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السبت, 12 آذار/مارس 2022 11:13

The History Behind the Russia-Ukraine War 2/2

كتبه  by Scott Horton
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This is the deadly legacy of the Democrats, FBI and CIA’s Russiagate hoax. Millions of Americans, caught up in the lies of these monsters, came to believe that their country had quite literally been conquered by the Russians in a way that the Communists only ever could in the movies: they had installed a Manchurian Candidate, a compromised white-supremacist agent of the Kremlin in the Oval Office, with his finger on the big red button and all. Narratives about politicians and statesmen fighting over regional power and influence give way to cartoonish morality plays full of heroes and villains and black and white issues and perceptions about Russa taken from appraisals of Nazi Germany back in the 1940s but just do not apply to Russia today. You cannot negotiate with Evil, as Dick Cheney might say.

An important note about the INF Treaty: The MK-41 missile launchers Obama installed in Romania and Poland are supposedly for firing defensive missiles, but they also fit medium range Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be tipped with hydrogen bombs. So the U.S. broke at least the spirit of the INF Treaty first. The same was true with the ships in the Baltic Sea which also employ these possible dual-use launchers. Russia then developed some new missiles that were probably also in violation – but were only being used for deployment near Russia’s frontier with China. But guess what? That’s why the U.S. wanted out of the treaty too, so they could deploy medium range missiles against China. So instead of saying, "hold on now," and trying to negotiate a continuation, this important Reagan-era treaty that kept medium range nuclear missiles out of Europe for 30 years is now dead. (More on that in a minute.)

Perhaps worst of all was Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review which, like his official National Security Strategy, announced a return to "great power competition," specifically citing the alleged Russian "threat" and called for the development and deployment of more low-yield, "usable" nuclear bombs and missiles (more on those in a minute), announced that the United States will not seek ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and even denounces the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which of course America signed back in 1968, promising to abolish our nuclear weapons stockpile completely, but has always ignored anyway.

In the summer of 2020, the disgusting New York Times/CIA stenographer Charlie Savage wrote a trash article reporting on the "fact" of the existence of an obviously fake rumor that the Russians were paying the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The truth is there was no truth to this at all. The Russians pay the Taliban for the same reason the U.S. spent the last years of the war flying as their "air force": they won the war, and were a far better bet for fighting ISIS than the phony Afghan government the U.S. had created in Kabul. But the hoax was enough to preemptively cancel any attempt Trump might have made to pull the troops out that summer, a possibility his people had begun to float as a possibility in the spring. All other things being equal, the best thing would have been to leave in the winter, but leaving in the summer 9 months ahead of schedule would have almost certainly have avoided the disaster that took place when Biden postponed the withdrawal to September 2021, trying to evacuate just as the Taliban were marching into the capital city.

Biden So Far

Joe Biden came to power seemingly determined to increase tensions with Moscow. He vastly increased provocative naval missions in the Black Sea and increased weapons transfers to Ukraine. On the other hand, he did save the New START Treaty, which, is the last standing nuclear weapons treaty limiting overall and deployed numbers of nuclear weapons by the U.S. and Russia. And he also finally gave up and lifted the sanctions on the firms building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. [John Stewart earpiece joke.] What’s that? Sorry yall, I spoke too soon. They’re back on again. That didn’t last very long. And as I said, it doesn’t even matter since the Germans have now gone ahead and cancelled it in response to the invasion. (Apologies to John Stewart out there somewhere.)

Biden vowed to reinforce America’s "sacred" commitment to the NATO alliance in Europe to roll back Russia. It has to be something. After helping turn Kosovo over to a bunch of terrorists and gangsters, losing a 20-year war in Afghanistan and turning Libya into a warring den of militias and bin Ladenites, the bureaucrats at alliance headquarters were starting to get nervous. A New York Times headline from the end of 2020 says it all. "NATO Needs to Adapt Quickly to Stay Relevant for 2030, Report Urges." They do not even know to be embarrassed. If the NATO alliance is not relevant, then why do we have it at all? How can their mission be "sacred" when they had to hold an emergency study group to decide what it is? The answer they came up with? China. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s new reason for existing is China. Or maybe they just got lucky and a new lease on life in Eastern Europe instead.

