Russia v Ukraine: Day 1

   

Obviously, I am working on an article on the origin, lead up and implications of this war. But for now, I'll just give some updates on what is likely happening. Due to the Fog of War, mass propaganda in Western nations and by Russia itself, it is impossible to verify most information. However, there is no doubt that Russia will win this war, the only question is how much resistance the Ukrainians are prepared to mount. Russia is targeting military installations at the moment, has achieved air superiority and the attack is not limited to the Donbass but Kiev also (which means everything east of the Dnieper but possibly all of Ukraine.

   It is quite clear that NATO will do nothing militarily to stop this.

Probable Russian gains after Day One.

 The following assessment is by Strelkov Igor Ivanovich, who is a Russian Army artillery officer who has fought in Ukraine and is an expert. Obviously. This information is to be taken with a grain of salt.  (Italics are mine)

1) Southern Offensive: Russian Armed Forces launched an offensive north from the Crimean isthmuses, supporting it with a naval landing near Genichesk and tactical helicopter landings on Kherson and Novaya Kakhovka. The AFU front collapsed and allowed the Russians to break through into open ground, reaching the lower course of the river Dnieper. (This would be a significant advance, but I would be amazed if the Russians had made the crossing as shown in the map) The river crossing has been reached and bridgeheads have been created on the east bank for further advancement Attempts by Ukrainian General Ukrov to rally troops and create a front were thwarted by air strikes. By nightfall. Russian troops reached outskirts of Melitopol from the south (probable). 

The prospects:

It seems the main strike groups at night and tomorrow will continue their offensive along both banks of the Dnieper to the north - to Zapororzhye and Dnepropetrovsk and also thrust westerly - to Nikolaev and in the northeast - the rear of the Ukrainian army defending the Donbass. (This all sounds perfectly reasonable as far as Russian planning goes. The main Ukrainian force of 60,000 men is located here and encirclement may lead to a quick surrender and less loss of life. Again, get out your saltshaker)

2) Donetsk Frontal attack: The fighting here is "emphatically "chilling" in nature. (I presume this is a Russian's way of saying that the Ukrainians are putting up stiff resistance and inflicting casualties on the Russians here.) A limited offensive on Volnovakha is designed to pose a threat to Mariupol (in fact, its capture now has no strategic significance, since it will almost certainly surrender when troops from the 1st theater reach Berdyansk and Zaporozhye (speculation), but more importantly, a breakthrough here will allow a rapid advance to link up with the Crimean forces rapidly advancing from the west. This threat will prevent the Ukrainian forces from releasing troops that would otherwise be thrown at the advancing "Crimean front". (This is logical but again, impossible to confirm if these Russian objectives are being achieved. However, it does indicate that the Russians do intend encirclement of the main Ukrainian Army and cutting it off from Kiev.)

    Similarly, attacks from the territory of Luhansk to the north (through the Seversky Donets), which have no strategic prospects look the same, their task is to bind the Ukrainian Forces and prevent them from being sent north to blockade and defend Kharkov. (Kharkov being a major Russian speaking city and the site a a very bloody battle v the Germans in WWII. This also confirms the Russians, if we didn't already know it, to take everything east of the Dnieper) And also to detain them until the "big cauldron" to the west closes somewhere in the Dnepropetrovsk area. According to the fierceness of the fighting and losses, this is the bloodiest direction right now (this is undoubtedly an admission of significant losses on both sides) since the enemy is defending a deep-echeloned and fortified strip where its most combat ready and experienced units are located (another admission of probable significant Russian casualties). Tomorrow, the fighting will continue with the main task: not to all the enemy to remove or transfer and unit to the west (i.e. thus preventing encirclement).

Chernihiv region top center.

3) The third strategic theater: the front from the northern part of the LPR to the Chernihiv region. The greatest success was achieved in what was assumed to be the least promising theater, the northern sector, where the Ukrainian Army either did not intend to defend at all or had insufficient forces. Sumy, Konotop, almost the entire Sumy region have been taken with no resistance. There is some progress in the Chernihiv region. It is assumed the Ukrainian Army will put up stiff resistance with "chilling battles" here (another tacit admission the Russians are experiencing difficulty here which is logical as this would delay any advance on the capital Kiev). 

