Pausing on the Escalation Escalator

The BRICS summit begins tomorrow; also meeting this week, the World Bank and IMF, and there is a Commonwealth Conference as well. So lots of opportunities/excuses for Western mainstream media to ignore BRICS or, like the Economist (which recently praised a US economic boom without mentioning the country’s staggering debt and ignored its dependence on non wealth producing activity) and to dismiss it as a “talking shop” - something which for the Economist is to be derided and attributed mainly to people of color. A further source of distraction would be a strike by Israel on Iran although Hezbollah’s recent pin-point accurate strike on a Netanyahu house and the release of top-secret NASA documents on to a Telegram Channel detailing from as recently as last Wednesday Israel’s plan to attack Iran may well have caused some delays on the Israeli side. Both Alastair Crooke and Ray McGovern this morning have indicated their certainty that the documents are authentic. Their publication would also provide further legal support for a preemptive Iranian strike. Asked by Judge Napolitano as to why he thought the documents had been leaked, Crooke replied that perhaps “someone wanted to stop World War Three.”