This is how the Bush and Obama governments talked about the Afghanistan war as well. It was a "team-building exercise" for the Atlantic alliance. In other words, these policies exist because all the vested interests want to stay paid without having to get a real job. It is understandable but unacceptable.

Americans caught off guard by all the big news recently might have no reason to believe that the U.S. could be unreasonably instigating a conflict here. But the blogger Bernard from Moon of Alabama recently pointed to an important study by the Air Force’s RAND Corporation think tank, titled, "Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground," which recommended a nearly endless list of provocations against a presumably weak and helpless Russia: providing arms to Ukraine; increasing support to the so-called "rebels" in Syria’s Idlib Province (madness, treason); promoting "regime change" in Belarus; exploiting tensions in the South Caucuses; reducing Russian influence in Central Asia; and "challenging" Russian influence in Moldova.

As Bernard points out, the Biden administration has largely pursued the agendas laid out in the document. Observing that the official demands of the attempted revolutionaries in Kazakhstan last January include withdrawal from all alliances with Russia and the efforts of the U.S. embassy and National Endowment for Democracy to support anti-regime forces there, he inferred that the U.S. and its allies were playing a role in the short-lived violent uprising, and correctly predicted that the effort would backfire and "strengthen Russia." In fact Russian troops did intervene, quickly crushed the insurrection and withdrew, now with the government there more dependent on them than before.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington in September 2021 and asked to begin negotiations toward Ukraine’s admission to NATO. This may have been the final straw before President Putin began to build up forces at bases adjacent to Ukraine last fall.

Putin proposed a treaty stating that Ukraine will not be brought into the alliance, that the U.S. promises not to station troops or offensive weapons there, to revive the INF treaty and for the U.S. to withdraw its military footprint in NATO member nations in Eastern Europe, as the Bill Clinton administration had promised not to do when embarking on the expansion project in 1997. Putin knows the U.S. will not agree to these terms, but he knows the U.S. will not seek to integrate Ukraine into NATO in the medium term at least. Biden said repeatedly he does not seek to integrate Ukraine into the alliance or station missiles there, and in his written response to Putin offered serious guarantees that the U.S. will not deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles to Romania and Poland even with the INF Treaty now being dead, including a new verification regime. On both of these major points, Putin had already won.

But apparently the Americans’ childish stubbornness on the issue of supposedly allowing Russia to "close the door" on another country’s ability to join NATO, the situation in the Donbass and the failure of the Kiev government to fully implement the Minsk II peace deal of 2015, which would have ended the fighting, given the Donbass increased autonomy and also veto power over the foreign policy decisions of the government in Kiev, was too much.

On Monday the 21st, the eighth anniversary of the 2014 coup against Yanukovych, Putin announced he was recognizing the "independence" of the two breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk and began marching his so-called "peacekeepers" in. At the time I’m giving this talk on Saturday March 5, the Russians seem to be in the process of conquering the entire country. In his statement Monday, Putin certainly made an argument broad enough to justify seizing the entire nation of Ukraine and integrating it into the Russian federation. As I said at the beginning it is not clear what his goals are at this point.

In a way, Putin’s absorption of the Donbass is actually a major loss for Russia. It made more sense to leave that strongly pro-Russian population inside Ukraine to at least possibly one day again serve as a balance against the western nationalists. That seemed to have been a major part of why he did not incorporate the Donbass back in early 2015, when they voted to ask to join Russia. Now that Putin has taken them away from Ukraine, he has strengthened the hand of his opponents. Now it seems that he has escalated to full-scale war in an attempt to solve that problem.

So far the U.S. and its allies have launched an all-out diplomatic and economic war against Russia in response. What future demands will he issue? What will the Western and NATO reaction be? I hate to consider it. Biden has sworn the U.S. will not fight for Ukraine, but they would still escalate the economic and diplomatic war to a point it could break out into a real war with NATO anyway.

