in europe or always interesting get your take dr jamal wakim professor of history and internationally at lebanese university in beirut. america's national debt has passed the historic twenty trillion dollar mark but it seems in the us under the radar explains why. the ever increasing u.s. national debt just recently went above the milestone of twenty trillion dollars the final big chunk came as part of a fifteen billion dollar loan to pay for hurricane relief expenses now normally this new spike in national debt would have been announced to the public on this billboard on the side of the i.r.s. building in manhattan and like we've done many times here on r.t. we make that debt clock center stage in our reporting. economists predict that the student debt bubble will burst sometime in the near future the job market is drying up and wages are going down here in midtown manhattan is possibly the best you america's ugliest economic state but the debt clock billboard which used to flash the sobering statistics to new yorkers that were passing by and was a kind of iconic part of the new york

backed forces launched an operation to rout the terror group i was discussing with jamal wakim he's a professor of history and international relations at the lebanese university in beirut welcome back. these attacks are being investigated what response from washington do you expect if any to this. well i believe that. complete denial it will deny any responsibility for the action. but i believe that we will see more. civilians killed by u.s. troops. in syria or iraq especially at the time when the americans had to intervene directly because they could no longer lie on their proxies in the region to be successes achieved by the city an army and their allies so that's why i believe that we will see more and more victims by the us. in syria civilian casualties are a sad fact of any conflict like this is it ever possible to avoid the metol that pretty. well of course in such conflicts it's. hard to avoid civilian casualties but at the same time when the whole american involvement in syria is illegitimate it's illegal because it was not sanctioned by the syrian government the way it was fo