The West's Reckless Rush Towards War With Russia
Chris
Martenson
31
July, 2014
Submitted
by Chris
Martenson via Peak Prosperity,
For
reasons that have no rational explanations at this time, the US and
Europe have embarked on a concerted program to demonize Putin,
ostracize Russia, and bring the world as close to a major conflict as
it's been since the Cold War,
a time hardly memorable to many in the current crop of our elected
officials.
Within
hours of the MH-17 plane crash, the United States pinned the blame on
Russia generally, and Putin particularly. The anti-Putin propaganda
(and if there were a stronger term I'd use it) has been relentless
and almost comically over-the-top (see image above, and those below).
The
US and the UK in particular, are leading the charge. Indeed, the UK's
Daily Mail managed to crank out an article on the MH-17 affair within
just a few hours on the very same day it occurred with this headline:
Jul
17, 2014
The
world may have averted its gaze towards Israel and Gaza, but this
week the rumbling warfare in eastern Ukraine has been erupting into
something growing daily more dangerous.
Meanwhile the
Russian bear, still pretending to be an innocent party despite blood
dripping from its paws, has
begun stealthily rebuilding its forces on the border.
Now
we may well have witnessed the kind of shocking event that happens
when heavy armaments are placed in the hands of untrained and
desperate militias.
That's
really an amazing piece of journalism to have managed to have figured
out the who, the what and the why of a major catastrophe without the
benefit of any evidence or investigation. One wonders who the
author's source was for obtaining what have become very crisp talking
points that both the US and Europe are echoing as they exert
increasing pressure on Russia?
Nearly
two weeks later, neither the US nor Europe has provided substantial
evidence of any sort to support their assertions that Ukrainian
separatists and/or Russia are to blame for the MH-17 catastrophe.
There's literally been nothing.
In
the meantime, very important questions surrounding the shoot-down
have gone entirely unaddressed by US officials and the western media.
Why? Perhaps because they raise the possibility that there could be
an alternative explanation:
What
about the Russian
satellite photos showing Kiev controlled BUK-1 missile batteries in
the area on July 17th?
What
were on the air traffic control recordings that were immediately
seized by Ukrainian authorities,
and why have they not been released?
Why
was a Ukrainian
SU-25 flying within a few kilometers of MH-17
at the moment of the shoot-down and what did that pilot see?
Why
has the
US not responded to nor released the satellite images and data
from its spy satellite that Russia claims was in the right position
to capture the precise moment of the MH-17 shoot-down?
So
far, the entire case made by the US State Department and Obama
administration boils down to a few highly-questionable social media
clips gathered right after the incident, plus several out-of-date
low-resolution satellite photos taken from a private company
(DigitalGlobe)
along with a bevy of 'trust us' statements.
Nonetheless,
despite the lack of solid, verified and credible evidence, the
current narrative has now been embedded firmly in the media cycle and
nearly everyone on the streets of the US, UK and most European
nations will tell you that Putin and/or Russia was responsible.
Similarly,
in 2007, years after all the facts were verified and known, when
asked "Do you think Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was
directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the
terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?" 41%
of Americans answered 'yes'
when the proper answer was (and remains) 'Absolutely not.'
It's
a fact of modern life that most people really don't pay close
attention to important world events. Due to that lack of engagement,
even the most patently obvious lies can quickly become entrenched in
the public mind as truth if touted by mainstream news outlets.
Here
now in July 2014, there is a rush towards war similar to those that
proceeded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Important
questions are not being asked by the media, our once again
missing-in-action fourth estate, and unsubstantiated and unverified
political talking points are simply being reprinted as facts.
But
this time the war fervor is being directed at a nuclear powerhouse,
not a derelict Middle East country. And the stakes could hardly be
higher. For Europe, even if things don't progress much further than
they already have, economic damage (we don't know how much yet, or
how much worse it may get) has already been done to its fragile
recovery. The people of Europe really ought to be asking what exactly
they're hoping to achieve by attempting to box Putin into a corner.
After
all, that might not even be possible. He enjoys an
83% approval rating
in Russia, a level beyond the fantasies of most western politicians,
plus his country supplies a vast amount of Europe's natural gas and a
hefty percentage of the world's exported oil. Temporary loss of
either would be a painful body blow to Europe, while a sustained loss
of oil exports would be crippling to the world at large.