The Germans have already announced the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and all of the Western nations and our East Asian allies have all announced a massive new round of sanctions against Russia. Biden has increased troop levels in the Baltics, though thankfully still not above decorative levels.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. should send someone capable, if the secretary of state isn’t up to it, to hammer out a deal. Retired U.S. army Col. Douglas Macgregor, an expert at the top of his field on the question of how to fight a war against Russia in Eastern Europe if it ever came down to it. Macgregor is proposing a deal recognizing Ukrainian neutrality and the scaling back of U.S. and other NATO forces in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia staying east of the Dnieper river. At this point that would mean they would have to withdraw from Lviv, Kiev and Odessa. Either way it shows that this is a peripheral interest to America at all, while it’s obviously central to Russia’s policy: "Okay, take half, but no more." And we will pull back our military presence in Eastern Europe because the Russians really do have a point that putting them does not spread peace and security but suspicion and destabilization.

What’s it all about?

Well it isn’t the threat of Soviet Communism, dead and gone 30 years now.

Putin is correct when he consistently refers to America as Russia’s "partners." In 2021, U.S. imported somewhere around 20 million barrels of Russian oil and gas per month.

I swear this is true: Two weeks ago today, the U.S., Russia and Ukraine successfully launched a rocket and satellite into orbit together. Again.

And it isn’t about containing "Russian Aggression" which exists only in the minds of their aggressive accusers. Russia’s entire GDP last year was 1.5 trillion dollars. When you include the VA and the energy department’s care and feeding of the nuke stockpile, the U.S. spends a trillion dollars per year on the military. Russia spends $60 billion. We have more than a million-man army spread throughout the world. They have 420,000 men and they almost all stay home, except special operations types in Ukraine and those and some air power in Syria, where, again, the U.S. has provoked their intervention through irresponsible policies in the first place.

The Russians have one broken down old diesel-powered aircraft carrier. America has 11 nuclear-powered carrier battle groups throughout the world at all times, 20 carriers overall. The U.S. has more than 3 times the amount of military aircraft as the Russians when including the U.S. air force and navy.

But Congressman Adam Schiff of California says we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. He really said that. He said it to justify sending arms to Ukraine, helping pick a fight for them that they cannot win when there never was any threat to us in the first place.

Well so far Putin has absorbed the Donbass region in the far east of Ukraine in the name of recognizing their "independence," at least from Kiev. Some experts claim that Putin is determined to recreate the USSR or at least the old Russian empire. But the residual fear left over from the Russiagate hoax has tainted Americans’ fears so badly that it’s hard to know how serious any of that is. Putin has begun insisting that NATO be rolled all the way back to Germany, like in the deal George H.W. Bush made, whether he really intends to call America’s bluff in the Baltics or Poland remain to be seen.

The man has been president of Russia for 20 years, virtually uninterrupted and up until now betrayed no intention of going this far. Again, in February 2015, the Donbass voted to join Russia and Putin told them no. Lyle Goldstein, an expert at Defense Priorities, formerly with the Naval War College told me two weeks ago that he believed the failed so-called "revolution" staged by the U.S. in Belarus last year was the final straw that changed Putin’s calculations. After decades of slights, that was the last one.

In his speech last Monday, February 21st, when Putin announced his government’s recognition of the so-called independence of the Donbass region, Donetsk and Luhansk, he again complained in quite explicit terms about Gorbachev’s decision to allow independence not only for the Warsaw Pact states, but also for the former so-called "republics," the Baltics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), as well as Belarus and Ukraine, leaving ethnic Russians behind and allowing for security threats on their borders. He brought up the danger of Ukraine’s admission to NATO and the eventual deployment of missiles and other American forces armaments being stationed there. If the Biden administration truly has no intention of installing such missiles, they should have given all the assurances necessary to satisfy Russia’s legitimate security concerns there.

Again, not that it justifies what Putin has done here or the worsening problems that are almost certain to come from it. But many of his worst accusations about the actions of the U.S.-led West in Ukraine were true, including the breaking of Bush Sr.’s no NATO expansion promises, CIA support for the bin Ladenite terrorists in Chechnya, Libya and Syria and war against Serbia to break off Kosovo, the disaster of Iraq War II and Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty, (again!) dual-use launchers at ABM sites in Eastern Europe, the 2014 coup and the subsequent and ongoing war in the east, including U.S. training for fighters, all the American and allied arms and advisers in the country since 2014 and cooperation with the U.S. Navy that he says puts the Russian Black Sea Fleet at risk. He also credibly claimed that the Ukrainian military had already been integrated with NATO and has given access to U.S. surveillance drones and planes.

