Everything is pointing to a real confrontation between the U.S. and Russia over the retaking of Idlib in Syria.  And when everything is pointing one direction, I always like to look at the other way to see what might really be going on.

My latest article at Strategic Culture Foundation lays out the argument that there will be no direct confrontation between the U.S. and Russia over this.  My argument boils down to that the incentives for everyone, including Crazy John Bolton, are for the U.S. to bluster and threaten in order to save face.

In short, they are bluffing over WWIII and Trump holds the best hole cards.

We’ll see if the power elite see it that way.

We have the neoconservatives in the Trump administration and in the K-Street think tanks all goading Trump to show strength and not to let Putin, Assad and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani win in Syria.

These people, the John Boltons and the Nikki Haleys, laptop and coffee clutch bombardiers all, believe that showing strength is the only way to protect America’s interests.  Because that’s all these animals know.

It’s an easily-digested lie told enough times, but it’s still a lie.

And here we are on the seventeenth anniversary of 9/11 listening to the media and these same prominent government officials who failed us that day arguing for leniency for al-Qaeda of all people from Russia and Syria.

This an affront to every person who died that day, their families, the first-responders who tried to help and anyone with an ounce of decency or shame.

But, look who we’re talking about here.

That fact that they continue to spin this policy of regime change in Syria for cynical geopolitical goals even when we’ve been proven to be on the wrong side of the war is breath-taking.

Never forget that we are the aggressors in Syria.

Being a neocon means never saying your sorry for wasting other people’s lives as proxies for your grand dreams of social engineering by bombing people into goodness.

That was the main theme of the week-long eulogy for the evil John McCain.

Instead of threatening Assad with “a much stronger response” over the use of chemical weapons John Bolton and the Trump Administration should be withdrawing their support of Jabhat al-Nusra (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) like we did during the retaking of Dara’a just a few weeks ago.

Because those threats give these head-chopping Salafist animals the excuse they need to stage such an attack and invite the very military response all sane people would avoid at all costs.

But, then again, look who we’re talking about here.

As the Syrian Arab Army prepared for the Dara’a operation the same apocalyptic rhetoric began from the Usual Suspects — Haley, the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and Secretary of Statelessness Mike Pompeo.  But, the order from the Trump Administration came down via back channels through Jordan that there would be no pledge of support to rebels holed up there.

And the operation was over in a matter of a couple of weeks: no humanitarian crisis, the White Helmets were evacuated and began preparing their next round of staged outrage and many of the rebels allowed, graciously, to relocate to Idlib.

Which brings us to today.

We’re staring at an insanely dangerous state of provocation between the U.S. and Russia because Idlib represents the loss in Syria the U.S. political establishment has been dreading since the day Russian Sukhois began flying sorties over Syria in October 2015.

With each victory over our pet head-choppers the Russians and the Syrians have allowed most of them and their families safe transport out of that area…. to Idlib.  Because their highest priority was restoring people to their homes and securing territory to bring sanity.

Does this sound like the brutal butchers the neocons keep trying to paint these people as?  Does this sound like people who would use chemical weapons after already committing to weeks of urban warfare while making steady gains?

If they were we wouldn’t be staring at having to flush out 100,000 of them from amidst a few million Syrians.

They would all be dead at this point along with a lot more civilians.

So, this has always been the plan from the U.S.’s perspective; postpone the big final battle and then cry, ‘humanitarian crisis’ on the eve of Assad’s victory because until that point, no piece of Syria west of the Euphrates River was worth threatening WWIII over for either side.

That’s where we are right now.

And the man who holds the future of the region in his hands is President Trump.

The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have just sent a letter to Trump outlining why he needs to back down here for the good of everyone.

Mr. President:

We are concerned that you may not have been adequately briefed on the upsurge of hostilities in northwestern Syria, where Syrian armed forces with Russian support have launched a full-out campaign to take back the al-Nusra/al-Qaeda/ISIS-infested province of Idlib. The Syrians will almost certainly succeed, as they did in late 2016 in Aleppo. As in Aleppo, it will mean unspeakable carnage, unless someone finally tells the insurgents theirs is a lost cause.

That someone is you. The Israelis, Saudis, and others who want unrest to endure are egging on the insurgents, assuring them that you, Mr. President, will use US forces to protect the insurgents in Idlib, and perhaps also rain hell down on Damascus. We believe that your senior advisers are encouraging the insurgents to think in those terms, and that your most senior aides are taking credit for your recent policy shift from troop withdrawal from Syria to indefinite war.

Furthering the uncertainty they aver, rightly, is that Moscow has no idea who exactly is in charge of Trump’s administration, Trump or his advisors who consistently undermine him.

It’s a very fair point and one that Trump himself can clear up with a phone call.  I can only hope that call has already been made and my scenario of U.S. threats to save face  in the face of abject defeat is the correct one.

Trump needs to not start a war on the eve of the mid-terms.  If he does he will lose a lot of his base.  The Deep State is goading him into this while ratcheting up their open sedition against him.

Idlib is shaping up to be the thing which will define Trump’s legacy.  He wants to be the guy who broke through geopolitical Gordian knots — bring peace to the Middle East, denuclearize North Korea, revive U.S. manufacturing, bust the globalist cartel ownership over the E.U. and D.C. while driving a hard bargain for the future with China.

Everyone in Washington, the City of London and the European elites I call The Davos Crowd wants the exact opposite.  They know Putin is playing for time to finish Russia’s rebuilding process.  They know Trump is not on-board with their plans for transnational control via supranational treaties.

But they also know that if the shooting starts in Syria and Russia retaliates, the full force of all of Israel’s enemies will be unleashed and there is little to stop that from wiping them off the face of the earth.

That may be the biggest incentive for peace in D.C. there is.   Mr. Trump, the options are in front of you, choose wisely.

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