The assassination by the United States of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The consequences are ominous.

The disinformation surrounding the Syrian civil war appears to have been lifted from the Iraq/Afghanistan playbook. It is all the more disgraceful that the media that participated in selling those wars (now recognized as catastrophic failures) is engaging in the same manipulative tactics to encourage ongoing suffering and destabalization in Syria.

Since its foundation in 2009, the international network “No to War – No to NATO” has successfully managed, through various actions, to reduce support for NATO among the population in key states, and even to delegitimize NATO. Our objective remains the same: to overcome the dinosaur named NATO and to replace it with an international organization for collective security and disarmament.

The biggest costs have fallen on the many millions killed and maimed by the US military and allied and proxy forces in the last seven decades and before. The victims include the many US military veterans who have killed themselves, many of them haunted by their own participation in sadistic attacks and torture on defenseless people at the distant command of sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce US hegemony by any and all means deemed necessary.

Coverage of terrorist attacks is so formulaic in 2017 that reporters, if asked, could certainly write a story without an actual event. It would have the sophistication of a puppet show in the town square. The victims, of course, would be European or Western allies. There would be fine details of weapons, injuries, trauma, shattered witnesses and mourners and deranged hoodlums as perpetrators.

As the US prepares to send more troops to Afghanistan to combat ISIS and the Taliban, and the specter of a war hangs over every tweet the President writes about North Korea, it’s important to remember that the US has been fighting in and bombing several countries in the Middle East and Asia for 16 years. According to a new study, all that war has cost the US taxpayers $5.6 trillion.

President Trump, according to numerous reliable Washington sources, has decided to end US arms supplies and logistics support to Syria’s jihadist rebels that have fuelled the bloody six-year conflict. Washington, and its allies Britain and France, have persistently denied arming Syria’s jihadist rebels fighting to bring down the Russian and Iranian-backed government of President Bashar Assad.

Israeli planning and preparations paid off during the war. The victory, though, proved to be a devastating one. Israel has never recuperated from it. Fifty years after, much of the Jewish state’s energies are devoted to maintaining the brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And the protracted debate about whether to continue and hold these territories tears Israel’s society apart.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton raised the matter of the American war in Afghanistan. The war has cost the U.S. at least $23 billion a year, with an additional $117 billion on reconstruction. Of that reconstruction money, 61 per cent, $71 billion, went towards the creation of the Afghan National Army.

Yet the moment Trump gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a chemical weapons attack a few days earlier, all was forgotten and forgiven. Finally Trump became president! Finally he put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his place! Finally the U.S. showed it had moved beyond former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to use military force!