In
all of the thousands of column inches I've read demonizing Putin over
the developments in Ukraine and MH-17, I've yet to identify a single
compelling answer to this question: What vital US interest is at
stake if Russia keeps Crimea and helps to defend the Russian-speaking
people along its border? To my knowledge, it's not yet been
articulated by anyone at the State Department or White House.
At
this stage, all we know is: the West thinks that Russia is bad, and
Putin is worse. But, given the stakes involved, we all deserve to
know more than that. A lot more. We deserve proper and
complete answers.
There's
a lot of context to this story. It involves broken promises,
desirable resources, power plays, and a dangerous lack of diplomatic
sophistication by the current US administration.
Diplomacy
and Statesmanship
My
greatest concern in seeing the this rush towards judgment before the
facts are in -- or worse -- war, is that the people running the show
in the White House and the US State Department are not cut from the
same cloth as the old-school diplomats that preceded them.
After
all, extremely dangerous conflicts transpired in the past (the Cuban
Missile crisis, anyone?) and yet talks between sides were held and
resolutions reached, preventing the more dire of outcomes from coming
to pass.
In
that spirit, I found this recent piece by Pat Buchanan (someone I've
not always agreed with in the past), to be spot on:
When
then did this issue of whose flag flies over Donetsk or
Crimea become so crucial that we would arm Ukrainians to fight
Russian-backed rebels and consider giving a NATO war guarantee to
Kiev, potentially bringing us to war with a nuclear-armed Russia?
From
FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain
isolated from the rulers of the world's largest nation.
Ike
invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the
Hungarian Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put
missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon calling for a new detente at
American University.
Within
weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August
1968, LBJ was seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.
After
excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that
old Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.
The
point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after
collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine,
sought to re-engage the men in the Kremlin.
Whatever
we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved
Eastern Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel,
Ike, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought
to engage Russia's rulers.
Avoidance
of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.
How
then can we explain the clamor of today's U.S. foreign policy elite
to confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral
and political leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?
That's
really an amazing piece of context. Past US presidents managed to
hold dialogs with Stalin, who killed millions, and Khrushchev, who
directly threatened the US with nuclear missiles.
What
exactly has Putin done to surpass the excesses of past Russian/Soviet
leaders? What the US still refers to as the "illegal annexation
of Crimea" was actually the result of a heavy turn-out vote by
the Crimean people where 97%
of the votes cast were in favor of rejoining Russia.
So,
to recap, Crimea's people voted overwhelmingly to shape their future
in the way they best saw fit, and not one life was lost during the
annexation. That sounds pretty peaceful and democratic if you ask me.
What would Washington DC prefer? To undo that particular vote and
have the people of Crimea be forcibly reunited with Ukraine? For what
purpose? To prevent map makers from having to once again redraw
Ukraine's wandering borders?
More
likely -- and this is the part that concerns me -- is that the
current people in power in Washington DC are just not the equals of
the statesmen of old.
In
researching this piece, I came across this 1998
interview
with George Kennan that I found both illuminating and troubling:
His
voice is a bit frail now, but the
mind,
even at age 94, is as sharp as
ever.
So when I reached George Kennan by
phone to get his reaction to
the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion
it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of
America's successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the
great American statesmen of the 20th century was
ready with an answer.
''I
think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said
Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home.
''I
think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will
affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no
reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This
expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over
in their graves. We
have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we
have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious
way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate
that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''
''What
bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate
debate was,'' added
Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose
anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ''X,''
defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years.
''I
was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country
dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our
differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime.
And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the
greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet
regime.
''And
Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of
these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia,''
said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was
U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952.
''It
shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history.
Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then
[the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the
Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''
(...)
As
he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just
one more thing: ''This has
been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.''
The
master statesman pretty much nailed it. Instead of bringing
Russia into the fold, a petulant strain of 'diplomacy' took over that
goaded and threatened Russia and now we are, in fact, being treated
to endless repetitions of oh you know - that's just how Russians are.
Instead we might also note that the current debate seems superficial
and ill-informed.
