If you have been trusting the mainstream media to help you understand what-the-heck just happened in Syria, forget it. They are never going to tell you the truth. Doing so would blow a narrative that they have been helping to spread for decades.
Here’s the situation. Vladimir Putin will not allow western business interests to control the largest national land mass on the planet, that being Mother Russia, unless the planet blows up first. After that, hey, they can have it. Those same business interests seized control of the US Government several decades ago, their ability to maintain control cemented into place by the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. McCain-Feingold, enacted in 2002, allows corporations to contribute unlimited funds to PACs and SuperPACs, legal entities created under the act, and which effectively operate as middlemen in a campaign donation money-laundering scheme.
Money buys elections. Western business interests have all the money they need for that purpose. With few exceptions, the McCain-Feingold scheme allows US business interests to select our DC representatives and senators. Legislators who do not do as they are told, will soon be replaced by those who will. That’s how this works. The late George Carlin aptly described those interests, as a “Big Club,” to which you and I do not belong.
Those who truly control the US Government, at least until Trump, they being “Big Club” international business interests, do not like Vladimir Putin, and for no other reason than they cannot control him, or Russia, and therefore cannot seize Russia’s strategic resources without trading real value for them. Putin sees his job as protecting Russia against all seeking to destroy its government, steal its national resources and make Russia a virtual colonial property of a worldwide corporate consortium, as are most other countries in the world.
That consortium goes by several names. Carlin called it the “Big Club.” Some call it the “New World Order.” Some, rather use the term, “Liberal World Order.” Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Dmitry Lavrov, along with China and others seeking to operate outside of the Big Club’s arbitrary international rules, reference this very real association of western corporate interests as the “Rules-Based International Order.”
Donald Trump calls the resulting US political order, acting as the Big Club’s representatives in Washington DC, the DC “Swamp.” Others call that association of Big Club representatives in the US Government, the “Deep State.”
For several decades, political actors representing the Rules-Based International Order, or choose your term, have advocated the ultimate takeover of what can be considered no less than the entire planet, to include Mother Russia, using US military-industrial might, and the people’s tax dollars, to underwrite the effort. What I describe is a privately-owned and operated system of one-world governance. Donald Trump emerged last decade largely combating that effort and purposed to restore the constitutional order of the American republic, which if successful would hand the US Government back to the American people, wresting control from the so-called, Big Club. Below, Trump exhorts supporters to aid in that effort and “never surrender.” Surrendering would mean the American republic would find itself unrecoverable.
Importantly, however, the swamp learned long ago against using US military personnel to accomplish their military objectives. In Vietnam, they witnessed that the American people would quickly lose interest in foreign military ventures with their sons and daughters dying for no apparent American national interests, only business interests.
The Big Club soon recognized that the American people will much more likely tolerate the use of proxy states, such as Ukraine, and proxy fighters, mercenaries hired and equipped to war against whomever the Big Club wants to destroy next, than to send their own loved ones to die in foreign lands. While Americans certainly notice their own children either MIA, or KIA in lands faraway, they hardly notice it when their tax dollars are used to accomplish that same goal.
Local US Representative Rich McCormick has expressed willingness to use hard-earned US tax dollars to purchase various high-priced weapons systems to blow up and kill people in Ukraine, while at the same time expressing unwillingness to send his own sons to fight in that war, one which involves no real American national interests.
Ukraine, a Natural Gas Conduit Between Russia and Europe
Prior to Ukraine being destroyed by nearly three year war with Russia, that nation had been known as “Europe’s breadbasket.” Across its farmlands stretched numerous enormous natural gas pipelines, the nation becoming a veritable conduit for Russian gas to be transported in trade between Russia and Europe. Europe is not blessed with natural gas of its own, certainly not enough to service the needs of its people and a growing industrial base. Europe has therefore depended on Russia for its energy for many years, a situation repugnant to Big Club sensibilities.