    The main reserves are concentrated here. At the same time, the deeper Russian troops advance, the stubbornly resistance around Kharkov falls into "operational shadow" (an interesting term), which was expecting a strike and is well equipped with well-trained troops. In turn, Russian Federation troops cannot advance and leave Kharkov and Chuguev not taken to the rear (an honest admission) both for logistical reasons and "left alone" Ukrainian troops may try to deliver counter strikes to the flank and rear of the units advancing on Kiev and may even strike into Russia itself which does not pose any military danger but is unacceptable for political reasons. (I find this a remarkable admission and makes the account all the more plausible strategic wise although all gains are to be again treated as "possible" only). Therefore, fierce battles will continue tomorrow in the Kharkov Region with the aim of speedy capture of the city. (I find it highly optimistic for the Russians to capture a city the size of Kharkov if it has significant Ukrainian troops entrenched in the city. This is where I could see a large civilian body count although the Russians will be reluctant to bomb it or use artillery on a city that was Russian 31 years ago and is full of ethnic Russians)

    In further news it is generally being reported by mainstream news that the Russians have captured Chernobyl (lol) and Pripyat which must be like a game of Stalker. Pripyat two has been taken. The significance of this besides the radiation is that puts a medium sized force 100 miles north of Kiev. All airports have been bombed or been subject to missile attack.

   One thing I cannot confirm as of this writing is the airborne assault on Kiev airport. It seems like it was attempted but is a tough hold for light infantry. Both sides are claiming victory here, so the truth is somewhere in the middle. If the Russians have made the gains as depicted in map 1, then much will depend on the speed and availability of pushing in reserves which will be needed to secure the territory captured.

   It seems the Russians are playing a somewhat risky gambit here which involves encircling the main Ukrainian army fronted at Luhansk and Donetsk and capturing Kiev (a huge psychological target for both sides). The Russians are counting on a capture of Kiev resulting in mass surrender of the Ukranian troops. The Azov divisions probably will not surrender as if they are captured the Russians will probably mass execute them (de Nazification) as Putin put it in his speech just two days ago.

   This is certainly the most interesting war in my lifetime but most definitely, this war is a decisive turn in the global order and sets a new course for the 21st century.

Afghanistan: The necessary defeat?

Your tax dollars at work.

   Who won this war? The longest war the US has ever fought on paper (20 years). It even beats out Vietnam for long drawn out attrition against an enemy, despite modern weaponry, against an enemy that resisted defeat. For the Taliban 'resist' is the operative word. Hide. Use forbidding terrain. Manipulate the local population. It was a very Viet Cong and NVA strategy and it somehow worked in the rocky moonscape desert of Afghanistan just as successfully as the jungles of South East Asia. All that 5th generation drone tech, satellite surveillance, state of the the art air support did not win the war for US forces.

   And now the retreat is humiliating not because The United States military displays weakness to its enemies but because the US has now demonstrated weakness to its friends. A defeat and a surrender (which in good faith Trump signed in February in 2020 in Doha) was at least an end to conflict. A conflict that could not be won. Biden tore it up.

  Yet this is not a red v blue situation. The US government is a monolith. Voting is a nice idea for the plebs but if it ever changed anything then they'd... do something else so long as it was saleable as "freedom". And when there is only one opinion you fall into a black hole of opinion...

• A) Because the cost of such a victory was too high for the attacking force.
• B) There was no support from the indigenous population.
• C) In warfare, time is as valuable as weaponry, and if your side has time and no weaponry, you wait. 

   Probably with an agenda in mind, the craven US media accidently  conducted a recent interview with a Taliban spokesman. One look in his eyes and you could see that this person was a high IQ individual and the US interviewer a mere shill for AP and Reuters news wires. But his answers and demeanor spoke volumes for those with eyes to see.

  

That look in his eyes when Bin Laden was mentioned.

  What he knows and the world knows is that Bin Laden was a CIA Asset working with the CIA and the Mujahedeen against the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan is the 1980s. He was their boy. Like Colonel Trautman in First Blood, the local police in the hick town didn't know what they were dealing with. In warfare, I'm a big believer in leaving people the fuck alone. Even if they treat their women like shit and throw gays off whatever their version of the Tarpeian Rock is; at the end of the day, it's none of the West's business. I'm sorry you were born in a shithole but sometimes, you've got to play the hand you get dealt.

Bin Laden was a CIA asset. This is known.

