July 05,
2023:
Information Clearing House
--The playbook the pimps
of war use to lure us into one military fiasco
after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not
change. Freedom and democracy are threatened.
Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be
protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along
with a “rules based international order” is at
stake. Victory is assured.
The results are also the same. The
justifications and narratives are exposed as
lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on
whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as
venal as those we are fighting against.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war
crime, although one that was provoked by NATO
expansion and by the United States backing of
the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted the democratically
elected Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic
integration with the European Union, but not at
the expense of economic and political ties with
Russia. The war will only be solved through
negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in
Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s
protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality,
which means the country cannot join NATO. The
longer these negotiations are delayed the more
Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and
infrastructure will continue to be pounded into
rubble.
But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to
serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons
manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and
isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to
Ukraine is irrelevant.
“First, equipping our friends on the front
lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way
— in both dollars and American lives — to
degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United
States,” admitted Senate
Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
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“Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its
territory is teaching us lessons about how to
improve the defenses of partners who are
threatened by China. It is no surprise that
senior officials from Taiwan are so supportive
of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Third,
most of the money that’s been appropriated for
Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go
to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense
manufacturing. It funds new weapons and
munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace
the older material we have provided to Ukraine.
Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs
for American workers and newer weapons for
American servicemembers.”
Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into
public consciousness, the media, which slavishly
promotes these conflicts, drastically reduces
coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and
Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By
the time the U.S. concedes defeat, most barely
remember that these wars are being fought.
The pimps of war who orchestrate these
military fiascos migrate from administration to
administration. Between posts they are ensconced
in think tanks — Project for the New American
Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign
Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of
War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings
Institution — funded by corporations and the war
industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its
inevitable conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves
will seek to ignite a war with
China. The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China.
God help us if we don’t stop them.
These pimps
of war con us into one conflict after
another with flattering narratives that paint us
as the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to
be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the
old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and
embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow —
to become unwitting agents in our
self-immolation.
Since the end of the Second World War, the
government has spent between
45 to 90 percent of the federal budget
on past, current and future military operations.
It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S.
government. It has stopped mattering — at least
to the pimps of war — whether these wars are
rational or prudent. The war industry
metastasizes within the bowels of the American
empire to hollow it out from the inside. The
U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an
impoverished working class and is burdened with
a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy
social services.
Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor
morale, poor
generalship, outdated
weapons, desertions,
a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers
to fight with
shovels, and severe supply shortages —
supposed to collapse months
ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from
power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed
to plunge the
ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing
of the Russian banking system from SWIFT,
the international money transfer system,
supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is
it that inflation rates in Europe and
the United
States are higher than in Russia despite
these attacks on the Russian economy?
Wasn’t the nearly $150 billion in
sophisticated military hardware, financial and
humanitarian assistance pledged by
the U.S., EU and 11 other countries supposed to
have turned the tide of the war? How is it that
perhaps a third of the tanks Germany and the
U.S. provided were swiftly turned by Russian
mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, air strikes
and missiles into charred hunks of metal at the
start of the vaunted counter-offensive?
Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counter-offensive,
which was originally known as the “spring
offensive,” supposed to punch through Russia’s
heavily fortified front lines and regain huge
swathes of territory? How can we explain the
tens of thousands of Ukrainian military
casualties and the forced conscription
by Ukraine’s military? Even our retired generals
and former CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security
officials, who serve as analysts on networks
such as CNN and MSNBC, can’t
say the offensive has succeeded.
And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are
fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian
parliament revoke the
official use of minority languages, including
Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do
we rationalize the eight years of warfare
against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region
before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do
we explain the killing of
over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people
who were displaced,
before Russia’s invasion took place last year?
How do we defend the decision by
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban eleven
opposition parties, including The Opposition
Platform for Life, which had 10 percent of the
seats in the Supreme Council, Ukraine’s
unicameral parliament, along with the Shariy
Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition,
Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive
Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of
Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo
Bloc? How can we accept the banning of these
opposition parties — many of which are on the
left — while Zelenskyy allows fascists from
the Svoboda and Right
Sector parties, as well as the Banderite Azov
Battalion and other
extremist militias, to flourish?
How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges
and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists”
sweeping through Ukraine, given that 30
percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian
speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi
groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that
harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma
population, anti-fascist protests and threaten
city council members, media outlets, artists and
foreign students? How can we countenance the decision by
the U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations
with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and
Moscow apparently being
on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty?
I reported from Eastern and Central Europe in
1989 during the breakup of the Soviet Union.
NATO, we assumed, had become obsolete. President
Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic
agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary
of State James Baker in Ronald Reagan’s
administration, along with the West German
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured Gorbachev
that NATO would not be extended beyond the
borders of a unified Germany. We naively thought
the end of the Cold War meant that Russia,
Europe and the U.S., would no longer have to
divert massive resources to their militaries.
The so-called “peace dividend,” however, was
a chimera.
If Russia did not want to be the enemy,
Russia would be forced to become the enemy. The
pimps of war recruited former Soviet republics
into NATO by painting Russia as a threat.
Countries that joined NATO, which now include
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia,
Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and
North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries,
often through tens of millions in western loans,
to become compatible with NATO military
hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers
billions in profits.
It was universally understood in Eastern and
Central Europe following the collapse of the
Soviet Union that NATO expansion was unnecessary
and a dangerous provocation. It made no
geopolitical sense. But it made commercial
sense. War is a business.
In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained
and released by WikiLeaks — dated Feb. 1, 2008,
written from Moscow, and addressed to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union
Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia
Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of
Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an
unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO
risked conflict with Russia, especially over
Ukraine.
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement
[by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s
influence in the region, but it also fears
unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences
which would seriously affect Russian security
interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us
that Russia is particularly worried that the
strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO
membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian
community against membership, could lead to a
major split, involving violence or at worst,
civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would
have to decide whether to intervene; a decision
Russia does not want to have to face. . . .”
“Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the
Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that
Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most
potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian
relations, given the level of emotion and
neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO
membership . . .” the cable read. “Because
membership remained divisive in Ukrainian
domestic politics, it created an opening for
Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern
that elements within the Russian establishment
would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S.
overt encouragement of opposing political
forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a
classic confrontational posture.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not
have happened if the western alliance had
honored its promises not to expand NATO beyond
Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained
neutral. The pimps of war knew the potential
consequences of NATO expansion. War, however, is
their single minded vocation, even if it leads
to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or China.
The war industry, not Putin, is our most
dangerous enemy.
