First, the background. When the United States abandoned the Iran agreement, that left Turkey’s oil imports adrift due to newly imposed US Treasury sanctions on Iranian oil exports. By December 2018, Turkey was forced to look elsewhere for its oil imports with Libya being the most logical choice by price and proximity, despite the violence there. Misrata rebels allied with Libya Dawn in charge of Libya’s largest free trade port, arranged oil exports from Zawiya and Sirte to Italy* and Turkey,...

The claim that Major General Qassem Soleimani was a “terrorist” on a mission to carry out an “imminent” attack that would kill hundreds of Americans turned out to be a lie, so why should one believe anything else relating to recent developments in Iran and Iraq? To be sure, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 departing from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport on the morning of January 8th with 176 passengers and crew on board was shot down by Iranian air defenses, something...

Donald Trump once bragged about the total demolition of Islamic State. Today, thanks to his and previous presidents’ policies, IS is making a dangerous comeback. Now, even staunch American supporters are ringing alarm bells. King Abdullah’s concern  In a stark warning, Jordan’s King Abdullah told French reporters that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) is regrouping and is on the rise in the Middle East. The reason for this resurgence is simple: the manifestation of the political division that...

The Donald Trump administration is ramping up its information war against Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. And it has enlisted social media platforms as weapons in its assault on these top regime-change targets. In the first two weeks of January, Twitter suspended dozens of accounts run by real, live people — not bots — in Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. Those erased from the website included heads of state, numerous state institutions, media outlets, and many average people who do not work for their...

Pentagon officials are assuring Americans that the Pentagon’s recent assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani will make Americans safer. There is at least one big problem with that formulation, one that, unfortunately, many Americans still don’t recognize. That problem is this: the power of assassination wielded by the Pentagon and the CIA extends to American citizens. Why is that a problem? Because there is no way to reconcile a government’s power to assassinate its own citizens...

You may think “fake news” is a fairly recent development made possible by the internet and social media. But a little over 100 years ago President Woodrow Wilson created an official fake news agency to persuade the American people to support the United States entry into WWI. But first a little perspective on what drove Wilson’s unorthodox methods. Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States in 1912. Politically, he was a novice having only served two years as governor of New...

The government which runs a globe-spanning empire led by a reality TV host keeps talking about the lack of normality in the nation of Iran. “What we want all countries to join in,” said State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus in a recent Fox News interview, “is to help us not only to de-escalate any tensions with Iran, but to help us bring Iran to a place where they are ready to stop their terrorist and malign behavior, and where they are ready to discuss with the United States, with...

President Trump’s decision earlier this month to assassinate Iran’s top military general on Iraqi soil – over the objection of the Iraqi government – has damaged the US relationship with its “ally” Iraq and set the region on the brink of war. Iran’s measured response – a few missiles fired on an Iraqi base after advance warning was given – is the only reason the US is not mired in another Middle East war.Trump said his decision to assassinate Gen. Qassim Soleimani was intended to prevent a...

What ever happened to Iraq? Is it not an independent country with a democratic government thanks to the 2003 US invasion? So says Washington. The murder of senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani suddenly shone a strobe light on ‘independent’ Iraq, and what we saw was not pretty. Welcome to the new Imperialism 101. Iraq’s population is estimated around 39 million. The pre-war Iraq of 2003 was broken into three parts by the US-British invasion: the Shia majority; Kurds in the north;...

When emotion rules the day facts do not matter. Sadly, that is the reality we confront when it comes to talking about Iran and terrorism. The US Government and almost all of the media continue to declare that Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism. That is not true. That is a lie. I realize that calling this assertion a lie opens me to accusations of being an apologist for Iran. But simply look at the facts. Here is the most recent US State Department claim about Iran and terrorism: Iran...

Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was assassinated by a US drone air strike, at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). Soleimani was traveling with one Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was an Iraqi, born and bred. Al-Muhandis was even elected to the Iraqi Parliament, in 2005, until the US intervened. (Yes, we intervene in other nations’ elections.) Iraq’s caretaker prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, was furious, denouncing “What happened [as] a political assassination.” Unanimously,...

American polling firm Gallup has found that Afghans are the saddest people on earth, finding that nearly nine in ten respondents are “suffering,” in their own words, with zero percent claiming that they are currently “thriving.” When asked to rate their life out of a score of ten, Afghans gave an average answer of 2.7, a record low for any country studied. Worse still, when asked to predict the quality of their life in five years, the average answer was even lower: 2.3. As the study mentioned,...

Russian leader Vladimir Putin made a surprise Christmas visit to Syria, where he met with the country's president, Bashar Assad. The tranquility of their meeting was in sharp contrast to the hell breaking out in neighboring Iraq. The unannounced visit to Syria, where Putin also delivered a Christmas address to Russian forces deployed in that nation, was remarkable. Any visit by a national leader to a foreign war zone is, in and of itself, notable, and let there be no doubt – Syria is an active...