  How it became the West's business was in the wake of 9/11 when US neocons were given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted is interesting. And boy, did they want a lot. Here we are twenty years later and still watching a shit show that should have ended by January 2002 after a few million tonnes of B-52 payload. But it didn't happen that way. The opium trade was just too juicy for black ops cash. Next time you're in the ER after breaking your arm watching Porn Hub, just know that pain shot came from the miserable moonscape of Afghanistan. And yet 2 trillion dollars later and 4000 US soldiers lost and who knows how many Afghan's dead, what has been gained? The problem with fighting in "the gravetard of empires" is that it continues to be, no matter how much tech you throw at it, a graveyard of empires. The Russians tried it in the 1980s and left with a very bloody nose that soon later lead to collapse of the USSR. The British tried it and failed as Kipling said not so eloquently in a poem more than one hundred years ago...

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
   An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
      Go, go, go like a soldier,


         But really that's not the point anymore is it? You can read this opinion in just about every US 
newspaper op-ed piece in the country. If there were a real media apparatus in the US, or in fact, if there
a media apparatus at all anywhere in what's left of Western Civilization, there would be honest reporting 
on what is really happening in the world. My favorite line of bullshit was the complete failure to evacuate
Kabul and Bagram Airbase. I'm no fan of authorities left or right but Trump did at least project a kind of 
will to power. Not that he understands Nietzsche or anything so profound but through his mouth and 
narcissism, through his bravado naivety and hard capitalism, he was willing to make a deal. And as 
simplistic as it sounds, he made that deal. 

     Trump was always an idiot and accidental genius at the same time. He was a type of phenomenon 
that divided the US so spectacularly that the audience lost a view of the big picture. And for all his failings,
he did make a deal. A deal with the enemy. And deals are how wars end. Of course the newspapers went 
insane but fortunately nobody reads them anymore.

   Either way, the new geriatric in chief tore it all up.

   Not because it was bad but because the orange man had negotiated it. I am no fan of either but you know 
what I am a fan of? 

   Pragmatism.

  Watching the politicians holding and passing the bag for the whole debacle is probably worth a cable TV
subscription but I've endured enough CNN in airport bars to last a lifetime. So I'll stick to clips on
YouTube. And by god were they selling the general public a narrative. After the truck bomb and by the 
sudden entrance of Player 3, named ISIS K you knew US foreign policy had fully decoupled from reality.
The new enemy sounded like a Covid Variant in keeping with the Zeitgeist and was so stage managed that
any thinking person was reaching for the drinks cabinet even if they didn't have one.

   Just imagine if you're the Taliban sitting back and watching America via satellite TV. They are not even 
laughing because humor requires a degree or irony and tact. Major Steuber in the following vid means the
 US tried to "nation build" but it local reality's could never be overcome. Especially the kid fucking.



Google fu has hit this link. Drag the timer to 23:55 to meet Major Steuber.


Do I have to quote Sun Tzu here? Maybe I do.

Country in which there are precipitous cliffs with torrents running between,
deep natural hollows, confined places, tangled thickets, quagmires and crevasses,
should be left with all possible speed and no approach. 




      The real question is, what's next geopolitically now that the US has lost Afghanistan and Bagram AFB 
which was there ostensibly to threaten Iran? There is the obvious loss of international prestige but not a loss
of military dominance. But, the Taliban have proven just like the Viet Cong before them, that disparate 
forces armed with small arms, RPGs and roadside bombs can win. 

   All you need is intent, balls and patience.

  China has already made a deal with the Taliban. (Not officially but you know it is in place).

  Their belt and road initiative (with the evacuation of the Americans) just opened a fresh square on the 
chessboard that they will fill or have already filled. The Chinese aim is to recreate the Silk Road 
(the most profitable trade route in history) but this time with two lane highways in each direction and 
high speed rail.

   We're talking something US military planners have feared for at least a century.

Never fight a land war in Asia...


   The unity of the European and Asian (and African) landmass in one continuous travel route.

   When China's belt and road initiative is complete, you'll be able to drive from Paris to Beijing so long as
 you've got enough meth to stay awake. And this highlights the difference between US and China's foreign 
policy. The Chinese are mercantile. They see the world as a transaction. If they want a road through 
Afghanistan, they're just going to pay the Taliban 20 billion dollars not to fuck with it. The US could make the 
same deal but their home population would riot for making a deal with the bad guys who make women
wash dishes and throw gays off mountains. The Chinese don't give a fuck so long as they get their road. The
US, on the other hand, is zip tied by "democracy".

   And because of this, the US and the Europeans who spawned it, are in decline.

