Global Economic Crisis

A mythology surrounds the man who has been President or Prime Minister of the Russian Federation for the past sixteen years, particularly among a clique of sycophants in Western Europe and the United States. This Putin myth, embellished by the Kremlin’s international television propaganda arm “Russia Today,” has convinced some that Mr. Putin is much smarter and more thoughtful in his long-term thinking than his peers in the West. My question to those who still believe in the Putin myth of infallibility is this: why did the Russian president recently decide on sending his armed forces to Syria to participate in that sad country’s interminable and ever more bloody civil war?

Not even the Russian president bothers to deny that Russia is establishing a forward operating base adjacent to the Syrian port of Latakia. The evidence is so overwhelming in an age of Internet access to satellite photography, why refute the obvious? Putin does offer a rationalization of sorts; the Kremlin, so says the Russian president, has decided to join the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS. In reality, with Russia’s Syrian ally (and Iran’s puppet) Basher al-Assad on the ropes , President Putin has made a strategic decision to join with the Iranian Shiite theocracy and its Hezbollah proxy to continue to wage war on Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, primarily to save a long-time client from total collapse.

If Putin is as smart and savvy as his fans in the West maintain, why has he not learned from America’s failed overseas intervention in Iraq, not to mention Vietnam? Then there is the example closer to home, the Russian geopolitical disaster of a quarter of a century ago; the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. If an army of 150,000 soldiers backed by massive airpower could not defeat the Islamist fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan, what calculus leads the Kremlin to believe that the much weaker Russia of today can have anything but a temporary and localized impact on the horrendous Syrian Civil War?

It appears that prestige, and a desire not to lose Russia’s version of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba–the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria– are the basis of the deployment of Russian military assets to Latakia. Whatever the short-term benefits are for Assad and his Alawite minority regime, the long-term impact for Russia will be brutally punishing. The appalling Russian experience in Afghanistan should have informed Russia’s decision makers of the dangerous path they have embarked upon.

When Iran deployed its Hezbollah militia, paid mercenaries and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria in the earlier stages of the Syrian Civil War, there were predictions outside the Middle East that this marked an irredeemable turn in the tide of battle in favor of Assad. A much more knowledgeable observer, the Beirut-based Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri, warned that Iran’s intervention in the Syrian Civil war would only inflame sectarian passions, leading to a regional Sunni-Shiite conflict. That predication had been vindicated in all its horror. Now Putin is doubling-down on the hell that he and his Iranian ally have contributed towards creating. Russia, which today has only a fraction of the military capability of the former Soviet Union, cannot achieve victory for Assad. However, as with Iran’s intervention in Syria, Vladimir Putin will succeed in galvanizing hatred towards his nation, unleashing a jihad against the Kremlin that will not only involve evermore fighters from the Sunni Arab world joining in a holy war against Russia’s invasion of the Arab world. In all probability, the festering discontent within Russia’s own borders among a disaffected and increasingly militant Muslim minority in regions such as Chechnya will be exacerbated. In the early years of Putin’s rule, Russia was subjected to a wave of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Russian civilians, all attributed to unrest in Chechnya. That is but a harbinger of what will come, a predictable bloodbath on Russia’s own soil as blowback for Mr. Putin’s ill-fated attempt to show he can militarily intervene in the Muslim world without incurring the consequences his Soviet-era predecessors experienced over Afghanistan.

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As Syria continues its descent into a hellish self-destruction, its barbaric civil war is being frequently compared to the equally brutal Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, which served as a prologue to the Second World War. It is said that history may not repeat itself, but it often rhythms. If that is so, then rhythmic parallels must be drawn to the probable chemical warfare attack  within  the Damascus Governate of Syria on the outskirts of the capital city, targeting the Ghoutaregion, currently in the hands of anti-Assad rebels.

During the Spanish Civil War an episode occurred that seemed so barbaric, even by the already ruthless standards of that horrific internal conflict, that the conscience of the world was briefly (ever so briefly) aroused. On April 27, 1937 an air raid was conducted on the town of Guernica, located in the heart of the Basque countryside. The attack was unleashed by foreign military elements allied with General Francisco Franco, head of the Spanish fascist forces, seeking to overthrow the elected Republican government in Spain. Planes from the Condor Legion,  an air force contingent sent by Nazi Germany, assisted by bombers from the air force of Fascist Italy, leveled Guernica to the ground, in the process slaughtering hundreds of defenseless civilians. The dead men, women and children of Guernica inspired the great expressionist painter Pablo Picasso to immortalize the carnage within that broken Basque town in his iconic painting, “Guernica.”

The outrage did not last long. When the Spanish Civil War first erupted, the rationale exercised by the major democratic countries for non-intervention was that active assistance they might provide to the Spanish Republic would encourage  Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to intervene in Spain on the side of Franco. When the two totalitarian nations did send massive military contingents to fight actively in Spain in support of Franco, in the absence of Western aid the Soviet Union and a force of largely communist volunteers known as the International Brigades entered the fray on the side of the elected government in Spain. That provided another excuse for non-intervention by the democratic countries; actively helping the democratic government in Spain, flawed as it was, would aid international communism, so argued the politicians and pundits of the day. We know what followed; Spain fell and the forces of totalitarianism, encouraged by the passivity of the democratic world, unleashed a world war of conquest.

