Chronicle of a War Foretold

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.

[scheerpost.com]

I rarely hesitate to post work from Hedges. But he lacks some clarity in a couple places in this article. Right off the top he allows a misleading description under the photo of a full invasion into Ukraine being stated. I however haven't turned on the news yet this morning. I added some information below for another one. While he does go into that regard further down in the article it's still vague. For all intensive purposes though the article provides some prehistory to the Ukraine issue.

{The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.}

{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, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations}

Well, we've now seen that all play out despite they obviously knew what the outcome could be. All it needed was a push within a conspiracy which Russia had the foresight of. The hindsight having been purposely orchestrated (from top to bottom of the above) with a manufactured civil war in Ukraine, leading to genocidal violence towards ethnic Russians primarily in the east, although throughout the country as a whole historically, leaving only Russia to defend them.

It's amazing that liberals and progressives who spent 4 years during the Trump administration bitching about the recognition of the growth of fascism in the US now blissfully support it within the Ukrainian government that Obama and Biden put into power there. Displaying so much gratification towards Biden recently for the up tick of sanctions against Russia which will also largely continue to effect us. They lost their senses of recognizing real humanitarian actions on the part of Russia from within a rabbit hole in a belief of a manufactured enemy from a perception management campaign from our representatives and their compliant MSCM. While also failing, like mostly Germany in Europe, how it's going to continue to effect the most vulnerable in our country. As a citizenry, we simply don't seem to be able to punish ourselves enough.

{The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.}

For especially Chris Hedges this is a misleading statement without the precursor of the 5 billion dollars that Victoria Nuland mustered up for Ukraine as she was orchestrating the 2014 coup and hand picking the new puppet government that would be installed after those atrocities. And when Biden threatened to withhold more money afterwards until a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired who was investigating the energy company his son was involved in. Which he of course achieved, being it was, and still is, a puppet government.

Yesterday I spoke on how the sanctions may effect us here in the US. Here's a segment of Boom Bust discussing it with Richard Wolff. He's been fairly busy on the RT shows lately where you can find various aspects of his opinions in this regard lately. What will the sanctions actually accomplish. What Russia contributes to the world structure. You can also find Professor Wolff's economic updates at Democracy at Work as a Marxist economist.

For those new/ish to socialist ideology, I highly recommend you look for his talk on the 3 basic types of socialism if you want to further educate yourself on that breakdown. If you apply the meanings you may discover how you're not actually living in a capitalist free market structure, but a corporate---state run communist structure. That's if you've gotten past the false perception that our government has your best interest at heart.