   The belt and road initiative makes the US an island on the fringe of a world economy where dollar
hegemony is gone. The question is, "is this the necessary defeat" to set US foreign strategic policy on a new 
realpolitick based track? Just by the blow back alone the US public, both left and right, are so against the 
idea of foreign desert excursions, or foreign intervention of any kind, that it leaves neocons and hawks
in a tough position as far as their geopolitical aims are concerned. Does it mean a step backward for
 Western power in terms a force projection? Are we entering the multi polar world beyond the dual
superpower paradigm that lasted until 1990 and, for the last thirty years has been a litany of made up bad
 guys, amorphous terrorists somewhere in a desert and dictators that don't like Israel and ISIS "K".

   For this writer, this black eye to US force projection, inflicted by goat herders in a formidable land is a
defeat no matter how you frame it. The question now is... what happens next?

   And just like the insanity of the last 18 months, like most, I have no answer. 

   Usually I can sift through the geopolitical bullshit and spot the shot. But this time, I got nothing.
   
   All I got is that Afghanistan is not the loss of American Empire but it is a major breach in the wall.

The Virus: It is not the Sickness you should be afraid of. It is the Cure.

   I ended my last post on this blog on December 22, 2019 with the following paragraph.

   "What we're confronted with now as a species is an overpopulated world, approaching 8 billion with mass flora and fauna extinction. And none of it is global warming or a globalist funded war against the environment Greta Thunberg can win.

    The darkest dark for this writer about war is that conflict itself may not kill us.The darkest dark is that someday soon this planet's biosphere combined with species extinction and bio weapons may finally have enough of us. And that is a war and battle even Alexander the Great could not win."

    And now here we are four months later.

    I am not the type to say I told you so, I just got "lucky" on the timing.

    I am not so worried about the virus. Sure, it's a highly contagious flu, virulent for certain demographics and fatal for an unknown segment of the population for reasons we haven't discovered yet. What I am afraid of is the hysteria, tenuous supply chains of global commerce, the thin thread by which supermarkets stock shelves, the fact that oil is now cheaper than Evian water and the world wide geopolitical implications of that. Futures markets, commodities, Forex markets all in free fall. Yet the effects of all this are still months away.

   What we're dealing with immediately is basically medical martial law in all western countries. If I had suggested this a year ago you would have laughed at me. No, our technological phantasmagoria, our science, our first world medical infrastructure and our smart phones would make such things impossible outside an alien invasion.

   Well, we have been invaded by aliens.

   It's just the aliens are very very small.

   And they've changed the world. And our perception of the world. Isn't it funny and morbidly cruel that if you run a slow collapse (the archetypal boil a frog slowly analogy), people will adjust and not see what is on obvious display. All you have to do is tell them new words and reframe them. This is how I imagine they persuaded a million men to die on the Somme.

In the mean time we've got the US government printing 10 TRILLION dollars to try to keep the system afloat. That's Weimar Germany levels of money printing or as the Feds like to call it now "quantitative easing". But this time on crack. In 2008, they printed 7 billion dollars to rescue the banks from bad mortgage loans so they could keep the Iraq war costs off the balance sheets. But ten trillion is not a number that can be absorbed into an economy without inflation.

 I have no doubt this virus will dissipate. The masks I see everyone wearing will go away despite their placebo reassuring useless effect. If someone coughs in your face, the virus droplets go straight into your body though your eyeballs. The masks, the hand washing, the social isolation, the six feet rule may have some minor benefit; but it is not their purpose.

  The purpose of these rules is fear.

  And people living in fear are malleable, impressionable and open to any authority that can deliver them from fear. This is not to say the virus is not real and that there is no reason for fear. This is to say that no government, monarchy, ruler or tyrant ever let a good crisis go to waste.

             Over 80,000 Americans Died of Flu Last Winter 2018, Highest Toll in Year. 
Among the dead were 180 babies and teenagers, more than in any year since the C.D.C. began tracking pediatric deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/health/flu-deaths-vaccine.html

  I am not minimizing this disease. It's essential you understand this to understand my point. For those who have had loved ones been affected by this there are no words that I can type to beguile you from your grief.

   But now to the darkness.

   The aftermath. When we're all "healed" and the fear is over and we can all literally breath again.

