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The Official Paracast Political Thread! — Part Four

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The words coming out of Moscow in the hours and days after the US intervention might sound harsh, but they are mild compared with the sort of language that might have been used. Who says what is also significant. The strongest condemnation came not from President Putin or his foreign minister, but from the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, and defence officials. Vladimir Putin himself has sounded quite clinical and comparatively measured.

This is telling given the potentially negative effects specifically for Russia from the US action, beyond the immediate damage to the capability of its Syrian ally. These effects could be much more than meets the eye.
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Why Trump’s missiles are shaking Putin’s home front | Mary Dejevsky
 
marduk said:
Putin has wanted out from Syria for some time.

His pipeline is secure. He has no reason to be there any more. Now he will declare that Syria is Trumps problem and do what economic oligarchs do best: manipulate markets and politics.
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The Russian pipelines were never under direct threat. They are no where near Syria.

Pipe-0a_zps45aa7c5f.jpg


The issue is that Qatar to the south of Syria wants to put its own pipeline in through Syria to sell cheaper gas to Russia's current customers, Germany, France etc

Recently Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum International have made a $10 Billion deal that allows Exxon Mobil to sell natural gas through a port in Texas to the UK and Mediterranean markets. Qatar stands to make a lot of money and the only thing standing in the way of their aspirations is Syria.It’s about the rivalry between competing gas pipeline projects – one that has been proposed to take gas from Quatar to Europe – via Syria and Turkey.

The funds from the Gulf states together with the influx of arms and ammunition have helped reinvigorate the rebellion against the Assad regime, which only a few weeks ago seemed on the point of collapse.
Are the opposition fighters really authentic opponents of the regime in Damascus fighting to free Syria from Assad’s rule? Or are they simply mercenaries lured to fight by the prospect of payment?
It’s a question the Western media largely fails to address: how authentic is the “Syrian opposition” movement when so many outside parties – the U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – are involved?
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Saudi Arabia and Qatar funding Syrian rebels

The Case Against Qatar
 
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UN watchdog confirms mustard gas attack in Syria
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons says child was probably killed by mustard gas in August during fighting between jihadi's and rebels.

UN watchdog confirms mustard gas attack in Syria


Its a bad look when US backed militants fighting to secure its financial interests gas and kill children, Confirmed by a UN watchdog. But no proof is given for the pretext that justified bombing Syrian Govt infrastructure.

Addressing parliamentarians on Thursday, Erdem showed a copy of the criminal case number 2013/120 that was opened by the General Prosecutor’s Office in the city of Adana in southern Turkey.

The investigation revealed that a number of Turkish citizens took part in negotiations with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) representatives on the supply of sarin gas. Pointing to evidence cited in the criminal case, he said that wiretapped phone conversations proved that an Al-Qaeda militant, Hayyam Kasap, acquired sarin.

“These are all detected. There are phone recordings of this shipment like ‘don’t worry about the border, we’ll take care of it’ and we also see the bureaucracy is being used,” continued Erdem.
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Chemical Agent Sarin Smuggled From Turkey To ISIS In Syria –...
 
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marduk said:
Sorry I should have said proposed pipeline.

Specifically, this one:
Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline - Wikipedia
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Yes that's the Iranian one.
That's why the Iranians are putting boots on the ground in support of Assad. Qatar is funding militants with the aim of getting its pipeline through, Iran is providing direct military force to ensure its the one who gets the Syrian concessions.
Russia isn't happy about the Iran deal, but its the lessor of two evils from its pov. Qatar has a massive LNG stock, Its the biggest producer in the world and could easily undercut Russian prices with cheaper gas.

But as your link says

Syria's rationale for rejecting the Qatar proposal was said to be "to protect the interests of [its] Russian ally, which is Europe's top supplier of natural gas
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Russia doesnt want either of these competitors anywhere near its customers, but Iran is less of a threat than Qatar. So Iran and Russia will continue to fight for Assad to stop the Qatar proposal.

Why would Qatar want to become involved in Syria where they have little invested? A map reveals that the kingdom is a geographic prisoner in a small enclave on the Persian Gulf coast.
It relies upon the export of LNG, because it is restricted by Saudi Arabia from building pipelines to distant markets. In 2009, the proposal of a pipeline to Europe through Saudi Arabia and Turkey to the Nabucco pipeline was considered, but Saudi Arabia that is angered by its smaller and much louder brother has blocked any overland expansion.
Already the largest LNG producer, Qatar will not increase the production of LNG. The market is becoming glutted with eight new facilities in Australia coming online between 2014 and 2020.
A saturated North American gas market and a far more competitive Asian market leaves only Europe. The discovery in 2009 of a new gas field near Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Syria opened new possibilities to bypass the Saudi Barrier and to secure a new source of income. Pipelines are in place already in Turkey to receive the gas. Only Al-Assad is in the way.