TV says Putin is just a psycho-case who wants to be a great Czar in history or something like that. It’s definitely a personal problem manifesting itself this way. Condoleezza Rice publicly wonders if he’s mentally ill. Why else could he possibly be acting this way? I think this part of his speech is worth quoting:

"Many Ukrainian airfields are located close to our borders. NATO tactical aircraft stationed here, including carriers of high-precision weapons, will be able to hit our territory to the depth of the Volgograd-Kazan-Samara-Astrakhan line. The deployment of radar reconnaissance assets on the territory of Ukraine will allow NATO to tightly control the airspace of Russia right up to the Urals. …

"After the US destroyed the INF Treaty, the Pentagon has been openly developing many land-based attack weapons, including ballistic missiles that are capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 5,500 km.

"If deployed in Ukraine, such systems will be able to hit targets in Russia’s entire European part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkiv will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes.

"It is like a knife to the throat."

This all provided him a compelling narrative to his domestic audience that Ukrainian independence was a mistake because it just cannot be without the west taking it over. Purposely echoing the arguments of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Putin invoked an illusory nuclear weapons threat — "weapons of mass destruction" — from Ukraine and his determination to protect the people of the Donbass from so-called "genocide." He claimed that Ukraine has been "reduced to a colony with a puppet regime," by the United States, and again he essentially argued that he would be justified in conquering the entire country. Again, I am not saying that his actions are reasonable. They are not. But his argument is rational if angry, more substance than bluster.

Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. has no intention of inviting Ukraine into NATO anytime in at least the next ten years. But it was somehow decided that it was a "sacred" principle that no one can ever "close the door" on NATO membership for anyone else. So if Putin wants the obvious in writing, forget it. That would be letting him "close the door," which would be intolerable. So it’s come to this over alliance membership which is not truly on offer and missiles the U.S. has no real intent to install. Biden now argues those are just pretexts for war. Well, maybe the U.S. should have given in and called their bluff by offering these security guarantees — since these are their policies anyway. They could have just put it in writing.

This is not just Antiwar.com’s point of view. Many liberal, conservative and realist scholars and experts agree on the same thing: Russia has very real security concerns here, and the U.S. and its allies should recognize that and treat them with the respect they deserve. Not more than that, but just what’s right.

The only risk to the United States itself is that our government would get us into a nuclear war over a country where we have no national interests whatsoever like Ukraine. The original Red Dawn invasion-occupation scenario makes for a hilarious and awesome movie, but despite Adam Schiff’s threats that the Russians will soon be parachuting into Colorado’s Front Range, it is just a movie.

"Wrong Commie! It’s Houston!" Sorry, I just love that.

Speaking of Wolverines, what will the U.S.-trained neo-Nazi-infested Stay Behind militias and saboteurs accomplish against Russia? Will the U.S. and its allies provide them safe haven in Poland from which to fight?

Somewhat famously, myself and a few other prominent antiwar types had mistakenly thought the administration and media were overreacting to Putin’s buildup and that Biden had hopefully conceded enough to avoid war.

Though it is not certain, I’m beginning to believe that my mistake was in — even after everything we’ve been through — not immediately presuming the worst about the U.S. government: that they really did want this to happen.

Some important indications are in recent prominent references to an American-backed "Stay Behind" program, beginning with semi-official CIA spokesman David Ignatius writing in the Washington Post in December. This effort included not only training by the U.S. CIA and military, but according to Zach Dorfman in Yahoo News, training them in the United States. A "former senior intelligence official" told Dorfman:

"If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders. We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact. … There’s going to be people who make their life miserable. [The CIA’s fighters] will organize the resistance. All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan, they can expect to see that in spades with these guys."

Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s statements seem to indicate a possible plan to bait Russia into this war to bleed them dry in the Afghan style. Irony is not their strong point. He told CBS News,

"Well, what the president has said is that we will continue to support Ukraine even after an invasion begins, and I’m not going to get into the specific details of what that will look like, but it is one of the three fundamental elements of our response."