   This aftermath is the new world we will be entering and anyone who thinks it will be unchanged is a fool. In this author's opinion, this out break and the mass media reaction to it is the most significant human action since WWII. Not because of the death toll. Which will be small compared to war. Anyone who studies military history and conflict knows life is cheap. But the death toll is never the issue is it? Only when it impacts the outcome. No, we're talking bigger things here and now, greater than any single man or group of men. We are positing the future course of human history itself post virus.We are talking a post war environment.

   We are never going back to a world pre 2020.

  All those music festivals you loved, or stadiums you filled and all those random strangers you banged at the cruise ship bar after a five minute conversation over a Gin and Tonic; well that's all gone for the next 5 years. Why? Because the authorities will say so. Because it's "dangerous" and poses an immunity risk. Of course it'll all be presented as a protection measure to serve in your best interest.

    No one will hold a gun to your head and say no.

   Instead, you'll be subject to a multitude of new laws that will seem reasonable but in time be realized  as Draconian when the "fear" has passed. Just the way the Patriot Act was passed to protect us from "terror" post 9/11 and is now used to arrest citizens without due process or even warrants; post Covid-19 world will require proof of vaccination to obtain basic government services like a passport, or drivers license or state benefits.

   The Corona World order has arrived.

   And just like the Patriot Act, it's never going away. But unlike the Patriot Act it's going to be instituted worldwide not just in the US. Welcome to the new normal. This is the dystopia humanity chose.Orwell said we would be forced into a police state via force. Huxley said we would be lulled into a police state via pleasure. It seems neither were right. Both authors couldn't have imagined a populace so dumbed down by TV and information overload, that they'd sleep walk into their own prison cell and call it freedom.

   The next question is will they get rid of cash?

   Conveniently, they have been wanting to do this for years. They say the virus can spread on paper. So let's switch to digital money, RFID chips and an endless record of what you buy and sell. Once every transaction is digital, every purchase can be traced to you and if you fuck up according to the rules of the rulers, they'll turn off your money at the flick of a switch and there will be no paper stuffed under your mattress to save you.

   But never mind that, in my ten years of writing about war, geopolitics and man's inhumanity to man I have never witnessed something like this. Mass population control, fear, distrust, loneliness, the old and the weak affected most and a cynical elite barely able to hold it together.

 Now I understand the destruction of Libya and Syria. It was done by mediocre men dressed in suits  put in front of cameras to deliver the orders of those you will never see.

   I have no fear of the virus.

   But I am terrified of the societal cure they will concoct.

   Stay safe my friends and ride the tiger. He cannot bite you while you grip his back.

   Hold Fast!

The Syrian Civil War is Over: Now welcome to the 2020s. The decade of decline in the West and the rise of the East.

"They created a desert and called it victory."

That's easily my favorite quote from antiquity. It's by the Roman writer Tacitus quoting a defeated general at the hands of the legions 2000 years ago. And look how nothing has changed. The point being that even when you win the war, often you lose the things you fought for. Nothing has changed in the modern war fighting environment. Many times all that's left is rubble and sand. And because nukes are in play, there's a limit to how much of the desert the big players can take. Back in the day, you could marshal superior forces and take what could be taken. Land, resources, cities. Alexander did it. Caesar did it. Khan did it. The strong will take from the weak and that is the truth of warfare going all the way back to the Stone Age tribe when those with the longest spears ran off their rivals from the nearest watering hole.

Of course it's harder to do that these days because plutonium packs a bigger punch.

So proxy wars it must be.

And surely Syria is the nexus of all proxy wars. It was the necessary domino to fall before Iran, the ultimate target of all of this Middle Eastern mess. Syria had to be tackled on the march to Mesopotamian hegemony. With the US/Israeli/Saudi failure to topple Assad, the Middle East has been tossed into disarray like has never been before. Assad held on because those who could obviously see an aggressive move played against him by foreign forces became his allies and rushed to his defense. Not because those allies are the good guys but precisely because those forces that came to his defense know that nobody is.

Who are the good or bad guys in any war?

That's for the victors to write.

For now, all nations act in self interest. Like they have done for all time.

