Last Days of Pompey
Last Days of Pompey
by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.
What follows here will surely surprise my loyal readers, who expect detailed argumentation and are not put off by 3,000 or even 5,000 words to get to a conclusion. For the same reason, detractors who complain of my long-winded style may take heart.
However that may be, I do not offer a bed-time story today but a shock to the system.
The overriding issue of war or peace, survival of mankind or its utter destruction, is now being decided in Washington and NYC without so much as a ‘by your leave’ for the rest of us.
Will Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dunford prevail in warning Trump against any action that will bring a kinetic response from the world’s other nuclear super power. Or will ‘Mad Dog’ Secretary of Defense Matthis win out in pressing Donald Trump to test the Russians’ bluff on their red lines in Syria? Will the US launch missiles against Damascus or against Iran, as I suggested yesterday as an alternative scenario? Or will it support Poroshenko in launching a massive attack on Donetsk, as the Russians appear to expect judging by their just putting their entire military on war alert?
Donald Trump has announced very clearly that he will be authorizing some kind of retribution to the CIA-faked chemical attack in Douma, Eastern Goutha in the coming 24 to 48 hours.
So, here we are at Judgment Day, and there surely will not be one soul out on Pennsylvania Avenue to raise an anti-war placard. The tattered remains of the American peace movement is rotten to the core. Even Daniel Ellsberg has been suckered into joining the buffoon Noam Chomsky in a cake-walk demo in NYC under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee, once the paragon of pacificism and today just another social action group promoting racial equality. Uncle Joe Gerson sent out invitations to participate in that theater of the absurd last night.
The anti-war movement was a Leftist movement, and we all know where the Left is today, along with the Progressives. In denial and Russia-bashing.
To anyone watching the UN Security Council "debate" last night it is crystal clear we are in the last days before all hell breaks out. The wall of mutual contempt between Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya and US Ambassador Nikki Haley was on full display. Nebenzya took to pieces the entire argumentation of the US side regarding Douma and the ‘chemical attack.’ He detailed the rebel caches of chemical weapons and equipment for their manufacture that Russian troops have found in recently liberated territory of Eastern Ghouta and elsewhere. He spoke about the past provocations of faked chemical attacks including the one used to justify the US cruise missile launches on the Syrian air base at Sheirat a year ago. He linked the US training and support for terrorists in fabrication of chemical arms to the faked nerve agent attack on the Skripals in the UK, which he described as a vaudeville act. He heaped scorn on Haley for her denying Russia the status of “friend,” saying that the US has no friends, only sycophants, whereas Russia has genuine friends, and seeks nothing more in relations with the United States than civilized discourse. In response to this unprecedented denunciation of the USA and its policies of global hegemony, we heard from Nikki Haley the familiar story of how the UN Security Council could now either adopt a US resolution condemning the Assad regime, in effect, or admit its total irrelevance while the US continued on its own unilateral path to resolving the Syrian question.
So, ladies and gents, open the champagne. Last days of Pompey? I was just there last week and I saw the future, not the past.
© Gilbert Doctorow, 2018
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Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review http://theduran.com/does-the-united-states-have-a-future-a-new-book-by-gilbert-doctorow-review/ For a video of the book presentation made at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. on 7 December 2017 see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciW4yod8upg
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsmVhwRVcQQ and:
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