Qatar along with the Turks would like to remove Al-Assad
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Mystery Sponsor Of Weapons And Money To Syrian Mercenary "Rebels" Revealed | Zero Hedge

It gets even more twisted as you dig down. The Qataris are supporting one band of rebels with the hope they can install them in power in Syria and thus get their pipeline through. The Saudis are backing another group with the aim of installing them so they can at least control the flow of gas, because they fear if Qatar can flood Europe with cheap gas, that will effect their Oil prices. Both countrys are desperate to install their own puppets to further their interests. Europe would be happy to see Assad gone because they want the cheaper gas. And the US china and Australia all have vested interests in this too.

In hindsight i think Assad should have cosied up to Qatar and ditched Russia. Turkey would have gotten its cut and would be an ally rather than an enemy.

What an unholy mess. Iran has its military in there. Russia has its there, Saudi has its proxy troops as does Qatar. And of course Syria has its forces. On top of that AL-Queda and IS are in there like vultures hoping to pick the carcass. Turkey is involved as well. and then we have the US and its coalition including Australia's military in there as well. Is it any wonder we've seen the refugee crisis to beat all refugee crisis's ?. The place is getting torn apart.
 
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Published on Apr 6, 2017
These horrific images of human suffering are the kind that start wars. The US and its allies are adamant to blame Assad for it. But why would he go and shoot himself in the foot like this? Especially days after the US declared they were no longer set on removing him from power. A sarin gas attack on a Damascus suburb back in 2013 almost triggered an international intervention. Assad surrendered his entire chemical and biological arsenal to avoid it. Syria claims their airstrikes hit a rebel chemical weapons facility, releasing the gas. Then there’s also this: In 2013, the Turkish press reported that police had caught al-Qaeda-affiliates on the Syrian border with sarin and / or the chemicals needed to produce it. The same group is known to have stolen around 200 tons of chlorine gas from a government chemical plant in Aleppo back in 2012. The UN even confirmed in 2014 that two cylinders seized from the opposition by the Syrian Army contained sarin. Some experts claim the rebels don’t have the capabilities to make chemical weapons themselves, but sarin has been developed and used by terrorists in the past. In the mid 90s, a Japanese cult produced the nerve agent themselves in a makeshift factory and used it to kill over 20 people on the Tokyo subway. With world leaders rushing to escalate the war in Syria again, why aren’t we taking time to fully investigate this tragedy?
 
Assad is a power mad wing nut who will hold onto his situational power like a boy in high school will claim that his dick is the biggest ever and he's had sex with a million hot girls and totally not a virgin.

They're quite common in the region, I'm told.
 
I want to say that some of Trump's supporters are waking up and realizing that he's nothing but a windbag.

Meantime, Democrats and Republicans have reached a proper bipartisan deal on the budget resolution:

Democrats confident they can block Trump’s agenda after spending-bill win

This is how negotiations are supposed to work. Each side gets something. Republicans get an increase in the defense budget and border protection, Democrats get continued finding of Planned Parenthood, the Affordable Act and other programs that were endangered by Trump.

Indeed, Trump was essentially irrelevant in how this played out. Too bad there will be no effort to actually look for waste in defense spending. Imagine how many poor people would be fed and otherwise helped by a fraction of the money thrown at military contractors for wasted projects.
 
[IMO: This well written, insightful article sums up our dysfunctional times perfectly —chris]

Reign of idiots

Article HERE:

By Chris Hedges/nationofchange.org

Ubu_Trump_590.jpg


The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles and impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy. There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.

The idiots know only one word – “more.” They are unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds where they eat chocolate cake and order missile strikes. They see the state as a projection of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Wilhelmine, Pahlavi and Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were law.

Donald Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality – a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac. He wields armies and fleets against the wretched of the earth, blithely ignores the catastrophic human misery caused by global warming, pillages on behalf of global oligarchs and at night sits slack-jawed in front of a television set before opening his “beautiful” Twitter account. He is our version of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers, the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back the potion that would give him eternal life, and a decayed Russian royalty that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as their nation was decimated by war and revolution brewed in the streets.

This moment in history marks the end of a long, sad tale of greed and murder by the white races. It is inevitable that for the final show we vomited a grotesque figure like Trump. Europeans and Americans have spent five centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting and polluting the earth in the name of human progress. They used their technological superiority to create the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone and anything, especially indigenous cultures, that stood in their way. They stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and resources. They believed that this orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. They do not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. But even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to break free from our evolutionary past....

REST OF ARTICLE HERE:
 
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