Friday 15th of November 2024
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for many years, the US has orchestrated this proxy war…….

As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kiev, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight how this war could have been avoided. The U.S. could have simply pledged military protection for Volodymyr Zelensky against the far-right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected president to enact.

Washington could have helped Zelensky pursue peacemaking with Russia — as he was elected to do — and prevented this war. But of course, that didn’t happen. 

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Listen to a reading of this article.

 

To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. We are imagining what would have happened had the U.S. pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war. In that, we are also imagining a world in which the U.S. government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it inflicts upon humanity. That would be a world in which the U.S. had not been taking the steps that it has for many years to orchestrate this proxy war.

With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the U.S. is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.

 

When asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kiev from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:

 

“I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.

I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.”

When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:

“In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was ‘not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,’ and was ‘prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.’

But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.

‘No, he would lose his life,’ Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. ‘He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.’ “

In a 2019 interview with Maté, the late great scholar Stephen Cohen made the following comments:

“But ultimately you have a situation now which seems not to be widely understood, that the new president of Ukraine, Zelensky, ran as a peace candidate. This is a bit of a stretch and maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot to your generation, but he ran a kind of George McGovern campaign. The difference was McGovern got wiped out and Zelensky won by, I think, 71, 72 percent. He won an enormous mandate to make peace.

So, that means he has to negotiate with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin. And there are various formats, right? There’s a so-called Minsk format which involves the German and the French; there’s a bilateral directly with Putin.

But his willingness — and this is what’s important and not well reported here — his willingness to deal directly with Putin, which his predecessor, Poroshenko, was not or couldn’t or whatever reason — actually required considerable boldness on Zelensky[‘s part], because there are opponents of this in Ukraine and they are armed. Some people say they’re fascists but they’re certainly ultra-nationalist, and they have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin.

…

Zelensky cannot go forward as I’ve explained. I mean, his life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine, he can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back. Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war, so the stakes are enormously high.”

In an article titled “Why Russia Went to War Now,” Antiwar’s Ted Snyder explains that Putin likely made the decision to invade because Kiev wasn’t respecting Minsk II and because future NATO membership with Ukraine was being kept on the table while weapons poured into the country from the U.S.

“Zelensky wouldn’t talk to the leaders of the Donbas, Minsk was dead and Russia feared an imminent operation against the ethnic Russian population of the Donbas,” Snyder writes. “At the same time, Washington had become a leaky faucet on promises of flooding Ukraine with weapons and open doors to NATO: two red lines Putin had clearly drawn.”

But, again, Zelensky couldn’t enact Minsk because it had been made abundantly clear to him that he faced a horrific death by fascist lynch mob if he did. If the choice is between taking a chance on a U.S. proxy war and getting killed in the public square, I think many leaders around the world would opt for the former.

So Zelensky made peace with the Nazis, whose will for Ukraine aligned with Washington’s.

This means is that every major factor which led to Russia’s decision to invade could have been nullified by the U.S. government. A guarantee of no NATO membership for Ukraine could have been made. The weapons supplies could have been stopped. And Zelensky and his government could have received protection from the U.S. military against the armed fascists who would repeat their violent acts of 2014 upon them.

It would have been wins all around. We wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon. Ukraine would have been spared the horrors of an insane proxy war. Western powers wouldn’t be sending arms to literal Nazi factions. And the U.S. would actually be protecting Ukrainian democracy, instead of just pretending to.

But, again, we are only indulging in fantasy here. Fighting Nazis, protecting democracy and waging peace are not things the U.S. empire actually does in real life. The U.S. is the most tyrannical and murderous regime on earth, by a truly massive margin, and it will happily risk the life of everyone on earth if it means securing planetary rule.

But sometimes it’s nice to imagine the kind of world we might be living in if we were not ruled by psychopaths.

 

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium.  Her work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following her on Steemit, throwing some money into her tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of her sweet merchandise, buying her books Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com

 

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/05/10/caitlin-johnstone-if-the-us-wanted-peace-in-ukraine/

 

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GusNote: Bono is an apologist for George W Bush.....

the creeps of mission creep…...

Americans Don’t Want War With Russia

 

by  Posted on May 11, 2022

 

Even New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is getting worried about America sliding into war with Russia. The problem is not the ends, which he shares with the Biden administration. Rather, it is the means. 

Despite President Biden’s assurance that Washington would not send troops to Ukraine, US involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian war has steadily expanded. Officials from the president on down have been telling the world and, more importantly, Moscow that America is essentially using Ukraine as a weapon to fight the Russian Federation.

Observed an obviously disturbed Friedman: "Loose lips sink ships – and they also lay the groundwork for overreach in warfare, mission creep, a disconnect between ends and means and huge unintended consequences." Such as war with Russia, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

Friedman is not alone in his fears. My church home group met shortly after Biden announced that his administration was going all into the war with $33 billion in aid to Ukraine. Most of that will be lethal. The attendees, largely politically conservative and strongly patriotic, some with military backgrounds, generally opposed the president’s plan. Why are we getting so deeply involved, they wondered? They understood that the more Washington did and Washington officials said, the greater the tensions with Russia. They believed Biden’s actions contradicted his promises of military noninvolvement.

