By
Jingo, an "Act of War!"
More chickenhawks on parade for war with Russia
By Philip Giraldi
April
05, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Unz
Review"
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The latest Democratic Party shill to demonize
Russia is, I am ashamed to say, my state of
Virginia’s Senator Mark Warner, who, on Thursday
said “Russian
President Vladimir Putin ordered a deliberate
campaign carefully constructed to undermine our
election.” Last Thursday, Warner was the top
Democrat on a Senate Intelligence Committee
panel investigating Moscow’s alleged
interference in last year’s presidential
election. The panel inevitably included
carefully selected expert witnesses who would
agree with the proposition that Russia is and
was guilty as charged. There was no one who
provided an alternative view even though a
little Googling would have surfaced some genuine
experts who dispute the prevailing narrative.
Warner joined many
of his
esteemed colleagues
in Congress who have completely accepted the
allegations that Russia meddled in the election
in spite of the failure of the Obama
Administration to provide any indisputable
evidence to that effect. Senator Ben Cardin of
Maryland has called Moscow’s claimed
interference an “attack” and labeled it a
“political Pearl Harbor.” A number of other
congressmen, to include Bonnie Watson Coleman of
New Jersey and Eric Swalwell of California have
called it an act of war. And then there are echo
chambers Senators John McCain and Mark Rubio on
the Republican side of the aisle while former
Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking at a
business conference in New Delhi saying the same
thing. Yes, that Dick Cheney. Why anyone in
India would pay to hear him speak on any subject
escapes me.
Democrat Adam
Schiff of California is leading the charge for
his party as he is the ranking Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee. He
outlined his case
against Russia two weeks ago, providing a heap
of minimally factual “information”, relying
heavily instead on supposition and featuring
mostly innuendo. And again, it was largely
evidence-free. One assertion is almost comical:
“In July 2016, Carter Page, one of Trump’s
former national security advisers,
traveled to Moscow
after being approved to do so by the Trump
campaign. While there, Page gave a speech in
which he was critical of the U.S. and its
efforts to fight corruption and promote
democracy.”
Almost
everyone I know who follows such matters is also
critical of U.S. (hypocritical) efforts to
promote democracy, a formulation wildly popular
among Hillary Clinton style Democrats to enable
attacking Muslim countries that have somehow
offended either Israel or the Washington
Establishment. But what is particularly
disturbing about the constant denigration of
Russia and Vladimir Putin in the media and among
the political class is the regular invocation of
war doctrine, that hacking a server by a foreign
power, if it took place, is in the same category
as the attack on Pearl Harbor. That World War 3
would be a nuclear holocaust does not seem to
have occurred to politicians seeking a punchy
line so they can get cited in The Washington
Post. It leads one to the inevitable conclusion
that war is far too serious a business to be
left to politicians.
But what
particularly offends me personally about those
eager to go toe to toe with the Russians is
their complete venality and fundamental
cowardice. As a Vietnam era vet, I understand
full well how it feels to have your life
disrupted to go off and possibly die to fight a
war that was totally meaningless. Our crowd of
politicians is fond of talking about war as if
it were some kind of diversion being featured on
a monopoly board and that is precisely because
they have no skin in the game. They somehow
fancy that a shooting war will somehow not
happen, that Russia will back down in a
confrontation with force majeur, and
they deep down feel completely immune to the
consequences that might result from their
ill-advised actions. And they are unfortunately
in large part correct to feel so, as no one was
ever held accountable for Iraq. Consequences
that apply to the “little people” in the U.S. do
not apply to them.
Under the rule of
our bipartisan war-loving elites the United
States has evolved from a bumbling giant into
something far more threatening. The completely
useless wars since 9/11
have killed
nearly 10,000 American soldiers and contractors
as well as hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of the inhabitants of the countries
that we have attacked. I would hold Congress,
the White House and the mainstream media as
directly responsible for those deaths. As former
Ambassador Chas Freeman
puts it,
“America has now chosen publicly to redefine
itself internationally as the foreign relations
equivalent of a sociopath – a country
indifferent to the rules, the consequences for
others of its ignoring them, and the reliability
of its word. No nation can now comfortably
entrust its prosperity or security to
Washington, no matter how militarily powerful it
perceives America to be.”
