meeting of Iranian, Turkish and Russian officials to discuss strategies that would allow those players to put an end to the war in Syria. According to various observers, this visit will be the official start of the formation of the Russian-Iranian-Turkish alliance on Syria, Fars news notes.
The Time would declare right off the bat that this meeting will mark the appearance of the new anti-US axis of evil in the Middle East.
The fact that Putin has been advancing rapidly in the the Middle East has been pointed out by the Austrian newspaper DiePresse. According to the newspaper, the fact that Russian air strikes are being launched from the Iranian airfield against terrorists in Syria has deep symbolic significance, since Moscow and Tehran are showing that they began to work more closely on Syria, manifesting to the world and above all the United States that Russia is here to stay in the Middle East.
The New York Times would note that the new level of Russian-Iranian cooperation in Syria leads to the conslusion that Washington committed a major mistake by refraining from creating so-called “safe zones “and large-scale military operations in Syria, leaving a loophole for Russian to enter this war on its own rules. According to American historians and officials, the fact that Tehran allowed Russia’s warplanes to use its territory is a milestone development. This step has not simply granted Russia’s aircraft tactical advantage, but also looks like a part of the larger plan to attempt the creation of a broader coalition to settle the Syrian conflict.
The Times is convinced that Obama should wake up to fact that he has virtually created a new military axis in the Middle East that is being held together by Russia’s Iran’s and Turkey’s contempt towards Washington.
The rapidly developing military ties between Russia and Iran have been reported by The Wall Street Journal, that would note that Moscow and Tehran are strengthening their cooperation after the Iran nuclear deal being signed by President Obama. This step was immediately followed by Russia’s decision to sell advanced anti-aircraft missile systems S-300 to Tehran.
The French Le Figaro has also noted that the allies in the Syrian conflict, Iran and Russia both refrained from establishing direct military ties officially for a long while. However, once the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program was signed, both Moscow and Tehran advanced on this path, which was a truly unexpected development for Western powers. French analysts are convinced that Moscow would take full advantage of the weak posture of the Obama administration in the region, since Putin used the war in Syria to speed up Russia’s return to the international scene as the lead actor.
Students of history will find eerie but quite predictable parallels between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century AD and the collapse of America’s global hegemony today. Not only has the choice of political so-called leaders become the near-exclusive province of big money patriarchs and their corporate interests. The choice of politicians voters are offered is worse than abysmal. As President Barack Obama tries every sneaky trick in the book to ram through a hugely unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade corporate scam, a report has emerged that there is a staggering $6.5 trillion of US taxpayer dollars that cannot be properly accounted for by standard good accounting methods. That’s trillion, not million, not billion, but trillion. That is almost 40% of the annual USA Gross Domestic Product. Missing in action…
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the agency that provides finance and accounting services for the Pentagon’s civilian and military members, has just revealed that it cannot provide adequate documentation for $6.5 trillion worth of “adjustments” to Army general fund transactions and data. According to a report released July 26 by the by the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense, US military budget practices are out of control.
This is no minor book-keeping bureaucratic snafu. It exposes the rampant corruption at the heart of the world’s largest military Leviathan, the Pentagon. The Pentagon report goes on to declare, “In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System-Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY2015…the data used to prepare the FY2015 AGF third quarter and year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail.” (emphasis added)
Translated into plain English, the US Army–and that’s only one branch of the US Armed Forces–destroyed accounting documents, did not provide an audit trail for accountability of funds allocated by Congress, and made apparently arbitrary, unverifiable accounting year-end adjustments that made it look like the books balanced, adjustments of $6.5 trillion worth. In other words they not only cooked the books, they Dixie-fried them, as in…trillion…trillion…trillion…
Interesting to know there are two mammoth institutions with government ties or government agencies which never have submitted to an independent audit. One is the privately-owned but Government linked and supposedly Congressionally monitored (hardly) Federal Reserve. The second institution never to have been audited is the Pentagon. Never.
The day before September 11, 2001 then US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announced, “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” The story vanished the next day in the panic of 911 events.
The title of my latest book is The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy. It refers to the fact that the boring old patriarchs, let’s call them BOPs, such as D. Rockefeller or G. Soros or W. Buffett–oligarchs whose so-called power is based on the popular delusion that they have real power, a funny kind of hypnosis or mass delusion we nurture–that their ability to push their globalist one world fascist agenda is failing.
It’s failing everywhere, whether in their use of Islam as with Fethullah Gülen in Turkey’s recently failed US coup attempt, or in their ISIS/Al Qaeda terror war against Syria to gain control of the oil and gas of the region. Or they have failed in their effort to isolate Russia or encircle China in the South China Sea. It recalls the final days of the Roman Empire which collapsed during the Fourth Century AD not from foreign invasion, but from internal moral rot and corruption.
The economic model of the Empire of Rome was based on the plunder of conquered territories. As the empire expanded, it installed remote military garrisons to maintain control and increasingly relied on foreign mercenaries to man those garrisons.
In the process of military expansionism the peasantry, the heart of the empire, became impoverished. Small farmers were bankrupted and forced to flee to Rome to attempt a living as proletarians, wage laborers. They had no voting rights or other citizen rights. In the eyes of the rich, they were simply the ‘mob’ that could be bought, manipulated, and directed to attack an opponent; they were the ‘demos,’ the masses, the public. Roman ‘democracy’ was all about mass manipulation in the service of empire.
The government of Imperial Rome didn’t have a proper budget system. They too squandered resources maintaining the empire while itself producing little of value. When the spoils from conquered territories were no longer enough to cover expenses, they turned to higher taxes, shifting the burden of the immense military structure onto the citizenry. Higher taxes forced many more small farmers to let their land go barren. To distract its citizens from the worsening conditions, the Roman ruling oligarch politicians handed out free wheat to the poor and entertained them with circuses, chariot races, throwing Christians to the lions and other entertainments, the notorious “bread and circuses” strategy of keeping unrest at bay.
The next fundamental change that mortally wounded the Roman Empire was the shift from a draft army made up of citizen farmer soldiers to one of paid professional career soldiers as the ever-more distant wars became more unpopular. It was not unlike what took place in America in the years after the Vietnam War when President Nixon abolished the draft in favor of an “all volunteer” Army, after the popular anti-war protest became a threat to the future agendas of the military.
As conditions for Roman soldiers in faraway wars became more onerous, more incentives were needed to staff the legions. Limiting of military service to citizens was dropped and Roman citizenship could be won in exchange for military service, not unlike what is taking place now as immigrant youth are being promised US citizenship if they risk their lives for America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.
The revelation of a $6.5 trillion Army bookkeeping disaster is but a symptom. A Presidential race pitting Democrat Hillary Clinton against Republican Donald Trump is but a symptom. A nation that spends on wars everywhere in the world while ignoring its domestic infrastructure decay whose proper rehabilitation would cost an estimated $3.6 trillion, merely half of what the US Army cannot account for is, sadly, destined to collapse. Unless of course the American people get disgusted with the Sodom and Gomorrah that today is Washington, and begin to act outside the matrix.
R
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