Kill for Peace - US and EU Sanctions Deny Medicine to the Critically Ill
Michael Collins
United States and European Union sanctions against Iran prevent much needed medical care for the Iranian people. Those with cancer, for example, have lost the option of treatment through chemotherapy while hemophiliacs are at high risk for any surgery due to a denial of essential pharmaceuticals. There are 85,000 new cases of cancer every year in Iran. Those with cancer and the newly diagnosed will have to do without effective treatments. A large percentage of them will die sooner than anticipated as a result. (Image: Fergal of Calldagh)
The Iranian medical community is unable to get required medicines due to financial restrictions in the sanctions regime. The restrictions effectively blocks pharmaceutical purchases by Iranian medical facilities. No ticket, no laundry is the policy of big and little pharma throughout the world. As a result, right now -- as you read this -- innocent Iranians are dying, sentenced to death by the U.S.-E.U. sanctions.
Who on earth would initiate and sustain such a policy?
You guessed it. The Obama administration, the leaders of the NATO countries and other wannabe tough-guy nations are behind the comprehensive sanctions designed to get Iran to stop its nuclear program. Here is how tough the sanctions are. Former UN ambassador, the very right wing John Bolton, described the E.U. sanctions as "brutal."
PermalinkLest we forget, an attack on Syria is an attack on Iran and a threat to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
by chycho
United States involvement in Syria has nothing to do with a repressive regime. After all, in 2002 the United States willingly used Assad’s regime to torture Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, when they renditioned him to Syria from New York. The world was also quite grateful to Syria for accepting 1.5 million refugees created by the US invasion of Iraq, especially considering that for approximately the same period the United States had only accepted 7,000 Iraqi refugees. What’s happening in Syria is part of a bigger picture, a grand chessboard if you’d like, and what’s happening there is definitely not the end game.
More spin on Syria…
by Philip Greaves
Having followed the Guardians Middle East Live blog for a while there has been a distinct narrative forming in the support of the opposition in the Syrian civil war, one could say the support in western media has from the outset been on the side of the uprising which started with peaceful protest, brutally cracked down by the Assad regime and it’s forces it has fomented into civil war, but it is far more complicated than that. What was once perceived as the street and the people rising up against a dictator and demanding self-determination and human rights has turned into civil war with outside states and internal factions now vying for the inevitable power vacuum once Assad has gone.
Turkey Pays the Price for Supporting Regime Change in Syria
It is well known that the situation in Syria would not have reached this point if it was not for Turkey’s political and military support of the Syrian opposition.
By: Hüsnü Mahalli alakhbar english
August 9, 2012 Creative Commons
(Turkey: Running its Own Gauntlet)
Turkey has burnt all its bridges with its neighbors – Iran, Iraq, and Syria – in a bid to ride the wave of the Arab Spring. Now, Ankara fears that Kurdish separatists will come to power if Assad’s regime collapses in Syria.
Istanbul - From the onset of events in Syria, Ankara has displayed relative caution in its relationship with Tehran. But now that the government of Recep Tayyib Erdogan has joined a “Sunni front” with Arab gulf countries, Ankara is being more direct with its Shia neighbor.
Chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces Hassan Firouzabadi recently blamed Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia for the bloodshed in Syria.
The Turkish government instantly jumped to respond to Firouzabadi’s accusations, and at the same time to remarks made earlier by senior Iranian envoy and chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili while on a visit to Damascus.
First came a declaration from Erdogan, followed by a more explicit position from his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The latter accused Iran of complicity in Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s slaughter of the Syrian people.
How we know what we know about Syria
By Michael Collins
Obama administration support for Syrian rebels is based on a United Nations authorized report from November 2011. In that document, Syria is accused of committing "crimes against humanity." The report's co-author is a board member at a Washington, D.C. based think tank that just happens to have the former chairman of ExxonMobil, a consultant for the Saudi Binladin Group, and a former CIA executive on its board of directors.
Much of the U.S. and European press on the so-called civil war originates from a tiny organization in the United Kingdom called the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (the Observatory). The one man operation is run by a longtime opponent of Syrian Bashar Hafez al-Assad.
For the most part, this is how we know what we know about Syria.
Netanyahu's pretext for war - Islamic Jihad missiles
By Michael Collins
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has his pretext for an attack on Iran. He left Washington disappointed by President Obama's reluctance to saddle up for Armageddon. Now he's got the formula.
Haaretz (daily news), one of Israel's few liberal media voices, linked Gaza based missile attacks on Israel to the presence of Iranian military experts. This fits nicely into the Netanyahu strategy. Here's how Haaretz reported events:
"Iran pressured Islamic Jihad and popular resistance groups in Gaza to continue firing rockets into Israel despite cease-fire, says high-ranking Jerusalem official.
"Iranian military experts are active in the Gaza Strip and in Sinai, according to a high-ranking official in Jerusalem. The official said the Iranians entered the areas via Sudan and Egypt, and added that some of the rocket-launching systems in Gaza were manufactured under Iranian supervision." Haaretz.com, March 19
The paper went on to say how shocked members of the Israeli left were with the overall theme of the article announcing a unified Israel in support of an attack on Iran.
Of course, any attack is so crazy on so many levels, it is exhausting to comprehend. Aside from the potential collapse of the world economy and the pervasive suffering, let's focus on a sure fired reason that the United States won't green light such a move.
The turbulent 2011 at a glance
Kourosh Ziabari
2011 was a turbulent year for the world. With chained revolutions in the Arab world, mounting financial crisis in Europe and the unprecedented wave of protests and mass demonstrations in the U.S. against the corporate system of the government which has long swallowed the rights of the defenseless majority of the people voraciously, one can call 2011 the year of global unrest and tumult.
For Iran, 2011 was also a challenging year. Benefiting from the all-out backing of the Western mainstream media, the apartheid regime of Israel for several times renewed its hawkish war threats against the Islamic Republic and repeatedly used an aggressive rhetoric against the people of Iran, threatening them with various military options which the United States and certain European governments embraced willingly and enthusiastically.
Is Iran Preparing to Strike Back
By Brian M. Downing
These attacks are almost certainly directed by Israeli, Saudi, and US intelligence services. They may also be acts of war.
"This business will get out of control."
– The Hunt for Red October
In the last few years diplomatic pressures and economic sanctions have been imposed to convince Iran to allow international inspection of its nuclear research facilities. A number of states have also pursued a violent clandestine campaign of bombings and assassinations that have killed scores of Iranians, including nuclear scientists. These attacks are almost certainly directed by Israeli, Saudi, and US intelligence services. They may also be acts of war.
In recent weeks Iran has decried terrorism around the world (somewhat paradoxically, to be sure), put up a clumsy plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador, boasted of its missile strength, and briefly seized the British embassy in Tehran – an act done not by students as with the US embassy in 1979, but by toughs of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Most recently, the IRGC went on alert, ostensibly to brace for more attacks inside the country.
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