Russia could not allow Damascus to fall and lose their Mediterranean naval base at Tartus. More importantly, they could not allow a natural gas pipeline from the Persian Gulf through Syria to the Mediterranean which would kill their whole pipeline to the EU that will bring in billions a month from Germany to everywhere in the EU where it gets cold... (meaning all of it in winter). So, to protect Nord Stream 2, Russia equipped Damascus with the means to defend itself. That has resulted in the world's third most defended airspace thanks to Russian S-200 S-300, Pantsir S-1 and a lot more other toys the Russians have provided secretly. The Israelis are testing these defenses every night with drones and US provided stealth F -35s. They've been getting a 50% attrition rate on drone strikes launches  and they did lose a pilot already when they tried the low level ground hugging under radar fighter attack probably with late generation F-16s. There are rumors that the Russians are deploying their latest S-500 system as a test bed around Damascus which they hope to sell to Turkey and possibly China. The hype says it can detect stealth aircraft; it's proven that it can shoot down LEO satellites (a must for future WWIII) and it's an all around monster AA  system to compliment the S-400 platform which is more concerned with local (250km) ranged targets.

But none of this military tech porn is really the point is it?

Damascus. Before the fall.

The geopolitical failure of Syria to fall to the "Arab Spring" was a major blow to Western neoliberal power. Was the Arab Spring ever real or just a psy-op? To question it is almost a conspiracy theory. "Conspiracy theory" these days meaning anything not on TV and something you watched on a YouTube channel that has been strangely banned off the platform for spouting crazy talk. In Roman and Medieval times the town loony was left to his own devices because everyone knew he spouted crazy talk. Locking up the town loony and silencing him meant he was hovering somewhere over the target. By this action, leaders do not win victory over truth. For those with eyes to see, by their imprisonment of the town loony; they reveal the truth of his argument.

The Western powers and their compliant states in Arabia broadcast the "Arab Spring" and 'freedom' on satellite television to the Arabs (who all have satellite dishes these days) and quietly under-reported the massacre in Tripoli and dismembered Gaddafi just before they called it victory. In fact, they stopped calling it anything once the result of the action in Libya found its way to its present state which is open air slave markets and a population terrified to go to the store for food lest they be targeted by roving marauders in Toyotas with opiate addicted lunatics manning 20mm cannon from a truck bed. Of course, this has all disappeared down the Western media memory hole quicker than a billionaire who ran a child fucking ring on a private island and recorded world leaders and influencers doing the same; for leverage and blackmail.

We live in a fucked up reality.

But it's been this way for a while now. Since WWII we've had 70 years of not total death; just acceptable continuous low level death that most people can live with. As the whole "Arab Spring" narrative went south, it became harder and harder to say who the good guys were. 

2000 years ago, Tacitus would have laughed and cried.

Violence is the main motive force in history; once you unleash it, he would say be careful. Killing changes things. From teenage shooters to world leaders, killing is what gets things done. The difference between Bush/Obama/Trump or similar world leaders and some disenfranchised school shooter is not the body count. The state can kill a million in Iraq; the other at best killed fifty. Yet it's never a matter of degree; it's a matter of how you define what murder is when you hold the power.

They admitted it before they even 
did it.

When you hold power, you get to say who gets killed.

Syria is a wasteland now but Assad is still there. Let's face it, it's a major achievement that he held on. If Assad were a soccer team, he'd be Jamaica winning the World Cup. Anyone left today who thinks ISIS were some kind of organic Sunni Arab people's movement has been watching too much corporate news media. Yes, ISIS were a bunch of lowlife drug addicted thugs funded by "front corporations". The conquest of Libya made its Mediterranean ports ripe for weapons exportation to Syria on ships with zero manifest and no obligation to report. In other words, a captured square on a world chess board. All of that Arab Spring stuff was media fog to keep the consumerist masses placated and continue buying shit. And worse still, they got to feel their governments were "good" and doing their best to fix the chaos in the desert.

The lies today abound and the media is in league with power. Its job of questioning it is over.

The riches of Araby (oil, natural gas, fell into the fists of the elite while European and American populations looked the other way not because they did not care but because they had no say in the matter. Democracy today has become a word repeated through media to make populations feel they have a say when they do not. Yet blood leaves a stain and even when you're not directly responsible for the bomb; you paid the taxes and your politicians have used your labor and twisted the blade so none of our hands can be clean. They did it in your name.

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

Libya is history now. War has a habit of memory holing even the most egregious acts. Especially these days. We all remember WWI. But who remembers Sudan?. Ask the average person and they couldn't point Sudan out on a map and yet two million died and where was the outrage? The 2020s will be more of the same but the decline of the West to police it and the rise of the East, China, not to give a fuck as they ruthlessly extract resources from Africa to South America. (More on that in Part II). 

Syria

"I like the desert... because it is clean"  T.E Lawrence.

   Assad has won this war.