As the Russia-Ukraine war broke out and US sanctions intensified, Putin countered, declared a policy in which “unfriendly nations” would have to pay for Russian gas using Russian currency, the “ruble.” No more dollars or Euros would Russia ingest in exchange for natural gas.
Putin, however, left open a trading window at Gazprombank to exchange dollars and euros, at a highly favorable exchange rate for the rubles necessary to purchase Russian gas. In essence, Putin charged unfriendly nations a premium to buy natural gas. Most recently, however, due to the latest round of economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, at this point Russia will no longer take dollars and euros, even through the Gazprombank window. To purchase Russian gas, Europe must now obtain rubles from sources outside of Russia, causing, for example, the nations of Europe to scramble for the Russian currency as the depths of winter approach. Putin’s maneuver leverages the value of Russian rubles on the international market.
Wealthy business interests calling the shots determining US policy, do not care what US policy toward Russia does to energy-consuming Europeans. Members of the Big Club do not care whether Europeans heat their homes during the winter. They do not care whether local European businesses remain open. The Big Club only wants one thing, to hurt Russia and diminish its power, both militarialy and economically.
When western business and financial interests cannot create dollars out of thin air, and trade them for what they want, they use them to buy politicians instead, politicians, maybe such as Representative McCormick, for example, legislators on whom they can count to vote for the US Government to borrow those same dollars, and use them to purchase more and more and more weapons, purposed to blow up and break more and more and more things, such as it takes to maintain the killing fields in Ukraine in a US proxy war against Russia.
Western business interests believe that if they blow up and break enough things, including as many Russian lives as possible, they can weaken Russia, and ultimately force Putin to acede to western demands, the Big Club’s final purpose being to force Russia to give up resistance and allow their country to be absorbed into the western “rule-based order,” just as Syria was last week.
That is not going to happen, at least until the circumstances might radically change. Short of Russia surrendering to western authority, the Big Club will attempt to replace Putin with one of its puppets, an individual who will do what they say, just like they did during the CIA regime-change operation in Ukraine a decade ago, an event which began a downhill slide toward the war presently playing out in the former European breadbasket.
Why Syria Is So Important, the Qatari Pipeline
Notice where Qatar is, way down at the bottom. Qatar, although a tiny emirate, possesses the third largest natural gas reserves in the world, after Russia and Iran. Qatar would like to sell its gas to Europe, and would agree to sell it in exchange for Wall Street dollars, except Qatar has no economical way to transport its product to Europe. Russia can sell and transport gas to Europe much cheaper than Qatar, even figuring the inflated cost of rubles to the “unfriendly countries” of Europe.
The problem for Qatar and the western business interests who control the gas-rich state is two-fold. First, the land mass of Iraq is positioned directly in the way of a Qatari pipeline. Iraq will not allow one to cross its territory. Weakened by more than two decades of fighting, Iraq now finds itself under the dominating political influence of Iran. Iran has no interest in allowing a Qatari gas pipeline through Iraq to Europe, making things easier for its major competitor.
Until recently, Iran held the same influence, allying with Russia, over Syria. Syria’s leader, Bashar Assad had blocked a Qatari pipeline from cutting through its sovereign territory for many decades. All that time, the ability to prevent Qatari gas from being piped directly to the European energy market through a Syrian roadblock has been the glue maintaining a strategic reliance between Russia, Iran and Assad’s Syria. Now, however, because of the fall of the Assad regime, Assad’s influence to block a Qatari pipeline, is effectively over, and so is the Russia-Syria-Iran alliance.
Assad’s commitment to block a Qatari pipeline has provided the motivation for Putin to commit Russian military assets to help protect the Assad regime all these years. Once a Qatari pipeline might become operational, Europe will no longer need Russian gas. It’s that simple. So Putin has been keeping Assad in power for the last decade largely to block the natural gas pipeline, which if built would severely, adversely affect vital Russian economic and strategic interests.
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