War

The Iraqi army’s effort to retake the northern city of Mosul from ISIS has been put on hold. The first phase of the campaign to liberate Mosul is running into difficulties as the army is short of men, training and tactics to be able to act independently from the more battle hardened Shiite and Kurdish militias. Reuters reports: Almost three weeks into the operation, Iraqi forces have retaken just three villages from Islamic State in the Makhmour area, which is set to be a key staging ground for a future assault on Mosul, around 60 km (40 miles) further north.

As Bloomberg reports, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute is out with their latest military spending report, and it looks as though many countries around the globe are preparing for more conflict in the coming years, if only based on the recent jump in military-related spending.    In aggregate, world military expenditures rose to $1.7 trillion in 2015, an increase of about 1% from last year. According to SIPRI, this was the first increase in global military spending since 2011.

US military bases that are stationed in Japan will not be relocated “within the foreseeable future” since the island country still needs security backing from the United States,  the Japanese Prime Minister Shizo Abe has claimed In an interview with the WSJ, published on Tuesday, Abe said: “I cannot conceive of any situation within the foreseeable future when the US presence wouldn’t be necessary” RT reports: The statement came in response to a question on the possibility of the withdrawal of American troops from Japan – a move recently proposed by Republican presidential front-runner Donal

Submitted by Pepe Escobar via SputnikNews.com,

So now Iran is back to being demonized by the West as “provocative” and “destabilizing”. How come? Wasn’t the nuclear deal supposed to have brought Iran back to the Western-concocted “concert of nations”?