  And that is quite a thing for a mild mannered eye doctor never groomed by his father to rule.  But he didn't really win did he? Syria isn't really even a country in the modern sense. It was just an offshoot of the post WWI Sykes-Picot agreement. And that's been the problem since 1916. It's a piece of desert foreign powers get to play with. And once the Arab Spring happened all bets were off and Syria became the next bull's eye for Western avarice.

   It was low hanging fruit and the nexus of oil and gas pipeline routes.

   The only thing that stood in the way was Assad.

   When Libya evaporated and Gaddafi melted so easily on your TV screen, the French, the British, the US and with the tacit approval of the EU, all saw Syria was ripe to fall. Through shell corporations and dodgy warehouses, a wrecked, bombed and failed state like Libya would be the perfect place along the Mediterranean to ship some state of the art weaponry (TOW wire guided anti tank missiles) perfect for taking out Assad's tanks. Such an easy shipping point without oversight once you've created a failed state. And Libya today is surely a failed state if you consider open air slave markets as an example of anything failed. For a million dollars a pop, which is peanuts for state actors who print the paper in the first place; you can buy or transport anything.

  Yes, the darkness is that dark.

As much as war and the casualties of it are damaging; staging suffering is almost worse than the real thing.
It's calculated to create more.

The Wikileaks Hillary Clinton email leaks prove all this to be true. That's why Assange will be in jail forever. He lifted the lid on the cauldron and showed everyone the fire inside. So all those ISIS beheading videos they blurred on network TV but not on Liveleak were supposed to tell you who the bad guys were. And we believed it in 2016. Hell, they even gave an Oscar to some guys called the White Helmets supposedly helping children out of the big bad Syrian rubble. Oh yeah, and then there was the "gas". US and European media pushed the gas angle because in the European psyche gas is bad because Auschwitz. 

    I know war and many veterans of it and I can I promise you an artillery barrage kills more people via ball bearings travelling at Mach 5 then a dissipating cloud of gas ever can. WWI trench lines proved this a century ago but modern audiences fall for "the gas" angle because for some reason it seems unfair. Blow my arms and legs off via bomb and let me bleed out seems fair, but suffocate me and make my lungs stop working via nerve agent is just plain unfair.

   This is the logic of Western liberal democracy. It's absurd, but it works.

   And for those who rule and make war the view is... if it works; it ain't stupid.

   Syria will attempt to rebuild now and Turkey will empty it's refugee camps now that ISIS are wrecked. The pocket of ISIS around the Idlib region will be wiped out in the spring. Going all the way back to Caesar, no one fights in winter unless they have to. And in Syria no one has to.

   The Syrian Civil War, whatever the historians or Wikipedia writes about is a lie of epic proportions in the popular imagination, but then again, isn't that all wars and most history. The victors writing the truth is a cliche but like most cliches it also happens to be true. No one who studies human conflict is standing on solid ground.

RUSSIA

Russia wiping out ISIS via air power was a no brainer from their strategic point of view but it was done so efficiently that it left Western media in a conundrum. Why couldn't we do that?NATO claimed to be doing it (fighting the bad guy ISIS "terrorists" that chopped peoples heads off on the Internet) but that was just the gore they ran on US and Euro TV so their domestic populations didn't get upset about blasting desert people. However, once Russia got involved in the air war and actually became effective killing the well supplied Toyota driving madmen (who supplied ISIS with all those brand new Toyota trucks by the way?) bad guys, Western media changed tack. Ammo dumps, staging areas, supply routes, everything a modern militia needs started falling apart via precision bombing and Assad's forces and Tiger divisions started knifing their way into the rubble taking zero prisoners. All it took was a little satellite intel, some SIGINT and ISIS began falling apart.

All of which makes you wonder. Who was funding these savages in the desert in the first place?

Russia's interest in the 2020s is to get rich via its vast oil and mineral wealth. Its arms industry too is potent. Its social problems are rife. Wealth distribution is at Victorian levels of justness and oligarchs run the country. (The West is headed in that same direction but the techno entertainment complex they've created hides it better).

Russia's aims are to contain the EU, resist NATO encroachment in Ukraine, develop weaponry that can counter US naval power and hamper US machinations as the frays develop on the post WWII Western hegemony that has endured. As the dollar weakens, Putin and the great Bear will be watching and not leaving the chessboard anytime soon.



IRAN

And here we come to the crux of the matter. The Persians.

