Author: Eric Margolis

To date, 62 Palestinians have been shot dead in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army and over 5,500 wounded by gunfire.  Their crime: protesting the loss of their ancestral homes in the West Bank. Here was an example of Gandhi-style passive resistance that failed.  Israeli sniper teams just fired at will at the protestors, some of who were throwing rocks or firing sling shots.  High concentration tear gas was dumped by drones on the demonstrators.  Israel claimed it was killing ‘terrorists.’ The United States, Israel’s patron and financier, reveled in the move of its embassy from Tel Aviv to … Continue reading →

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It’s got to be either one of the stupidest acts that I can recall or a very wicked plan by Washington neocons to sabotage Korean peace talks. How else to describe the decision by Big Brother USA and junior sidekick South Korea to stage major air force exercises on North Korea’s border.  The prickly North Koreans had a fit, of course, as always when the US flexes its muscles on their borders.  Continuing South and North Korean peace talks scheduled this week were cancelled by the furious North Koreans.  The much ballyhooed Singapore summit between US President Donald Trump and … Continue reading →

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Israel launched waves of air attacks and ground shelling on a score of alleged Iranian military positions in Syria this week.   Was this a big step forward in the plan by Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally Donald Trump to provoke a major war with Iran? It certainly looks so.  The US, Saudi Arabia and Israel all recently suffered a stinging defeat in Syria. Their campaign to overthrow the Assad government in Damascus by using the rag-tag ISIS movement, then Sunni Muslim jihadist wild men, was defeated by the Syrian Army, backed by Russian air power, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and some … Continue reading →

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‘Chutzpah’ is a wonderful Yiddish word that means outrageous nerve, or unmitigated gall. This week’s Chutzpah Award goes to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Standing in front of props of data files and cd’s, Netanyahu claimed Israel’s renowned Mossad spy agency had stolen a small mountain of secret Iranian nuclear data from a warehouse in Tehran. The never-understated Netanyahu claimed that the purloined material proved that Iran was lying about having halted its covert nuclear program and must not be trusted. Netanyahu’s supposed nuclear bombshell was likely the warm-up act for President Donald Trump to reject Iran’s nuclear freeze deal … Continue reading →

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France likes to call itself America’s oldest and closest ally.  Indeed, the American Revolution might never have succeeded without strong French military support. However, France bankrupted itself supporting the American Revolution.  This, in turn, helped ignite the French Revolution that cost poor King Louis XVI his head.    The United States twice intervened in Europe’s wars to rescue France, amply repaying the debt.  As US General ‘Blackjack’ Pershing nobly proclaimed on the arrival of US troops in France in World War I, ‘Lafayette, we are here.’ This past week, France’s new, young, president, Emmanuel Macron, came to Washington to give guidance … Continue reading →

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Butcher of Damascus. Gasser of children. Baby Killer of Syria. Tool of Moscow. Cruel despot. Monster. These are all names the western media and politicians routinely heap on Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.  He has now become the top Mideast villain, the man we love to hate. As a veteran Mideast watcher, I find all this hard to swallow.  Compared to other brutal Mideast leaders, Assad is pretty weak tea. The US/British propaganda effort to paint Assad in blackest colors is having a difficult time. Mideast leaders who toe the US line and make nice to Israel are invariably called ‘statesmen’ … Continue reading →

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Behind President Donald Trump’s bluster and threats over Syria, powerful forces are pushing the US towards war with Russia and Syria: the neocons and the military industrial complex. For a candidate who once proposed a normal relationship with Russia, just peace in the Mideast, and an end to America’s foreign wars Donald Trump is now hurtling towards a full-scale war with Russia and a new disaster in the Mideast.  Not since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis has the danger of nuclear war seemed to close. While Trump fulminates about the alleged use of toxic gas in Syria, US B-1 and … Continue reading →