As
I recently wrote in the piece on the Ukraine
Flashpoint,
the expansion of NATO to the east towards Russia happened even though
the US had previously struck an explicit agreement not to progress
any further. Not one inch, was the vow. That vow was consciously
and repeatedly broken. So who exactly is it that has cause not
to trust the other?
The
West had the opportunity to bring Russia and its extensive abilities
and resources closer into partnership. But for some reason (Military
industrial complex anyone? Campaign contributions from same?),
the decision was made during the Clinton administration to violate
the NATO agreement instead and move many millions of inches
eastward.
The
last encroachment both brought NATO right to Russia's borders and
placed millions of culturally-Russian people under the heavy-handed
rule of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. Some of these same
ultra-nationalists were caught on tape recommending that the 8
million Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine should be "nuked".
Perhaps
an idle threat. However, one of the first actions of Kiev's new
government this February was to immediately revoke legal equality for
the use of Russian language:
Perhaps
the most obvious of the new Kiev government's mistakes came last
week, when deputies in the nationalist party Svoboda, or Freedom,
pushed through the cancellation of a law that gave equal status to
minority languages, such as Russian.
The
previous law had allowed regions across the country to use languages
other than the official national language, Ukrainian, on
commercial signs, in schools and government documents. When it passed
in 2012, it was seen as a victory for the areas where Russian was the
dominant language, particularly in the east and south.
Suffice
it to say, there's a very long list of very good reasons why the
Russian-speakers in the east of Ukraine might want nothing to do with
being under the rule (thumb?) of western Ukraine.
Propaganda
Propaganda
is information that is designed to mislead and provoke an emotional
response. The covers of western newspapers and magazines have been
absolutely choked with anti-Putin propaganda. After such yellow
journalism, what sort of dialog, what rapprochement, can be proposed
with Putin?
Would
not Obama (or any other leader) be seen as 'siding with the enemy' if
he engaged in dialog with Putin after all this?
That
Newsweek cover with the darkened face and mushroom clouds reflected
in the glasses is especially ominous. Exactly what's the
message being represented there? Well that's easy. It's Armageddon.
Before
you take Newsweek's views too seriously, you need to know that
the once respectable publication went through some hard times, went
out of print for while, was bought and is now run by these folks:
Aug
4, 2013
On
Saturday, news broke that IBT Media, a company that runs the online
business (at least, in theory) newspaper International
Business Times, had purchased Newsweek from
IAC. So IBT Media now owns Newsweek. But
exactly who controls IBT Media?
IBT
Media’s corporate leadership site lists two cofounders:
Etienne Uzac, the company’s CEO, and Johnathan Davis, its chief
content officer.
But
some say that the company
is actually controlled by—or
at least has very close undisclosed ties to—someone whose name
appears nowhere on the site: David
Jang, a controversial Korean Christian preacher who has been
accused of calling himself “Second Coming Christ.”
Before
founding IBT, Mr. Davis was the journalism director at Mr.
Jang’s Olivet University.
So
Newsweek may or may not have a larger agenda to push beyond just
getting the facts out. It's another case where knowing that an
editorial slant exists can be helpful in maintaining a healthy stance
of skepticism.
But
beyond Newsweek, the entire suite of publications ranging from the
NYTimes, Washington Post, Financial Times, and nearly every other
main pillar of the Fourth Estate have been running with the "Putin's
responsible" meme.
And,
it bears repeating, all without any solid evidence, none(!), plus a
host of legitimate serious questions that are being met with zero
investigative vigor by the mainstream media and complete radio
silence from the government agencies that should be examining and
addressing them.
This
relentless campaign of propaganda directed against Russia (generally)
and Putin (specifically) is now at a fever pitch. My caution to you
is that you should be actively suspicious of any media outfit that
chooses to run this propaganda.
Perhaps
their travel and dining sections can be trusted; but I'd advise
reading the front section with a huge grain of salt.
Poking
the Bear
With
all of that background, we're now at the point where we can
understand just how annoyed Russia must be at the sanctions that have
been recently levied against it, various of its industries, and in
certain cases, specific wealthy and influential citizens.
