They keep calling it "reconstruction." I call it what it is: a receipt.

A Syrian woman writes to us this week about what's left after thirteen and a half years of dirty war — oil fields that once belonged to a state now belong to an American ambassador, a pipeline America itself bombed now reopening for America's profit, uranium stockpiles handed to Turkey truck by truck, garbage rotting in the streets because there's no fuel for anything but HTS convoys.. This is the "victory" they sold you.

And don't come to me with the fairy tale that Syria's "allies" were any better. Russia and Iran, sitting on more gas and oil than half the planet, dripped aid to Damascus in teaspoons — while pumping discounted Iranian gas straight into Turkey's pipelines with ever increasing discounts and building Erdogan a nuclear plant on Russia's own long-term dime. Meanwhile Erdogan spends his days poking Moscow everywhere from the Turkic republics to Ukraine, and helping Israel do its damage to the Slavic and Orthodox world. Some alliance.

Read the whole account — "Syria's Oil Wealth Flows to America While Syrians Bleed for It" — on Syria News: Syria's Oil Wealth Flows to America While Syrians Bleed for It.

If this kind of reporting matters to you, that's exactly why your support keeps our site, Syria News, online.

Craig Mokhiber, former New York Office Director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, exposed on X what Western newsrooms and, in extension, Western politicians, intentionally manipulate.

Mohiber said "The constant sanitizing of language by the corporate Western media, done on behalf of the US-Israel Axis, is simply stunning to watch. The attacks on Iran are not some "war of choice," they are the crime of aggression, full stop. The Israeli regime's ongoing attacks on the Palestinian people are not a "war", they are the crime of genocide. And the lawless dissemination of Axis propaganda by the media is not journalism, it's complicity."

— Craig Mokhiber on Twitter

This is exactly the same game we have been documenting here on Syria News since the war of terror on Syria first began, more than a decade and a half ago now.

Language is never innocent in these wars. It is chosen, on purpose, word by word, to launder real crimes into something soft and forgettable for the people back home in the West, the very same people whose tax money is paying for all of it.

We were heavily criticized for years, since the very beginning of the war of terror on Syria, simply for refusing to call the head-chopping terrorists of Al Qaeda and ISIS by the polite name the mainstream media insisted on using for them, "moderate rebels." That was the accepted narrative back then. Anyone who called it what it actually was got labeled "not balanced."

It is the same trick, over and over, in every single one of these wars.

• An illegal aggression becomes a "strike."
• Unilateral sanctions, imposed without any approval whatsoever from the United Nations Security Council, become simple "measures," almost like paperwork.
• And now, a deliberate war of aggression by choice against Iran, which is in fact the highest crime recognized under international law, as it was defined by no one other than the victors of World War II themselves when they wrote the UN Charter, gets softened down into something as forgettable as "tensions in the region."

Mokhiber is completely right to name this for what it is. It is not journalism, it is complicity, and it has been complicity for a very long time now.

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If you want to see, in real and undeniable clinical detail, exactly what all these sanitized, softened words are actually hiding underneath them, we invite you to check our two-part series, The War of Terror on Syria Through Forensic Medicine and its second part here.

We have also collected many more examples just like this one, over the years, under our War of Terror tag on the site, a running record of the real gap between the words the media chooses to use, and the actual heinous crimes those words are designed to hide from you.

Your objective comments are always welcome.

Watch what these people actually DO, not what they say in front of the cameras, and mostly you'll find the real story hiding there in plain sight.

When Trump landed in Beijing with Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, and BlackRock's Larry Fink in his delegation, the official story given to the public was tariffs and trade, as usual. But financial commentator Andrei Jikh put out a theory that's much more interesting than that, and it's now 11 weeks old, and it's still checking out against the real data as time passes. His theory: this trip was never really about tariffs. This was about who gets to write the next global monetary order, now that the post-World War II dollar system Washington has been riding on for 80 years is clearly falling apart at its seams.

Jikh goes back to 1985 and to the Plaza Accord, the deal Washington forced onto Japan, West Germany, France, and the UK, to weaken the dollar and save its own manufacturing. It 'worked' for America, sure. But Japan's currency doubled overnight, its export economy got destroyed, and the country spent the next 30 years trying to dig itself out of what history now calls the Lost Decades. That is the real price of making a monetary deal with Washington, ask Japan. China, and this is not surprising at all, has zero intention to become the next Japan.

So instead of a direct revaluation of the yuan, this theory says, the pressure valve this time will be gold. And the fingerprints are already there for anyone who wants to look: China's currency getting stronger instead of weaker while it's supposedly "under pressure," Chinese borrowing costs staying flat while everyone else's keep climbing up, and physical gold, not oil, not weapons, becoming one of America's single biggest exports for five of the last six months. Guess where all that gold is heading to. Throughout history, whoever is the country exporting its gold is usually the one losing this game, and whoever is hoarding it is the one about to come out ahead. Washington already sold off the gold pile that made the dollar the world's reserve currency in the first place, decades ago. Now, it's quietly handing another one over to Beijing.

Add on top of this the Strait of Hormuz, closed since Washington's war on Iran started earlier this year, and around a fifth of the whole planet's energy flow choked with it, and Jikh's theory gets even sharper: Iran is not really the main actor in this story; Iran is the leverage. China and Russia don't need to hand Tehran a nuclear weapon to win this standoff; all they need is for the Strait to stay closed long enough until Washington's own broken supply chains and drowning debt force it to sit at the table on someone else's terms, not its own.

The public aspect of this emerging deal involves approximately $1 trillion of Chinese investment flooding into American factories, which is essentially the same thing Japanese automakers did after 1985. This time, however, it's Chinese money rebuilding the American industrial base that Washington itself has hollowed out over the decades. The quiet part, the part not said out loud: a coordinated re-pricing of gold that could make Washington's absurdly underpriced official reserves, still valued on the books at $42 an ounce since 1973!, suddenly worth what they're actually worth today, easing a debt burden that otherwise cannot be paid, without China having to touch the yuan-dollar exchange rate at all.

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Jikh is careful, to be fair to him, to call all this a theory, not a confirmed account of what got said behind those closed doors. Fair enough, noted. But watch what happens to the dollar in the coming period, watch what happens to gold, and watch closely who ends up holding real assets versus who ends up holding a currency that's being quietly inflated out from under them while they sleep. As always, and as we've said here many times before, it's never the countries Washington sanctions and bullies who end up paying the real price of its own decline; it's the ordinary American sitting with cash in a savings account, while Washington's empire quietly rearranges the furniture on its way down.

Watch Jikh's video clip on our Telegram channel: https://t.me/syupdates/4022

Your objective comments are always welcome.