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There was something refreshing about watching former French president Nicholas Sarkozy being interrogated in a French jail.   Particularly since he may soon be accused of conspiracy in the murder of my old friend, Col. Muammar Khadaffi of Libya. Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Guéant, are being investigated for secretly accepting at least fifty million Euros from Khadaffi for his 2007 electoral campaign.  Such a payment violated France’s maximum permissible limit for political donation, not to mention a ban on foreign financing of candidates and failure to report the payments.  Sarko also faces investigation over secret payments from … Continue reading →

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`We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great-power competition – not terrorism – is now the primary focus of US national security.’  Henceforth Russia and China will be America’s main enemies, with Iran and North Korea thrown in for good measure. So declared US Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, last week in a statement of profound importance for the world. For the past seventeen years, the US military has been laying waste to the Muslim world in the faux `war on terrorism.’  Afghanistan, Iraq, much of Syria, Somalia, Pakistan – all have been heavily bombed. US B-52’s … Continue reading →

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A gathering of rich oil Arabs pledged $30 billion this week at a meeting in Kuwait to start rebuilding war-shattered Iraq.  Sounds nice but these kinds of conclaves are notorious for offering big but delivering little. The event was billed as helping Iraq repair war damage caused by ISIS.  In fact, most of the damage from that short-lived conflict was caused by US bombing and a few Russian air strikes.   ISIS, as this column has long been crying in the wilderness, was largely a paper tiger confected by the US, Britain and France to justify their military re-entry into Syria. … Continue reading →

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Considering that a nuclear conflict over North Korea appeared imminent in recent weeks, the winter Olympics at Pyeongchang, South Korea, is a most welcome distraction – and might even deter a major war on the peninsula. The highlight of the games was the arrival of Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-un. This was the first time a member of North Korea’s ruling Kim dynasty had come to South Korea. Her handshake with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in was a historic and welcome moment. So too the planned joint marches by North and South Korean athletes … Continue reading →

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Last summer, I was positioned just across the border from the Syrian town of Afrin around which Turkish and Kurdish and, possibly, American forces, are now poised for a head-on clash.  It seems crazy to me that anyone would want to fight over this one-donkey farm town.  We were there on a mission to rescue wild animals trapped in a zoo in war-torn Aleppo, Syria. Why on earth are at least 2,000 US troops mixed up in this fracas in darkest Syria?  Because the pro-Israel neocons in Washington, who pretty much run US foreign policy these days, are determined to … Continue reading →

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While we agonize over such life and death questions as clumsy men groping women and the crucial need for gender and racial ‘inclusion,’ let me spare a few seconds thought to something really important and scary:  Russia’s doomsday nuclear torpedo. Codenamed by NATO ‘Kanyon,’  it’s reportedly something new and terrifying, a ‘third strike’ weapon designed to obliterate the US east and west coasts in a nuclear war.   US intelligence seems to think this doomsday weapon is very real indeed. I just re-watched for the umpteenth time the wonderful, 1964 Kubrick film, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and marveled anew at how prescient this … Continue reading →

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Henry Kissinger rightly noted that it’s often more dangerous being an ally of the United States than its enemy.  The latest victim of this sad truism is Pakistan, a loyal ally of the US since the dawn of our era. President Donald Trump’s visceral hatred of Muslims (never mind what kind, or why, or where) erupted this week as he ordered some $900 million in US aid to Pakistan to be abruptly cut off.  Trump accused Pakistan of lying and deceiving the US and providing a safe haven to Afghan resistance forces of Taliban (`terrorists’ in US speak) battling American … Continue reading →

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Listen to the state-‘guided’ US media this past week and you’d believe a series of spontaneous anti-government protests broke out across Iran.  The protests, according to President Donald Trump and his Israeli allies, were caused by `anger over Iran’s spending billions on wars in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon and helping the Palestinian movement Hamas.’ Trump tweeted that Iranians were finally rising up against what he called their hated, brutal regime. Talk about manufactured news.  Most Iranians were elated and proud of their nation’s role in thwarting US plans to occupy much of Syria and overthrow the government of President Bashar … Continue reading →

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