Nafeez Ahmed: "So the US is not targeting the Islamic State’s financial lifeline - its black market oil infrastructure - but instead is teaming up with the same al-Qaeda affiliated groups that spawned IS in the first place, to undermine Assad. And Russia, for all its muscle-flexing rhetoric, sees its main priority as countering US-led efforts to topple Assad, by targeting his most immediate opponents.
This is, in other words, a New Cold War between competing empires, the unending victims of which are the Syrian people. As for the Islamic State, it is little more than the proxy bastard child of a conflict that looks set to escalate.
8 december 2011. Carl Bildt på väg till NATO-konferens om Afghanistan och till följande konferens om nätfrihet. Idag 20 år sedan Belavezha-avtalen om Sovjetunionens upplösning. Assyrisk kommentar till bliogginlägget om oljan i Nineveslätten.
Paul Rogers on the US-led privatisation of the Iraqi oil resources and the Pentagon's current preparation for a major long-term military presence in Iraq