The attempted coup in Venezuela looks like it might be the brainchild of Zalmay Khalilzad, now back in the American jihad driver’s seat. ZKh’s counterinsurgency thoughts in The Envoy about Iran fit the bill.
Stick with soft power
“Washington,” he writes boldly, “had a contradictory policy on Iran. It spoke loudly against Iran, and it refused to talk with Iranians.” He was frustrated as ambassador to Iraq 2004-7, alert to the instability that the US occupation had caused, the horrendous deaths from the defection to the rebels of fired Iraqi army soldiers/ officers.
The humiliated soldiers were pushed into the hands of the hastily founded Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) by the US after disbanding the Iraqi Army. There had been no al-Qaeda before the invasion. The US created it, whether by bungling (or to play the devil, Israeli-style).
Suddenly President Trump’s no longer the fool, the dupe of his generals. His latest, historic tweets are bombshells. “Getting out of Syria was no surprise. I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer. Russia, Iran, and Syria & others are the local enemy of ISIS” and the US was “doing there [sic] work.”
In “How a just peace in Palestine-Israel can save our planet”,* Beit Zatoun director Robert Massoud stressed that the UN’s failure to deal with its first major crisis, the establishment of Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, seriously compromised it as a forum for international relations and world peace. Seventy years later, the UN is still impotent in the face of imperialism, and the Palestine issue is still, literally, burning. Among its atrocities, Israel uses white phosphorus--WP, know affectionately by WWII soldiers as Willie Pete--against Palestinians. Israel is not alone, as (US-made) WP is used by Saudi Arabia in its bombing in Yemen, and somebody is using it in Syria and it ain't Assad.
