Bombing resumed as usual in eastern Ghouta – hell on earth – a day after the UN ceasefire agreement. Which is down to Assad with Putin looking increasingly on the wrong foot.
Putin leapt in to prop up Assad in 2015 and prove his muscle as global player. Now his claim of ‘victory’ in December is looking meaningless, and he’s mired in an intractable and expensive conflict from which there is no easy exit, no investment benefit to Russia and is domestically unpopular as a waste of money and men.
An ex-Syrian diplomat in exile said. ‘The only winner so far is Iran. It achieves what it wants without too much noise.’ Another commentator said: ‘alliances that were more or less predictable are now splintered and opaque. A chessboard once easy to read could now outwit a grandmaster of global geopolitics.’
Putin has an election coming up in March, which should be a foregone conclusion. But he does have tr Pluto square his Neptune on his personal chart picking up from election day and running across the second round (if there is one) and on to late May, repeating on and off till late 2019 – that is confusing, can be devastating. His 2012 Presidency chart looks bullishly confident; though sagging into April.
There are uneasy tensions in the Russia/Iran relationship charts, peaking in March/April/May. When Israel’s chart is also on high alert, repeating late in the year as well.
See previous Syria post: February 11 2018.
I’m not a great catastrorpherian or given to apocalyptic fears, but another World War fought in the Middle East, isn’t too much of a stretch given the chaos out there.
I agree with much of what RE says. The mainstream media including the once mighty Guardian are complicit in the carnage in the ME. This link to the excellent Off-Guardian explains who the delightful gentlemen we are so keen to protect in E Gouta are, and no it isnt the innocents…Our western politicians, corporate media, military industrial complex and Dr Strangelove headbanger neo cons are all in it together….
https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/26/who-are-the-us-uk-and-france-trying-to-protect-in-eastern-ghouta/
An email from RE.
With respect to you, this analysis is incorrect and damages the credibility of other analysis on this site. When the current state of Syria was established in the aftermath of WW2, the then Soviet Union signed a friendship treaty with Syria. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation continued the friendship treaty. In that context the sovereign state of Syria asked for Russian support in its fight against terrorists. As stated publicly as a matter of Russian foreign policy, Russia was extremely concerned that the fall of the Syrian Government would lead to a power vacuum in the Middle East that would facilitate the breakout out of widespread war in the Middle East and would also facilitate the spreading of Islamic extremism to its own Muslim populations and those of Islamic states in the Commonwealth of former Soviet Republics. The situation was exacerbated by the role of the USA in its attempts to break Syria as a nation and the Assad regime as a Government. The USA was playing the game of allowing ISIS enough oxygen to wear down the Syrian Government forces in the hope that the USA backed terrorists would take over in the event of the fall of the Syrian Government at the hands of ISIS. Both Turkey and the USA allowed thousands of ISIS oil tankers to take ISIS oil to Turkey to sell and to fund ISIS operations. Russia stepped in when ISIS was making military advances towards Damascus to prevent the power vacuum occurring and not out of any particular love for the Assad regime. President Putin did succeed in the Russian mission in Syria because Russian forces prevented the fall of the Syrian Government and stymied the American dream of breaking yet another sovereign state. The official Russian position on Syria is that once all the terrorists have been defeated, all political stakeholders in Syria need to get around the negotiating table to hammer out a new political settlement for Syria. The Guardian article is incorrect. The quality of journalism in the Guardian ranges from the worst quality to the best quality. The Guardian article referred to is an example of the laziest kind of journalism – taking the American propaganda against Russia at face value and not investigating to find the truth. Thank you.
Marjorie, yup and bin Laden is an example…..the doublespeak and sheer deception in the ME is shocking. Neptune in Pisces in guess ?
Daesh and many of it’s affiliates are controlled, sponsored, armed and trained by the head choppers in Saudi Arabia, as well as Gulf States, UK, USA and Israel. Maybe if those countries instructed the terrorist proxy armies under their control to surrender, or at least not hide among civilians there would be a better chance of some degree of peace. Putin and Assad are pretty gruesome characters but to imagine we in the West don’t have a major contributory role in the mayhem in Syria and the wider ME is just wrong. And those same nations’ role in Yemen bears some deeper scrutiny too. And didn’t our annihilation of Libya and Iraq end well?
For sure and the west have a bad habit of arming freedom fighters who then turn on them at a later date.
It also doesn’t help Putin that the shame of Russia’s state-sanctioned doping scandal was confirmed in the recent Olympics from beginning to end.