This is the war the Israelis and Saudis fear and want. It might be unwinnable but it is sure to throw the world into chaos in the 2020s and sometimes chaos is an end in itself. Iran is a country of 82 million people, dwarfing the populations of Israel and Saudi Arabia. They control all of southern Iraq (thanks America for killing Saddam for us), they run supply lines across Syria, have ousted the Kurds from the oilfields of Kirkuk, and are in an alliance with Assad. The weapon and supply run to Hezbelloh in Lebanon is open and the trucks full of anti tank/ anti air shoulder mounted weaponry are flowing. 

If they get a nuke than theater parity will have been achieved and this is what Israel fears most of all. Mutually Assured Destruction is a wonderful thing because it makes war impossible. And this terrifies those with eyes on Iranian oil and gas and its theocratic opposition to the Western world which it sees as decadent, satanic and wrong. Try being a transgender in Iran and see what happens to your dick. 

Yes, it's not a perfect society in a liberal democracy type of way but who said the world has to be the same?. Isn't that the whole idea behind diversity? People get to live how they want even if others oppose it? Well the Saudis and Israelis certainly oppose the Iranian oil and natural gas fields. With sanctions in affect (and lets face it sanctions are just a kinder word for a blockade which last time I checked in every history book I ever read is in act of war). Cutting off a country from international trade is war. But the Persians are the bad guys because they refuse to become behest to the international banking system. SWIFT payments have been cut off, inflation is rampant and the CIA and Mossad are encouraging the kids to wear green and get themselves shot in street protests so the TV screens in Europe and the US can say Ayatollah man bad.

You know what it's all really about?

The straits of Hormuz.

The bottleneck the Iranians control by geography alone.

Forget the logistics.

Saudi Arabia, despite the billions in reciprocal petrodollars Trump and Obama has been dumping into their military, the Saudis couldn't fight their way into Yemen; goat herder territory.  Still, in war as in life, if you can't win it, you can't have it and Saudi Arabia will not have their Yemen southern oil exporting terminal unless the US comes to the rescue. And the US, quiet rightly, no longer has the stomach for it. Fracking alone has made the US self sufficient in oil. 

McCain the patriot hero https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/try-as-he-may-john-mccain-cant-shake-falsehoods-about-ties-to-isis.html

CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and the NYT are merely the US elite consensus view hand fed to you and you're job is to consume it and worse still, agree with it.

The entire US military complex is basically a taxpayer subsidy to Israel and Saudi Arabia in a reciprocal dollar cycle where Saudi Arabia swaps oil for military tech and Israel swaps... not much other than the fact that they own the US government through money power.

The whole aim is to stop an Iranian nuke.

If they get a nuke than theater parity will have been achieved and this is what Israel fears most of all. Mutually Assured Destruction is a wonderful thing because it makes war impossible. And this terrifies those with eyes on Iranian oil and gas and its theocratic opposition to the Western world which it sees as decadent, satanic and wrong.

Forget the numbers. Saudi Arabia despite the billions in reciprocal petrodollars couldn't fight their way into Yemen; goat herder territory. Who in the Saudi military has an espirit de corps when you're fighting for a paycheck so a bunch of hooded Saudi royal billionaires can fuck supermodels on yachts in Monte Carlo? The reason the whole Yemen war is happening is that the Saudi Sheiks are trying to cut their way to the ocean and bypass Hormuz which is the choke point their oil exports are constrained by Iranian proximity and power. But the Saudi's are failing miserably. Equipped with the best military tech that money can buy at some  arms dealer comic con in Jordan and Trump's idiocy, their troops keep getting wrecked by lads in the hills with AT and AA shoulder mounted weaponry (supplied by Iran via Russia and China of course).

So like all armies, the Saudis went for the soft targets, famine and children. Sure to win right?

Reality is about as real as living in a world where you believe Jeffrey Epstein hung himself in a jail cell on suicide watch. The point being, everything on TV is bullshit and it isn't even funny anymore. 

If they can kill/silence one man in a maximum security prison because he might name names ; just imagine what the can do and have done to millions  in far flung countries. What we're confronted with now as a species is an overpopulated world, approaching 8 billion with mass flora and fauna extinction. And none of it is global warming or a globalist funded war against the environment Greta Thunberg can win.

The darkest dark for this writer about war is that conflict itself may not kill us.The darkest dark is that someday soon this planet's biosphere combined with species extinction and bio weapons may finally have enough of us.

And that is a battle even Alexander the Great couldn't win.