They lied about Afghanistan. They lied about Iraq. Now they’re lying about Ukraine Russia’s invasion was a war crime. That’s no excuse for the disastrous, destructive path of endless war
-Chris Hedges

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 U.S. backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup, which ousted democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic integration with the EU, 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.

“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 service members.”

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, the 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 U.S. 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 counteroffensive? Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counteroffensive, 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 February 2022? How do we explain the killing of more than 14,200 people and the 1.5 million who were displaced, before Russia’s invasion took place last year?

How do we defend the decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban 11 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 LGBTQ community, the Roma population and anti-fascist protesters, 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 at the time, had become obsolete. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker, along with 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, the NATO-European Union Cooperative, the National Security Council, the Russia Moscow Political Collective, the Secretary of Defense and the 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. 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. … 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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    61 year ago

    I’m going to ignore the whataboutism in the reply and focus on the quote. Ukraine didn’t choose war in Ukraine. The US didn’t choose war in Ukraine. Russia doesn’t like NATO. Too bad. Russia chose to invade. Russia chose war. So, once you choose war, you have to deal with the outcome.

    We could go on all day about the bad shit that the US has done, is doing. We could go on all day about the bad shit that China has done, is doing. Same with most countries and gov’t’s. But try to focus on one topic at a time. Russia invaded a sovereign country. In 2014 Russia illegally annexed Crimea. Russia is the root of the problem in Ukraine right now. Russia is the one who needs to get the fuck out if it wants peace. You can choose to do things diplomatically, or you can choose the idiot’s way and go to war. Russia chose to go to war. The world will be a better place if they come out of this without the ability to wage any more acts of aggression against its neighbor’s for a long, long time.

    Bending yourself into a pretzel trying to weirdly justify Russia’s aggression is fucking strange.

    • @niceboysummerOP
      link
      -11 year ago

      Yes, every country must bow down the the United States and its junior partners. I see now. Wars can only have one bad actor, and one reason for occurring, and Ukraine is a shining beacon of democracy, and not a nearly identical country with a nearly identical political system (except until maybe the Nazi & US led coup in 2014).

      The world will absolutely not be a better place if the US/NATO wins. The US government serves finance capital and the defense industry before any regular person. Russia sucks, but they don’t have control over the rest of the world the way that the US does. The US is not a bastion of freedom or human rights, it the the world #1 jailer and is responsible for millions, if not tens of millions, of deaths around the world in the past few decades alone. While the planet boils from the economic system they defend to the death, they will be rewarding their class with money hand over fist, selling weapons and gas to their client states in europe, and all while telling us that they are fighting for human rights the whole time. The US has even written position papers that the war is good for them (check out the original RAND paper written prior to the war) They think using this proxy war will weaken a potential geopolitical threat, and they have had a huge windfall increasing their sales of LNG and weapons. The US wants to fight russia to the last ukranian and instead of calling for some kind of peaceful settlement liberals are frothing at the mouth for russian blood and calling them orcs, pretending it isn’t racist at all

      • @TokenBoomer
        link
        2
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Mexico wants to join the BRICS trade alliance. Then China starts arming Mexico and offering them intelligence on the US. Do you think the US would allow that? Or would they start a war with Mexico to keep a buffer against the BRICS alliance? Russia has 2 military naval ports in the Baltic and Black seas facing NATO countries. One in Syria and one in Crimea. The war in Syria threatened to cut off one port. And Ukraine joining the EU or NATO threatened to cut off the other. That explains so much of what is going on. It’s also why Russia is accelerating climate change. It opens up ports in the arctic and allows for Siberia to become the breadbasket of the world. I respect your indefatigable tenacity.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        11 year ago

        LOL, you’re still doing the whataboutism and defending fucking Russia for invading another country. It’s kind of sad really. Russia could, you know, like not invade and try to solve things diplomatically. But no, Russia invaded another country.

        If you want to talk about the bad shit the US (or China or wherever) has gotten up to, and is getting up to, feel free. I have a lot to say on those fronts too. But that doesn’t change the fact that Russia decided to go invade another sovereign country, and the fact that you are defending Russia. Not a good look.