Portside

Poor King Abdullah II of Jordan was forced to host Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, the world’s biggest Christian Zionist, who positively exulted about turning all of Jerusalem over to Israel’s far right government headed by Binyamin Netanyahu.

Presidential action needed when 3.4 million Americans are living without electricity, 40% of them without potable water, and hundreds of thousands without shelter. When some 80% of its agricultural crops were wiped out. This is an apocalyptic scenario. We can't even know what is going on very much because there is no wifi most places. Some entire towns haven't been heard from! But this President tweets about football players who protest racism.

It turns out . . . the real threat to the Homeland did not come from fringe radicals in the Middle East. Americans are more likely to be struck by lighting or fall down in their bathtubs and fatally hit their heads than they are ever to be negatively affected by Middle Eastern terrorism. Where did the real threat come from? From toxic carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

The attack in Manchester was likely by Sunni radicals (ISIL has claimed it), and came two days after President Trump blamed all terrorism on Shiite Iran at a speech in Saudi Arabia, the proponent of a form of extreme Sunni supremacism. In 1996, Manchester had also been victimized by a bomb at a civillian center; in that instance left by the Provisional IRA. The question is: can anything be learned from looking at 1996 and 2017 in the same historical frame?

Bad Dictators are arguably Bad, and some are war criminals. But Washington tends to deal with the pro-American dictators by just not bringing them up much.

Torture is an excellent way to be trolled by a seasoned operative, with potentially disastrous consequences, as Iraq showed

For Baghdadi to call his band of human traffickers, rapists, drug smugglers, and looters the “Islamic State” is rather like a Mexican drug cartel adopting the moniker “the Vatican,” and our adopting that term thereafter (“The Vatican kidnapped 30 people today”) when reporting on its violence. Journalists would resist such linguistic coercion in the case of Catholics; they should resist it in the case of Muslims as well.

So Obama wants al-Assad to stand down as a prerequisite for effective US action against Daesh in Syria (a few air sorties and even fewer air strikes are ineffectual). Putin thinks al-Assad is key to defeating Daesh and that everyone should ally with Damascus. Putin is blind to the ways that al-Assad and his military brutality is prolonging the civil war. Backing his genocidal policies will just perpetuate that war.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was given repeated access to millions of Americans to talk trash about the deal over the weekend and to make mostly false allegations about its contours. What does he want? Netanyahu wants to keep Iran poor and undeveloped. He wants to make sure that “crippling” sanctions aren’t lifted. He wants to keep Iranians in grinding poverty.

What would a war with Iran cost?