In Syria, the absence of meaningful Western aid when the Free Syrian Army began its valiant struggle against the oppressive rule of the Basher Assad dictatorship led to a void which became increasingly filled by Jihadi radicals flowing into Syria from aboard. That in turn added further justification  for Western inaction. Meanwhile, the totalitarian regime in Iran began its direct intervention in the Syrian Civil War on the side of Assad, employing both its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanese Shiite proxy, the Hezbollah militia.

The apparent chemical warfare attack on the environs of Damascus by Assad’s forced involving a form of nerve agent on August 21, 2013 may have killed more than a thousand non-combatants, including hundreds of children. The videos that have emerged from the hell that is now the Ghouta regionsear the conscience of humanity; who cannot be moved by the sight of small children convulsing in agony before their torment ends with a death that seems a merciful release?

If after a brief interlude of moral outrage and verbal condemnation the international community resumes its indifference towards the escalating atrocities in Syria, it may find itself confronting the same insidious evil, on a much large scale, as much of the world discovered after its silence over the horror that was Guernica.

Ghoutaon the outskirts of Damascus is the Guernica of 2013. We ignore its lessons-and its consequences-at our peril.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

YouTube

Hillary Clinton Nude

Hillary Clinton Nude

YouTube

HILLARY CLINTON NUDE

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.

In the year 680 AD, a military engagement  occurred in the town of Karbala, in present-day Iraq. The forces of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of Islam’s prophet, were defeated by the army of the ruling Umayyad caliph. Hussein was beheaded, and approximately 150 men on both sides died. Based strictly on military casualties,  the Battle of Karbala would be viewed by historians as a mere skirmish. However, the importance of a battle cannot be measured strictly by an accountant’s ledger of losses inflicted and incurred. In terms of its long-term  strategic significance, the Battle for Karbala  must be ranked as one of the most consequential in recorded history, for it created the seismic divide in the Islamic world between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and the for the past 13 centuries the internecine struggle persists as to the correct and legitimate line of succession beginning with the Prophet Muhammad.

The followers who mourn Hussein, his bother Hasan  and father Ali as the first Imams, and martyrs of the true path of succession in Islam, have come to be known as the Shia, a large minority branch in the Islamic world that has been in perpetual theological conflict with the majority within the Muslim world, the Sunnis.  This internal strife within Islam that has endured for more than a millennium sets the context for the fearsome bloodletting occurring in Syria.

In a uniquely insightful column published in Lebanon’s English language newspaper, The Daily Star, entitled “Qusair Portends Great Danger Ahead,” Beirut-based Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri  points out that the victory in that devastated Syrian town for President Assad is in a larger sense a defeat, for it was only with the massive intervention of the Iranian backed and controlled Shiite militia based in Lebanon , Hezbollah, that a triumph could be claimed over heaps of rubble in a once predominantly Sunni populated city.

In response to the destruction of Qusair, prominent Sunni theologians throughout the Arab and broader Muslim world are calling on their faithful to flock to Syria to fight a new Jihad, not against the Western world or Israel, but in opposition to what is being described as a Iranian Shiite plot to dominate the Middle East. Those sentiments are being echoed by renewed sectarian violence in Iraq, and continuing Sunni-Shiite conflict in Pakistan.

Khouri writes with prescient eloquence, “The Hezbollah-Syria-Lebanon dynamic now also feeds into the newest regional problem arena: deteriorating Sunni-Shiite relations across the Middle East, including increasing incidents of outright ethnic cleansing, bombings, and intense provocations that started after President George W. Bush and Prime MinisterTony BlairinvadedIraqand turned it into the first modern Arab battleground of Sunni-Shiite mutual demonization and death. “

Now, a decade after the beginning of the first modern Sunni-Shiite civil war  that resulted from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria has become the center of gravity in a regional sectarian bloodbath  that displays every indication that it will get far more bloody, with no end in sight to the carnage, as the rest of the world lulls itself into believing that it can be mere spectators to frightful instability that will  likely not confine its ruinous impact to the Middle East.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

YouTube

Hillary Clinton Nude

Hillary Clinton Nude

YouTube

HILLARY CLINTON NUDE

WALL STREET KILLS--A CHILLING NOVEL ABOUT WALL STREET GREED GONE MAD

To view the official trailer YouTube video for “Wall Street Kills,” click image below:

Wall Street Kills-Official Trailer

In a world dominated by high finance, how far would Wall Streetgo in search of profits? In Sheldon Filger’s terrifying novel about money, sex and murder, Wall Street has no limits. “Wall Street Kills” is the ultimate thriller about greed gone mad. Read “Wall Street Kills” and blow your mind.