On January 14, the New York Times ran a story called "U.S. Considers Backing an Insurgency in Ukraine." In it Helene Cooper wrote, "In Afghanistan, the United States showed itself to be dismal at fighting insurgencies. But when it comes to funding them, military experts say it is a different ballgame."

She quoted the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe and Hillary Clinton adviser, retired admiral James Stavridis:

"If Putin invades Ukraine with a major military force, U.S. and NATO military assistance — intelligence, cyber, anti-armor and anti-air weapons, offensive naval missiles — would ratchet up significantly. And if it turned into a Ukrainian insurgency, Putin should realize that after fighting insurgencies ourselves for two decades, we know how to arm, train and energize them."

"The level of military support would make our efforts in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union [in the 1980s] look puny by comparison."

Weapons to Ukraine had all been supposedly "calibrated" they said, "not to provoke Mr. Putin," officials told the New York Times. Maybe arming an insurgency truly is Plan B after an invasion they truly meant to deter and these Democrats are just very poor at "calibration." But they sure seem to be thinking ahead to how an invasion could hurt Russia, with the poor Ukrainians serving as merely an instrument against them.

"A Western military adviser to the Ukrainians said that details of a specific resistance there remained a closely held secret. But already, particularly in the west, Ukrainians are joining territorial defense forces that train in guerrilla tactics.

"The Biden administration and its NATO allies want to capitalize on any distaste the Russian body politic might have for troop casualties, U.S. and European officials said in interviews."

Former Obama-era defense department official Evelyn Farkas told the Times, "I think the gloves should come off." When asked about the involvement of Hitler-loving neo-Nazis, including Americans, among Ukrainian nationalist forces, Farkas told Newsweek, "The far-right groups are helping defend Ukraine. … the Ukrainian government needs all the help it can get from its citizens, regardless of their ideology."

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent performance on MSNBC gives further reason to suspect this outcome was welcome if not preferred. Hey, she is Hillary Clinton, so they just let her blabber on about it:

"Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. And although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisers to those who were recruited to fight Russia. It didn’t end well for the Russians. And there were other unintended consequences, as we know, but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

"Obviously the similarities are not ones that we should bank on because the terrain, the development in urban areas is so different, but I think that is the model that people are now looking toward. And if there can be sufficient armaments that can get in, and they should be able to get in along some of the borders between other nations and Ukraine, and keep the Ukrainians, both their military and their citizens, volunteer soldiers, supplies, That can continue to stymie Russia.

"Now, let’s be clear that Russia has overwhelming military force. But of course they did in Afghanistan as well. They have also brought a lot of air power to Syria. It took years to finally defeat Syria in terms of the insurgencies, the democratic forces — as well as others — who battled the Russians, the Syrians and the Iranians."

By others she means, the terrorists backed by the United States and its allies, like Jaysh al Islam, Arar al Sham and Jabhat al Nusra, aka Hayat Tahrir al Sham.

After claiming the Russian forces are completely disorganized and weak, she continues, "So I think we have to watch this carefully. We have to provide sufficient military armaments for the Ukrainian military and volunteers. And we have to keep tightening the screws."

People really should watch the entire clip to see the way Clinton smirks at the cute little irony of al Qaeda’s attacks against America and the entire 20-year terror war: What are two million dead human, 10 trillion dollars wasted, the 21st century and new millennium started off soaking in blood just a decade after the peaceful victory for the West after the fall of the USSR? Just a few little-old "unintended consequences," not even worth mentioning.

But the most compelling bit of information along these lines came from CBS News’s Margaret Brennan, who wrote on March 1, that,

"Given the durability of the Ukrainian resistance and its long history of pushing Russia back, the U.S. and Western powers do not believe that this will be a short war. The UK foreign secretary estimated it would be a 10-year war. Lawmakers at the Capitol were told Monday it is likely to last 10, 15 or 20 years — and that ultimately, Russia will lose."

To me this seems to indicate that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies have been planning for this. To "give them their own Vietnam" again in Ukraine as our government is still giving us for 20 years in the Middle East and beyond.

