July 21, 2022:
Information Clearing
House
-- "UNZ"
- The
White House keeps insisting that it will
not directly involve American soldiers
in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps
taking steps that will inevitably lead
to a large-scale open combat role for
the US against Russia. Among the most
recent moves to increase the pressure on
the Kremlin,
Biden revealed at a NATO summit
meeting in Madrid on June 29th
that the US will establish a permanent
headquarters in Poland for the Fifth
Army Corps, maintain an additional
rotational brigade of thousands of
troops in Romania and bolster other
deployments in the Baltic states. Also,
the number of US troops in Europe,
currently approaching 100,000, will be
increased. Biden also was pleased to
learn that Turkey had been enticed to
drop its objection to Finland and Sweden
joining NATO.
On the way to the
NATO summit aboard Air Force One,
Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake
Sullivan
advised that “By the end of the
summit what you will see is a more
robust, more effective, more combat
credible, more capable and more
determined force posture to take account
of a more acute and aggravated Russian
threat.” Presumably Sullivan was reading
from a prepared script, but the
objective surely seemed to be to
heighten tension with Moscow rather than
attempt to reduce it and come to some
kind of diplomatic settlement.
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NATO Secretary
General Jens Stoltenberg also did his
bit. In an astonishing display of
derriere kissing, he responded that the
new US force posture commitments were
demonstrative of Biden’s strong
leadership. What Stoltenberg did not
mention was that Biden has been lying
for some time about the presence of US
military personnel in Ukraine. He let
the cat out of the bag back in March,
when he told troops belonging to the
82nd Airborne division in
Poland that they would soon be going to
Ukraine, observing that “You’re going to
see when you’re there, and some of you
have been there, you’re gonna see —” It
was an admission that US forces are
already in place inside Ukraine even
though the White House quickly did
damage control, asserting that the
president continues to be opposed to
American soldiers being directly engaged
in the fighting. Biden also claimed that
the US was working to “keep the massacre
[of Ukrainians] from continuing.” Again,
the language was hardly designed to make
some room for a possible accommodation
with Russia to negotiate an end to the
fighting.
And now there is
a
New York Times report
entitled “Commando Network
Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine,
Officials Say: A secretive operation
involving US Special Operations forces
hints at the scale of the effort to
assist Ukraine’s still outgunned
military.”
The article
describes a more active US role in
Ukraine than the Biden Administration
has been willing to admit publicly. Back
in February, before intervened in
Ukraine, the US reportedly withdrew its
own 150 military instructors, many of
whom were training Ukrainian soldiers on
newly acquired American produced
weapons. However, some Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary
operatives and special ops troops
continued their service in the country
secretly, directing most of the
intelligence flow the US is sharing with
Ukrainian forces. In addition to that,
special ops soldiers from Washington’s
NATO allies have been managing the
movement of weapons and equipment into
Ukraine and providing some specialized
training. It has also been reported that
British SAS commandos are actually
guarding President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The NYT specifies, citing
American and other Western officials,
that the soldiers and CIA officers are
currently not on the front lines with
Ukrainian troops. Also according to the
Times, even though the US and
NATO member states have not acknowledged
the presence of their paramilitaries
soldiers in operational roles in
Ukraine, Russia and other intelligence
services around the world are aware of
this.
The New York
Times report appears to be
generally correct, though it does omit
some details, some of which I have been
hearing from former colleagues in the
intelligence services. There has been
considerable overt training at the
Grafenwoehr German army base as well as
at the Ramstein US Air Base to
familiarize the Ukrainians with the new
weapons arriving. Other NATO countries
are also participating in the training.
Meanwhile, the cadres of special
operations soldiers and intelligence
personnel operating primarily in western
Ukraine are not in uniform and many of
them are working under various contrived
cover designations, including sometimes
loose affiliations with foreign
embassies and NGOs. There are also a
conventional CIA Station, a group from
the National Security Agency and a
Military Attache’s office in the
recently reopened US Embassy in Kiev.
All of the above
means that Biden and other western
leaders have been dissimulating
regarding their active participation in
the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Apart from
his possible gaffe, Biden will not admit
that there are American boots already on
the ground, but they are there and are
playing a major role in both logistics
and intelligence sharing. The potential
downside for the president could come
when some of these soldiers in mufti get
killed or, worse, captured and start to
talk about their role.
Retired US Air
Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a
former analyst for the US Department of
Defense,
observes that deploying plausibly
deniable non-uniformed personnel “is
completely typical of the initial stages
of a US-backed long war, and for
long-term political manipulation of the
target country. This is the future that
neoconservative ‘strategists’ in DC and
their British and European allies
imagine for Ukraine. Rather than a
negotiated conclusion, with a new
Ukrainian role as a neutral and
productive country, independent of both
Russian and US political influences, the
US government and CIA see Ukraine as an
expendable yet useful satrap in its
competition with the Russian
Federation.”
Former CIA
analyst Larry Johnson sees the activity
in stark terms, while also commenting
that the CIA has not won a
semi-clandestine insurgent war in forty
years. He observes that “Ukraine
is a proxy; the West is trying to
destroy Russia, it’s that simple. It
would be one thing if Russia was the
most evil, oppressive, authoritarian
regime in the world. It’s nowhere even
close. Even though the West keeps trying
to portray Russia as such. The fact of
the matter is, the West wants the
resources that Russia has and it wants
to control Russia. [But] Russia is not
about to be controlled.”
In other words,
Washington might be seeking an unending
war entangling Russia and limiting its
options globally. The Biden
Administration has staked its reputation
and possible political future on
enabling Ukraine to survive without
succumbing to Russian territorial
demands. It is a risky and even
dangerous policy, both in practical
terms and politically. The persistence
of the Ukrainians in their defense is
largely a product of US and Western
Europe guarantees that they will do all
that is necessary to support Zelensky
and his regime, which is already seeking
$750 billion in aid for
“reconstruction.” If western military
casualties begin to surface, the
political support for the Ukraine war
will begin to fade in Washington and
elsewhere and there will be consequences
in the upcoming midterm US elections in
November.
A final comment
on the Times piece is in
response to the question why it has
appeared at all at the present time. The
mainstream media has been a cheerleader
for aggressive US support of Ukraine and
Zelensky, but now it is beginning to
step back from that position, as have
also the Washington Post and
other media outlets. Perhaps they are
becoming convinced that the game plan
being promoted by Washington and its
European allies is unlikely to succeed
at great cost to the respective
economies. Larry Johnson puts it this
way: “I think the purpose of this
article coming out now is just to lay
the groundwork for why we can’t put or
shouldn’t put any more US military
personnel or even CIA personnel inside
Ukraine because continuing to put US
personnel…inside Ukraine to train is
becoming too risky because of Russia’s
success on the battlefield.” One might
also add that it is exceptionally
dangerous. A misstep or even a
deliberate false flag coming from either
side could easily make the war go
nuclear.
Philip M.
Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of
the Council for the National Interest, a
501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation (Federal ID Number
#52-1739023) that seeks a more
interests-based U.S. foreign policy in
the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville
VA 20134 and its email is
inform@cnionline.org.