Since
the MH-17 downing and all of those resulting accusations of Russian
responsibility, Russia has been accused of firing artillery and
rockets across its border into Ukraine. The only "evidence"
to this is the aforementioned crude satellite photos taken by a
private company. These photos were then drawn upon (literally) to
show trajectories the missiles *could* have followed. These very
non-rigorous images were then tweeted
out of the account
of one Geoffrey Pyatt as hard fact. If his name isn't familiar to
you, he's the US Ukrainian ambassador who was famously caught on tape
with Victoria Nuland (Asst. Sec. of State) discussing
the imminent coup
against then-Ukrainian President Yanukovych.
Next,
a western tribunal in The Hague suddenly ruled that the former
shareholders of the dismantled Russian oil giant Yukos were entitled
to $50 billion in compensation to be paid by the Russian government.
Surprise!
In
chilling response, a person close to Putin reportedly
said,
“There is a war coming in Europe. Do you really think this
matters?”
Following
that, the
US accused Russia of violating the 1987 nuclear arms treaty
by testing ground based missiles in...wait for it...2008. I'm sure
the timing of this is in no way connected to the dust-up over
Ukraine...
And
most recently, both the US and the EU levied additional sanctions on
Russia and certain Russian individuals:
Jul
29, 2014
WASHINGTON
— President Obama
announced expanded sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, just hours
after the European Union imposed its most sweeping measures yet
penalizing Moscow for
its role in supporting separatists in neighboring Ukraine.
The
latest American actions took aim at more Russian banks and a large
defense firm, but they also went further than past moves by blocking
future technology sales to Russia’s lucrative oil industry in an
effort to inhibit its ability to develop future resources. The
measures were meant to largely match those unveiled earlier in the
day in Europe.
“Today
is a reminder that the United States means what it says and we will
rally the international community in standing up for the rights and
freedom of people around the world,” Mr.
Obama said on the South Lawn of the White House.
While
one could be forgiven for thinking that the "rights and freedom
of people" might include the freedom to vote for the future one
wants, and the right not to be ruled over by people hostile to one's
language and customs, apparently the Obama administration has other
ideas for the people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
The
final act of hostility by the US towards Russia that bears mention
here concerns a Senate bill introduced by the ranking member of the
foreign relations committee, Sen. Bob Corker, that outlines what
would happen if Russia does not 'comply' and leave Crimea and Ukraine
entirely within seven days of the act's passage:
Jul
29, 2014
Corker’s
bill would declare Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine “major non-NATO
allies” of the United States, move NATO forces into Poland,
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, accelerate the building of
an ABM system in Eastern Europe,
and authorize U.S.
intelligence and military aid for Ukraine’s army in
the Donbass war with Russian-backed separatists.
U.S.
aid would include antitank and antiaircraft weapons.
S.
2277 would direct the secretary of state to intensify efforts to
strengthen democratic institutions inside the Russian Federation,
e.g., subvert Vladimir Putin’s government, looking toward regime
change.
If
Putin has not vacated Crimea and terminated support for Ukraine’s
separatist rebels within seven days of passage of the Corker
Ultimatum, sweeping
sanctions would be imposed on Russian officials, banks and energy
companies, including Gazprom.
Economic
relations between us would be virtually severed.
In
short, this is an ultimatum to Russia that she faces a new Cold War
if she does not get out of Ukraine and Crimea,
and it is a U.S. declaration that we will now regard three more
former Soviet republics – Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia – as
allies.
Poor
George Kennan. Once again the US Senate is operating without the
benefit of either humility or historical perspective.
The
people of Russia are not in any mood to be bullied by the US Senate,
just as the US Senate would refuse to be dictated to by the Russian
parliament. That's just common sense.
It's
completely obvious that the impact of any such Act passed by the US
legislature would be to further erode, if not collapse, relations and
economic ties between Russia and the US.
The
main conclusion here is that not only is the US poking the bear, but
it is doing so with increasing frequency and upping the ante
dangerously with each step.
In
Part
2: How The Coming Confrontation Will Unfold,
we examine the most likely scenarios for where the current tensions
between the West and Russia may head. Whichever path we head down,
there will be at least some degree of pain experiences by the West,
which Europe will feel first and worst (though the US will not be
immune). And, sadly, it's safe to say that this East-West conflict
will only accelerate the coming correction of the unstable
over-leveraged, bubblicious world markets.
Click
here to read Part 2
of this report (free executive summary, enrollment
required for full access)
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