Could it be that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent comments about seeking nuclear weapons at the Munich Security Conference, which many analysts think may have been the last straw before the invasion, a deliberate provocation — it was certainly invoked as an excuse to invade by Putin in his speech of February 24. Certainly, he must have known he could not obtain nuclear weapons from other weapons states, nor fabricate one of his own in any reasonable amount of time to serve as a deterrent.

As historian Jeff Rogg recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, declassified CIA documents show that when they backed right wing Stay Behind forces in Ukraine against the Soviets in the 1950s, the stated purpose of the operation was not to liberate Ukraine, but to "bleed" Russia. He quoted a CIA historian who wrote that since the Ukrainians had no chance at victory, "America was in effect encouraging Ukrainians to go to their deaths." We could very well be seeing the beginning of an attempt to do the same thing again.

"The CIA’s recent experience in supporting and fighting insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria prepares it well for opposing Russia’s modern, conventional forces," former CIA officer Douglas London wrote in Foreign Affairs in February.

Instead of looking to negotiate an early end to the war, the U.S. foreign policy establishment would prefer to see an endless insurgency against Russia in Europe, if barely. A whole new wave of weapons is now flowing into the country from the United States and its allies, reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars worth, so far. No one on the American side is talking about negotiating a long-term peace. All we here is talk of supporting this new cross between the Galatian SS and the mujahideen "to kill Russians," as a CIA official told Yahoo’s Dorfman.

Why is the U.S. government taking such risks? It’s the money. As Richard Cummings did such a great job of explaining in his 2007 article "Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," the 1990s-era U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was a project of Lockheed Vice-President Bruce Jackson. The whole thing was just a racket for selling jets either directly to the eastern European states, or failing that, to force the American taxpayer to pick up the tab for them.

The Military-Industrial Complex President Ike Eisenhower helped to build and then warned us about, has completely captured our government, in alliance with foreign states in the Middle East and Europe.

A fun anecdote about that: back in the spring of 2014, Harper’s magazine reporter Andrew Cockburn reported that he had a source who had been at a big party in Crystal City outside of Washington, D.C. — an area heavy with military contractors and lobbyists — when it was announced that the Russian sailors were leaving their bases and seizing the Crimean Peninsula. They all started laughing and cheering and celebrating. Forget patrolling Pashtun peasants in Paktika, a massive buildup against the renewed Russian Threat was exactly the conflict these men were looking and hoping for; threatening the future of our entire species so they can keep making money for nothing.

You’ll note that while the Army and Air Force focus on Eastern Europe, the Navy and Marines are more concerned with implementing their Air/Sea Battle doctrines in East Asia, while the Special Operations Command is doubling down in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya and on into West Africa. What accounts for the different services’ perception of the threats facing America?

It’s all in the game. The entire U.S. military is, as they themselves call it, a "self-licking ice cream cone," dedicated to its own perpetuation at any cost, and conveniently, continually creating the disasters which are said to require their next intervention.

Full-Spectrum Dominance is a government program; as such it is the means and the end in itself.

Of course we shouldn’t sell the American foreign policy establishment too short: they are not only greedy, but seem to truly believe their own public relations about how smart and moral and exceptional they are. As Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright explained in 1998,

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. And we see the danger here to all of us."

(She was defending bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia, a policy which got 3,000 Americans killed just three and a half years later.)

Nuclear Weapons

The elephant in the room here of course are the hydrogen bombs, otherwise known as thermonuclear fusion bombs or "strategic" nuclear weapons. One of these in the high kiloton or low megaton range can kill your entire city in a single shot.

Barack Obama pushed a massive appropriation toward revamping the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal as well as a complete overhaul of the entire industry; all the factories and national laboratories too. They started by saying the project would cost 1 trillion dollars. Now it’s 1.75 trillion. We’ll be lucky if it’s only 3 or 4 trillion dollars by the time their done. And this after spending almost 6 trillion on the current arsenal during the last arms race with Russia in the 20th century. This was the only was to get the New START Treaty ratified by the Senate. The "nuclear weapons caucus’s" financial needs must be satisfied for us to have any limits on overall stockpiles and deployed nukes at all.