Which inevitably
leads to the subject of Dick Cheney. When it
comes to hypocrisy over war as a constant state
for the American Republic with absolutely no
consequences for those who lead, no one takes a
back seat to good old Dick. Dick had five
deferments during Vietnam and
he has explained
that he had had “other priorities.” He and his
consigliere Scooter Libby, together
with Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, might have
had more to do with America’s march to war in
Iraq than any other individuals in the Bush
Administration. And none of them paid any price
except Libby who was convicted of having
committed perjury
connected to his apparent outing of CIA officer
Valerie Plame as revenge for her husband’s
refutation of claims about Iraq buying uranium
from Niger. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in
prison but had his jail time commuted by
President George W. Bush.
One might even
suggest that the architects of devastating
policies were actually rewarded, most
particularly Wolfowitz, who was named president
of the World Bank before having to resign over a
sex scandal that he initiated. Today Wolfowitz
is a
Visiting Scholar
at the American Enterprise Institute and Libby
is a Senior Vice President at the neocon Hudson
Institute. Cheney is retired comfortably on the
somewhere between $19 and $86 million he made,
mostly while working for five years at defense
contractor Halliburton. His truly frightening
daughter Liz is in congress representing
Wyoming, continuing the family legacy of bone
headed knee jerk reactionaryism combined with
egregious self-aggrandizement that Dick is best
known for.
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Note that
neither Cheney, nor Wolfowitz nor Libby ever
served in the U.S. military, exhibiting thereby
their willingness to let other American die for
the dreadful policies that they initiated. That
pattern also holds true for the Democrats who
seem to have found Russia as a useful scapegoat
for their failure to elect Hillary Clinton
president. If the Kremlin did it then the
Democratic National Committee and Clinton
campaign are off the hook, aren’t they? And even
better if one can simultaneously discredit
Donald Trump by implying that he or his
associates might be subjected to blackmail by
Moscow, making them little more than agents of
Vladimir Putin and therefore traitors to the
United States.
Senator Mark
Warner, a lawyer by training, founded a venture
capital firm called Columbia Capital before
being elected Governor of Virginia and then
Senator in 2008. He is
reported to be
the wealthiest U.S. Senator, worth $200 million.
He has a 15 acre farm in Rappahannock County
Virginia where he produces wine as a hobby.
Warner has
three daughters who will never serve in the U.S.
military, which is precisely the problem. The
more our “ruling class” in Washington has little
or nothing to do with the average American or,
to be more precise, the class of Americans
called upon to fight and die in the wars that
are constantly being promoted, the more we will
engage in senseless wars and sabre rattling. As
Warner appears willing to use the threat of war
to pillory Trump, he perhaps should step back,
take a deep breath, and try to think of the
consequences of the politically loaded claims
that he is promoting.
Ben Cardin
and Adam Schiff are a lot like Warner in that
they are reliable partisan Democrats who are
seeking to milk as much benefit out of beating
on Russia as they can. Both are unimpeachable
liberals who wrap their arguments in the good
old American flag by claiming that Moscow is
seeking to threaten our democracy while
completely ignoring the fact that the U.S.
intelligence agencies have been regularly
overthrowing governments and corrupting
elections since the Second World War. They both
have children who will never serve in uniform or
see the inside of a barracks. War for them is an
abstraction which serves as a useful tool, in
this case, for bringing down Donald Trump. And
they are bringing down with Trump any hope of
rapprochement with Russia, a readjustment in
policy that is desperately needed.
I am
reminded frequently of the ancient Greek way of
war. Armor was expensive and only the wealthy
and powerful could afford it. And those with the
armor stood in the front line as they were most
able to engage in the cutting and thrusting and
still survive. Armor was also heavy and they
could not run away, so wars were only fought
when vital interests were at stake and they were
fought to the death for most of those on the
battlefield. I fancy a phalanx of hoplites with
Warner, Cardin, Schiff, Wolfowitz, Cheney and
Libby arrayed on the front line in their fine
armor manufactured by Halliburton. That way they
could have all the war they want and experience
it first-hand. I doubt they would last very long
as they are both moral and physical cowards, but
given that reality, they just might think a bit
harder about promoting the type of fearmongering
that will only end by sending the children of
other Americans off to war.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