Then I watched a webinar on Biden’s fitness and the potential of removing him from office. The host and participants were all right-leaning, a couple extremely so, and none were friends of Moscow. However, they generally agreed that one of the most important reasons to force Biden from office was his administration’s increasingly irresponsible stance toward Russia.

For instance, they noted, saying that Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power and should be put on trial for war crimes was playing with fire. Shifting the administration’s objective from defending Ukraine to defeating Russia made full-scale war increasingly possible.

Coming through these views is a basic common sense lacking in Washington’s War Party. The American people, in contrast to those who make US foreign policy, understand that the worst outcome of the Russo-Ukraine war is not a loss by Kyiv, but entry by Washington, with horrors that could only be imagined.

How to think about the ongoing conflict?

  • Ukraine deserves America’s sympathy, not America’s defense. There is no vital interest at stake that warrants the US going to war. Nor does Moscow’s botched campaign indicate that such a battle would be easy. Russians would fight better for their nation if attacked by Washington than when attacking Ukraine. Moreover, as the weaker power Russia likely would turn to tactical nuclear weapons as an equalizer. Having escaped the Cold War without triggering another catastrophic global conflict, Washington should step extra carefully now.

  • Europe should take the lead in providing aid to Ukraine. US peace activists across the spectrum disagree on the appropriateness of military assistance. However, all agree that Washington’s involvement has become increasingly risky. Surely any role should be carefully limited and calibrated, while emphasizing the goal of ending the conflict. Ostentatiously shipping weapons of war, celebrating involvement in sinking Russian ships and killing Russian generals, and proclaiming plans to weaken Moscow are reckless acts, inviting retaliation and war. Congress was demanding blood over the fake news story of Russian payments to the Taliban for killing US personnel. Imagine the reaction of Russians, people as well as officials, to the real news of American participation in killing Russian personnel.

  • Washington should be working to end the war. Moscow’s brutal invasion was murderous, unjustified aggression [GusNote: this is bullshit, read from top]. It should fail [GusNote: this is bullshit — Putin and Russia should get The security they have sought for years and NATO has been lying about this]. However, the imperative is to end the conflict. Ukraine, the battleground, is suffering grievously, with thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, multiple cities wrecked, and an economy in collapse. It is up to Kyiv to decide its future, but the allies should indicate their support for a negotiated settlement. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the chance that the fighting will spread, with catastrophic consequences. Any war is dangerous. One in which some combatants and potential entrants have nuclear weapons is far worse.

  • Europe requires a new security order. It should begin with the Europeans taking over their own defense. They appear vulnerable to Russian threats only because they have spent nearly eight decades cheap riding on the US. It is difficult to blame them, since Washington allowed them to get away with their irresponsible behavior. However, there no longer is any reason for America to risk a nuclear confrontation with Moscow because the Europeans prefer to fund generous welfare states than robust military establishments. In fact, Vladimir Putin has never indicated much interest in invading Europe and the performance of his military in Ukraine suggests that continental conquest is beyond his means. It is time for burden-shifting, not burden-sharing, in Europe.

  • The US and its allies should seek a long-term outcome that avoids a new Cold War. Treating Russia like a very large and much better armed North Korea would make for a more dangerous world. A policy of permanent hostility and isolation would fuel continuing conflict. And new global divisions would not be as simple as the West might desire. Even today Moscow is isolated from America and Europe, not the world. The most populous nations – including China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, and Bangladesh – and most of the Global South have remained aloof from the allied campaign against Russia. They are even less likely to back a permanent cordon sanitaire. 

  • The American people should insist that the War Party become the Peace Party. The Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine. However, Western policy was dishonest, foolish, and reckless, ignoring Moscow’s security concerns and daring Vladimir Putin to respond. Indeed, Washington policymakers would never have tolerated similar conduct by the Russians in the Western hemisphere. Yet as was said of the Bourbons who once ruled France, America’s neoconservatives and other hawks have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Without a sharp break in policy, Americans will find themselves again at war for nothing, other than a vain desire to dominate the earth.

US policymakers may be glorying in Russia’s distress in Ukraine. For having started a war of conquest, Moscow should lose. However, Washington’s conduct risks broadening and intensifying the conduct, which would put Europe and America at risk.

Instead of talking about victory, the Biden administration should promote peace [GusNote: peace is annoying to weapons mearchants]. Ukraine is being ravaged. Europe would be the immediate target if the conflict spreads. And America’s homeland would be the final target [GusNote: the USA could be the FIRST target] if a US-Russian military confrontation spiraled out of control. Nothing involved in today’s conflict is worth taking these kinds of risks.

 

 

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2022/05/10/americans-dont-want-war-with-russia/

 

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

 

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