Much of the time, if you listen to the DC wonks talk about it, the H-bombs just go without saying. Of course everybody knows that both sides are armed to the teeth with them still, but so then their part in the story remains unsaid, leaving entire plans and discussions about war revolving around the idea that we could really just fight a conventional war with Russia like in some fun fantasy of a junior tank officer or a stay-at-home PlayStation general.

But both sides still have about 2,000 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs deployed, with approximately another 4,000 each in reserve.

Possibly even more dangerous than mostly dormant stockpiles of the multi-megaton city-killers are the new dial-a-yield bombs, capable of being detonated at so-called "usable" low-yield strengths in the 10s or even single digit kilotons. They also come with new and improved proximity fuses that make them far more accurate. This might sound like an improvement, but at the same time it makes the actual use of these weapons seem far more plausible to the men in control of them. It was only just announced two years ago that the first of the new generation of these weapons have been deployed on U.S. submarines.

The Americans have a theory that Russia’s new military doctrine in Europe is to "escalate to de-escalate" — that is, in the event of war, to use one small nuke to dissuade any further escalation by our side. But the U.S. wants the Russians to know that that won’t work: the U.S. will escalate back, not disengage. To drive this point home a story was leaked in 2020 about a war game which included the use by Russia of a low-yield nuke under their alleged new doctrine. So in the simulation, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper immediately nuked them right back. Hans Christianson from the Federation of American Scientists said this leak was also a public relations stunt to get Congress to fund the new submarine-launched low-yield cruise missile.

By the way, in Andrew Cockburn’s book Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy, he describes how the former Secretary of Defense, filling in as the president while playing Continuity of Government games in the 1990s, would always blow up the world, every chance he got. Even when the game was designed to provide off ramps from full Omnicide, Rumsfeld still went for it every time.

In real life, this type of exchange, beginning with so-called tactical nukes, would almost certainly devolve into general nuclear war and the destruction of the northern hemisphere and the starvation of billions more, as a war simulation carried out by Princeton University demonstrated in 2019. Any people who survived would have been set back centuries. Even an extremely so-called "limited" nuclear war, such as between India and Pakistan, could kill as many people as all who died in World War II in a single day. The soot from the fires, rising high above the clouds where it cannot be rained out, could be enough to darken sunlight enough to cause nuclear winter, massive global crop failures and the deaths of billions.

And for what? To keep Russia from occupying Lviv, Tallinn or Vilnius, cities most Americans have never heard of before in their lives?

In another recent DoD exercise, Russia nukes Ukraine first and the U.S. responds by nuking their ally Belarus. Who comes up with this stuff?

If you want to know how crazy America’s nuclear weapons policy really is, please read The Doomsday Machine by the great Vietnam War whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. He was also a nuclear war planner and has some serious things to tell you in there. For example, back in the ’50s, the one and only nuclear war plan said that in the event of a crisis with the Soviets, in, say, West Berlin, the U.S. would nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China. Though that was revised somewhat in the Kennedy years, anecdotes since that time are not reassuring. Old "Iron Ass," Dick Cheney, was said to be astonished and disturbed when as secretary of defense in the Bush Sr. years, he was shown a simulation of a U.S. nuclear war against Russia which included scores and scores of strikes on Moscow, long after it would have ceased to exist. "Moscow turned slowly into a solid red, covered over and over with ludicrous targets," a witness later said. "Cheney started squirming around and finally asked one of his military aides why we were doing this kind of thing."

Well, you see, every service wants two cracks at every target because what if the first shot is a dud? Better make it three air force gravity bombs, two ICBMs, two Tomahawk cruise missiles and a couple of sub-launched Polaris missiles at this one radar station on the edge of town, just to be sure. And every new weapon invented and deployed is added to the list while the old ones remain. Year after year it adds up to just comic book-crazy scenarios such as nuking cities full of people and then the empty craters over and over and over again. As Ellsberg recounted, when he left his first viewing of Dr. Strangelove, he and a RAND Corporation college said to each other, that wasn’t satire; it was a documentary.

It seems crazy and alarmist to even consider. After all, what could we really have to fight about with Russia now that’s more important that all the crises of the first Cold War era? But it is crazy. And that’s why we should be alarmed. And we should do everything we can to shout down those ignorant TV-slogan shouting myna birds in our communities who have climbed on board the bandwagon on this.

