No one left to sanction

The U.S. put sanctions on Russia’s main arms exporter, Kremlin aides and the black leather-loving head of a motorcycle gang nicknamed “The Surgeon” after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Now, as Washington seeks ways to punish Moscow for its actions in Syria, it may be running out of options.
President Barack Obama’s administration says new sanctions are among its alternatives as it seeks to ease the humanitarian crisis in Syria, where Russia backs President Bashar al-Assad’s drive to recapture the city of Aleppo. But Secretary of State John Kerry won’t give any details, and European allies failed last week to consider tighter restrictions.
“While the president has full sanction authority, there’s nobody left to sanction in Russia besides the janitor in the Kremlin,” said Michael Kofman, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute in Washington. “In terms of expanding any kind of commercial or financial sanctions, we’re basically maxed out.”

Aleppo = Mosul

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western outrage over a Russian bombing campaign in the Syrian city of Aleppo is hypocritical because Western governments are carrying out a similar operation in the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Lavrov said Tuesday that "the American coalition in Mosul is calling on residents to leave exactly like we did in Aleppo."

Amnesty International

Amnesty International has issued a new statement warning that the US needs to do more to prevent civilian casualties in its coalition airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria, and cautioned the US has dramatically under-reported the number of civilians killed in their air war.
The new report centered on Syria, noting that the US-led coalition had killed at least 300 civilians in Syria, and had not admitted to the vast majority of those slain. They reported the US had killed around 250 civilians just in the city of Manbij and the surrounding area.

International Law

The UN is not free in its opinion; it is playing a part in the game on the side of the US, says Willy Wimmer, former State Secretary of the German Christian Democratic Party.
Some 80 aid and humanitarian organizations, including Human Rights Watch, claim Russia - the only country operating militarily in Syria legally - is no longer "fit" to hold its position in the body

Outskirts of Mosul

- The Iraqi Army's 9th Armored Division, backed by the Nineveh Protection Units (Assyrian forces), reportedly reached Mosul's eastern outskirts today after a 10 day long battle with the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS).
According to the Iraqi Army's media page, their forces reached the Kokjali (var. Gogjali) District in eastern Mosul after seizing several villages nearby.

Turkey may invade Iraq

Tensions between Turkey and Iraq continue to rise, and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced today that his country reserves the right to invade Iraq “if there is a threat posed to Turkey,” and that this would include a substantial number of ground troops.
This has been the main source of tension in recent weeks, with Turkey insisting that they are going to send ground troops into Mosul, and Iraq insisting they are unwelcome. Shi’ite militias have even suggested they will treat Turkish troops as enemy forces in the fighting around Mosul.
Turkey is now claiming that they believe the PKK is heavily involved in the fight against ISIS, and has designs on setting up a base of operations in the Yazidi city of Sinjar, threatening the military response to prevent a PKK presence there.

Syria and Turkey clashing

Turkey said on Wednesday it will press its military offensive in Syria until Islamic State is driven from the town of al-Bab, despite a warning from forces allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a helicopter attack on the rebels it backs...
As the Turkey-backed rebels push south toward al-Bab, an Islamic State-held town 35 km (22 miles) northeast of Aleppo, they face confrontation with both Kurdish and pro-Assad forces, whose frontlines lie close by.
The field commander of the forces allied to the Syrian leader - which include the Lebanese group Hezbollah, Iraqi militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - warned Turkey any advance towards their positions north and east of Aleppo would be met "decisively and with force"...
The Turkish military said a helicopter "assessed to belong to regime forces" bombed the rebels it backs in a village near Akhtarin, a town 5 km (3 miles) southeast of Dabiq, late on Tuesday. Dabiq is a former Islamic State stronghold that the rebels seized from the jihadists this month.
It was the first time a direct clash between Syrian forces and the Turkey-backed rebels has been announced. Two rebels were killed and five wounded, the Turkish army said.

NeoMcCarthyism

In any case, what we are seeing today with the revival of the cold war mindset is in many ways the complete opposite of the “old” McCarthyism: the target may be the same – Russia as the bogeyman de jour – but the methods and sources of the neo-McCarthyites are quite different.
To begin with, the “old” McCarthyism was a movement generated from below, and aimed at the elites: the “new” McCarthyism is a media construct, generated from above and created by the elites.
The average American, while hardly a Putin groupie, is not lying awake at night worrying about the “Russian threat.” The fate of Ukraine, not to mention Crimea, is so far from his concerns that the distance can only be measured in light-years. And when some new scandal breaks as a result of WikiLeaks releasing the emails of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, Joe Sixpack doesn’t think “Oh, that just proves Julian Assange is a Kremlin toady!” WikiLeaks is merely confirming what Joe already knew: that Washington is a cornucopia of corruption...
This barrage has gone into overdrive with the launching of the Clinton campaign’s effort to smear Donald Trump as a Kremlin “puppet.” You have to go all the way back to the earliest days of our Republic, when pro-British supporters of Alexander Hamilton were sliming the Jeffersonian Democrats with accusations that they were agents of the French revolutionaries, to come up with the historical equivalent of Hillary’s “you’re a puppet” charges directed at Trump. And the media, being an auxiliary of the Clinton campaign, has been filled with even more virulent screeds purporting to “prove” Trump is the Manchurian candidate.