People on the left like him (he is the son of the Communist Claud Cockburn and pretty left-wing) are usually best on world politics because they do not follow the FCO line but think.
They assume that the US, UK and Nato lines are self-interested, misleading and untruthful, which is a wise starting point.
By comparison Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph on Friday felt obliged to say "...the Russian economy is a long way from the abject collapse many Western commentators seem to imagine. I’m trying to be careful in expressing myself here, because commentary like this is open to misinterpretation, and I don’t want to come across as a Russian apologist."
Left-wingers (and dissident conservatives) don't worry about coming across as Russian apologists, though if they come across as Hamas apologists they can be imprisoned for up to 14 years in England.
England is not a free country.
This is from Mr Cockburn's latest article in iNews.
On Ukraine he repeats an important piece of hearsay that he has told us about before:Israel is today super-confident, not to say hubristic, in exercising its new sovereignty in the region. It has bombed Gaza, Damascus, Sanaa in Yemen, Beirut and Tehran with impunity. It forbids the Syrian army from advancing into south Syria. It has effectively annexed all of the Golan Heights. An Israeli minister has even threatened al-Sharaa with assassination and, without conscious hypocrisy, Israel has accused him of proposing to massacre and ethnically cleanse the Druze in Suweida.
Israel’s new-forged hegemony in the Middle East is real, but it has been forged by airpower alone and can only be maintained by its continual destructive use, which in turn requires unstinting US military supply and political backing.
Israel appears to have no other plan except war without end. In Syria, this will probably mean Israel offering military protection to minorities such as the Druze, Alawi and Kurds in order to ensure that no centralised Syrian state with a significant army is ever reborn. From Israel’s point of view, post-Assad Syria should be like a larger Lebanon with a patchwork of local powers loosely controlled from the centres.
As regards the Palestinians, Israel is visibly moving closer to penning survivors in Gaza into a smaller and smaller area with a view to expelling them in the not-too-distant future. And after Gaza, the West Bank will be next for Israeli resettlement and potential annexation.
A Ukraine expert told me that an Ukrainian official had sought to deposit $350m in an Italian bank, but the bank had rejected the money. The Italian government said privately to the bankers that they had done the right thing, but to keep quiet about it.
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