It’s no different than the demonization of any of the U.S. government’s enemies here and around the world: virtually the entire popular narrative is fake.

The older generation is used to hating Russia and the young have been sold a line about "Russian aggression" throughout Eastern Europe for years now, and of course the Russiagate hoax and the dastardly Putin inflicting Trump upon our land which has seemingly forever damaged the brains of America’s Democrats.

But the U.S.A., not Russia, is the World Empire. And it shouldn’t be. Primacy in the Old World is a Fool’s Errand. This is the middle part of North America. Our supposed limited constitutional republic should never have tried it. And while it’s possible that economic catastrophe could end the era of attempted predominance before a nuclear war does, it seems that the more responsible course would be to recognize the self-destructive nature of our current policy and just call it all off now while we’re still ahead.

Even Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, author of the doctrine of "benevolent global hegemony" admitted in the Washington Post the other day that the unipolar moment is truly over now. The former power disparity between the U.S. and the two major independent powers of Russia and China has now begun to shift back.

"It is time to start imagining a world where Russia effectively controls much of Eastern Europe and China controls much of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Americans and their democratic allies in Europe and Asia will have to decide, again, whether that world is tolerable."

Tolerable? Compared to what? Better dead than also-red, white and blue?

Sorry, I’m almost done.

Strobe Talbott was Bill Clinton’s roommate at Oxford when they were Rhodes Scholars and later became his national security adviser and eventually became one of the biggest promoters of NATO expansion inside the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

In 2018 a New York Times reporter went to see Talbott to ask what went wrong with the American-Russian relationship. Talbott conceded that NATO expansion had been provocative but argued in his own defense that, "If the leadership of a country has any view but the following, it’s not going to be the leadership of that county for very long. And that is: We do what we can in our own interest." When it came to NATO expansion, Talbott asked, "Should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?"

It’s just a simple matter of time preference. Should we worry more about angering and provoking Russia, ruining our new friendly relationship and risking going back to the bad old days of the Cold War or worse 24 years from now, or should we worry about collecting Polish votes and Lockheed dollars today? To us, the answer is obvious. To them it is too, but they answer it wrong.

It never had to be this way. Putin and his men obviously are responsible for the decisions that they have made and the blood on their hands. But the fact remains that it is the U.S.A. which has picked this fight so far from our shores.

And it seems the establishment is going mad with frustration over the crisis they have created. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution have both publicly threatened regime change in Moscow. Republicans and Democrats of all descriptions are demanding no-fly zones over Ukraine and escalated intervention against Russia there, the lesson of what can happen when the U.S. does so seemingly completely lost on them. Biden and the Pentagon so far are more reluctant.

Of course in the current political climate any statement or position that contains anything better than the most overly simplistic, "other side"-bashing, fearmongering point of view is spun from on high as not just "pro-Russian," but also "obviously-secretly-controlled-by-Russia" because what other explanation for someone not believing the hype could there possibly be?

But that’s why the current political climate must change. America’s relationship with Russia is the single most important matter facing humanity. We all deserve policies that will bring an end to the current system which requires a perpetual nuclear sword hanging over all of our necks while tragic proxy conflicts are waged against innocent people and the threat of a real war breaking out is higher than at any time since the early 1980s, if not the early 1960s.

This essential issue is one where libertarians can lead by telling the truth and demanding an end to this insane game of militarism and global hegemony so that we can truly live in peace and prosperity together.

Scott Horton is editorial director of Antiwar.com, director of the Libertarian Institute, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He’s the author of the 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editor of the 2019 book, The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019. He’s conducted more than 5,500 interviews since 2003. Scott’s articles have appeared at Antiwar.com, The American Conservative magazine, the History News Network, The Future of FreedomThe National Interest and the Christian Science Monitor. He also contributed a chapter to the 2019 book, The Impact of War. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, investigative reporter Larisa Alexandrovna Horton. He is a fan of, but no relation to the lawyer from Harper’s. Scott’s TwitterYouTubePatreon.

Link : https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2022/03/02/the-history-behind-the-russia-ukraine-war/

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