/ world today news/ The playbook that the pimps of war use to drag us into one military failure after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change: freedom and democracy are at risk. Evil must be defeated. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules-based international order”, is at stake. Victory is certain.
The results are also the same. Excuses and narratives are exposed as lies. The happy prediction turns out to be false. Those on whose behalf we supposedly fight are just as corrupt as those we fight against.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, even though it was provoked by NATO expansion and US support for the 2014 Maidan coup that ousted 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 resolved 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 reduced to rubble.
But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve US interests. It enriches arms 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 much cheaper way — both in dollars and in American lives — to reduce Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” the Senate Republican leader acknowledged Mitch McConnell.
“Secondly, the effective defense of Ukraine’s territory teaches us lessons on how to improve the defense of partners who are threatened by China. Not surprisingly, high-ranking Taiwanese officials are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia.
Third, most of the money earmarked for security assistance to Ukraine does not actually go to Ukraine. It is invested in American defense production. It funds new weapons and ammunition for the U.S. Air Force to replace the older materials we provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this aid means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemen.
Once the truth of these endless wars seeps into the public consciousness, the media that slavishly promotes these conflicts drastically reduces coverage. Military failures, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue to be overlooked. While the US admits defeat, most hardly remember that these wars were fought.
The war pimps who orchestrate these military failures migrate from administration to administration. Between posts, they are housed at think tanks such as the Project for a New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, the Foreign Policy Initiative, the Institute for the Study of War, the Atlantic Council, and the Brookings Institution—funded by corporations and the military industry. After the war in Ukraine reaches its inevitable end, these specialists will try to start a war with China. The US Navy and military are already threatening and encircling China. God help us if we don’t stop them.
These pimps of war drag us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as the saviors of the world. They don’t even have to be inventive. The rhetoric is from the old handbooks. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag – this time blue and yellow – to become unwitting agents in our own self-immolation.
Since the end of World War II, the government has spent between 45 and 90 percent of the federal budget on past, present, and future military operations. It is the largest ongoing activity of the US government. It has ceased to matter – at least to the pimps of war – whether these wars are rational or prudent. The military industry metastasized into the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from within. The US is maligned abroad, mired in debt, has an impoverished working class, and is saddled with a crumbling infrastructure as well as shoddy social services.
Shouldn’t the Russian army – due to bad morale, bad generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages – collapsed months ago? Shouldn’t Putin have been ousted from power? Shouldn’t the sanctions have sent the ruble into a death spiral? Shouldn’t the separation of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, 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 almost $150 billion in sophisticated military equipment, financial and humanitarian aid pledged by the US, the EU and 11 other countries to turn the tide of the war? How was it that perhaps a third of the tanks provided by Germany and the US were quickly reduced to charred pieces of metal by Russian mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, airstrikes and rockets at the start of the vaunted counter-offensive? Wasn’t this Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was originally known as the “Spring Offensive”, aimed to break through Russia’s heavily fortified front lines and take back huge swaths of territory? How can we explain the tens of thousands of casualties of the Ukrainian army and the forced conscription by the Ukrainian army? Even our retired generals and former CIA, FBI, NSA, and Homeland Security officials who serve as media analysts cannot say that the offensive has been successful.
And what about the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament cancel the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of war against ethnic Russians in the Donbas region before the Russian invasion in February 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced before Russia invaded last year?
How to defend President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to ban eleven opposition parties, including the “Opposition Platform for Life,” which had 10 percent of the seats in the Rada, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament, along with the Shari’i party, Nashi, the “Opposition Bloc” ”, “Left Opposition”, Union of Left Forces, “State”, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party and Bloc of Volodymyr Saldo? How can we accept the banning of these opposition parties – many of which are on the left – while Zelensky allows fascists from the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, as well as the Bandera Azov Battalion and other extremist militias to flourish?
How to deal with the anti-Russian purges and arrests of alleged “fifth columns” sweeping across Ukraine, given that 30% of Ukraine’s population is Russian-speaking? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi groups supported by the Zelenskyi government who harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten municipal officials, the media, artists and foreign students? How can we accept the decision of the US and its Western allies to block negotiations with Russia to end the war, even though Kiev and Moscow were apparently on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty?
I was reporting from Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 during the collapse of the Soviet Union. We assumed that NATO was obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker in the Ronald Reagan administration, along with West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded beyond the borders of a unified Germany. We naively thought that the end of the Cold War meant that Russia, Europe and the US would no longer divert huge resources to their militaries.
However, the so-called “peace dividend” was a chimera.
If Russia did not want to be an enemy, Russia would be forced to become an enemy. The war pimps recruited former Soviet republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. The 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, have reconfigured their armed forces, often through dozens millions in Western loans to become compatible with NATO military equipment. This brought billions in profits to arms manufacturers.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in Eastern and Central Europe, it was realized that NATO expansion was an unnecessary and dangerous provocation. It made no geopolitical sense. But there was commercial. War is a business.
In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained and released by WikiLeaks — dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NATO-European Union Cooperation, the National Security Council, Russia’s Moscow Political Collective, the Minister of Defense, and the Secretary of State had an unequivocal understanding that NATO expansion poses a risk of conflict with Russia, especially for Ukraine.
“Russia is not only reacting to NATO’s encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences that would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable said. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly concerned that strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with a large part of the ethnic Russian community opposed to membership, could lead to a major division involving violence or, at worst, civil war. In this case, Russia will have to decide whether to intervene; a decision that Russia does not want to accept. “
“Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that, in the long term, Ukraine is the most potentially destabilizing factor in US-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and nervousness caused by its pursuit of NATO membership…” read the cable. “As membership remained a divisive issue in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opportunity for Russian interference. Trenin expressed concern that elements in the Russian establishment would be emboldened to intervene, spurring open U.S. encouragement of opposing political forces and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic position of confrontation,” it added.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if the West had kept its promises not to expand NATO beyond Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained neutral. The war’s pimps knew the potential consequences of NATO expansion. However, war is their unequivocal calling, even if it leads to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or China.
The military industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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