Missing Links in Textbook History: War
According to the Institute for National Strategic Studies: “The most highly prized attribute of private contractors is that they reduce troop requirements by replacing military personnel. This reduces the military and political resources that must be dedicated to the war.”
By Jim Mamer , ScheerPost, 28 Mar 24
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)
n the late 1980s I had a student in an American history class who said that the United States won the war in Vietnam. I felt dizzy. Maybe I had misunderstood. So, I asked him to explain. “My father,” he told the class, “said that we had won the war because we won most of the battles and we killed more of them than they killed of us.”
My instinct was to attempt to impose logic on the discussion. American aircraft, I said, dropped millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than twice what the U.S. dropped in all of World War II. That, of course, killed a lot of people, but it did not win the war.
That student was not convinced and I quickly realized that I would not change his mind. Not long after, I discovered that he and his father were not alone.
Ignorance or Amnesia?
The late Gore Vidal famously referred to this country as the “United States of Amnesia.” He had a point. As a society, we don’t seem to learn much from past experiences and even what we think we remember is often blurry.
In a 2003 episode of “Democracy Now!” Vidal reported that George W. Bush had managed to have a number of presidential papers put beyond the reach of historians for a great length of time. Making historical records unavailable, he predicted, will worsen America’s amnesia: “There will be no functioning historical memory … we are creating a lobotomized nation wherein the connections between essential parts of our history are severed from what is taught.”…………………………………………………………..
Glenn Greenwald blames some of the misunderstanding on journalists. He began a recent edition of System Update by talking about how journalists report on war. “One of the most important parts of journalism, when it comes to war, is to scrutinize, and investigate and debunk propaganda that comes from every side in every war.” Unfortunately, he concludes, journalists often fail to scrutinize, investigate and debunk.
I have argued some of the blame should be put on state approved textbooks which often fail, in Vidal’s words, to make the vital connections, due to what I call “missing links.
The Often-Invisible Agenda of Corporate Media
In 2005, Norman Solomon wrote an article titled “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” where he describes the connections of the military-industrial complex to corporate media.
“Firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant.”
Because so much of the media is now tied to corporate sponsors or serves the agenda of one political party most Americans are never exposed to real debate. Highly paid broadcasters may be fearful of offending their corporate paymasters when they report on a war involving the United States, especially when their reports have been given a veneer of credibility from “experts” drawn from the ranks of retired military officers, retired CIA personnel and former FBI officials.
As a result, there is virtually no media coverage of weapons manufacturers and the profits they make. Just imagine the impact it would make if reports from war zones that we are deeply involved with, like Gaza or Ukraine, were followed by listings of the profits made by various weapon-making conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Boeing, General Dynamics or Raytheon?
How much do we know about American Wars?
To understand the gravity of the situation it helps to have a sense of how many American wars have been fought and how many conflicts we are currently involved with. The numbers differ according to the source largely because wars are sometimes grouped under umbrella terms like the Caribbean wars, the Cold War or the War on Terror.
According to Wikipedia, the United States has been involved in 107 wars since its founding and 41 of these were fought against the Indigenous peoples of North America. Most of these wars are ignored by schools, textbooks and the media, but the pressure to become involved in additional conflict is ever-present and comes from a variety of sources.
When Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense for President George Bush Sr., he contracted engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root (then part of Halliburton) to identify traditional military jobs that could be taken over by private sector contractors. It turned out there were a lot of jobs for the private sector and ever since the use of contractors has grown in positions like conducting intelligence, training local military, handling security and assisting in drone warfare.
At times the number of private contractors has been larger than that of enlisted troops……………………………
According to the Institute for National Strategic Studies: “The most highly prized attribute of private contractors is that they reduce troop requirements by replacing military personnel. This reduces the military and political resources that must be dedicated to the war.”
Public Citizen reports that “Every year, the defense industry donates millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress, creating pressure on the legislative branch to fund specific weapons systems, maintain an extremely high Pentagon budget, and add ever more military spending.”
They also report that the pressure to spend more is constant, even though “nearly 50% of the Pentagon budget” already goes to private contractors. According to the report, in 2022 the weapons/defense industry donated $10.2 million to the 84 members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
Even the language employed to report on war is structured to confuse. Invented phrases resemble Orwell’s Newspeak, from the novel 1984, meant to prevent too much thought. How else to explain the birth of misleading terms like “protective reaction strike” (an attack) “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture), “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping), “collateral damage” (extra dead), or “targeted killings” (usually with a lot of collateral damage).
The Art of Promoting Misunderstanding
What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is,
What can you make people believe that you have done?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. High school textbooks all discuss early American wars, but usually without analysis. What follows are examples of how three early wars are discussed in textbooks………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Are we headed toward Forever Wars?
Republicans and Democrats disagree today on many issues, but they are united in their resolve that the United States must remain the world’s greatest military power. This bipartisan commitment to maintaining American supremacy has become a political signature of our times.
— Andrew J. Bacevich, American Imperium 2016
……………………………..describing our history as one damn war after another.
How else to respond to the Wikipedia list of 107 wars involving the United States since 1787. And the wars continue. In his book “The United States of War,” David Vine reports that, “In the nearly two decades since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has fought in at least 22 countries.”
In his analysis of American wars Andrew Bacevich writes that “the constructed image of the past to which most Americans habitually subscribe prevents them from seeing other possibilities.” This “constructed image” is basically one of the United States as largely innocent of aggression, but forced by circumstance to defend itself.
In order to identify the missing links in the textbook treatments of American wars, it is important to look beyond the minutiae of single events and the unique characteristics of each conflict and look for common threads in the motivations towards engaging in war.
We have a government financed and influenced by Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex idea, and a population which seems either uninformed or uninterested.
The combination invites a future of permanent war.
Common threads include the ever-present assertion that the United States is defending itself whenever it goes to war and that includes wars engaged in while assembling a nation that would span the continent, as the song goes, “from sea to shining sea.”
How accurate were American claims of self-defense regarding American participation in the three early wars I reviewed?
…………………………………………………… If Andrew Bacevich is correct in saying we in the U.S. have a bipartisan congressional commitment to maintaining American supremacy, then more wars are inevitable. If we are to escape a future of forever wars, all justifications for war should be questioned and debated before the killing starts. https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/28/missing-links-in-textbook-history-war/
Spending Unlimited – The Pentagon’s Budget Follies Come at a High Price.
More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.
One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.
BY JULIA GLEDHILL AND WILLIAM D. HARTUNG, MARCH 26, 2024, https://tomdispatch.com/spending-unlimited-2/
The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.
Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.
Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.
And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.
Defending “the Free World”?
President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.
Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.
As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.
Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less
Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increase
Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.
Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.
And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.
Defending “the Free World”?
President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.
Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.
As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.
Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less
Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increased.
Take the Navy’s top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the “ultimate backstop” for global deterrence. As a key part of this country’s never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy’s most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn’t implemented a single one of the GAO’s six recommendations to help keep it on track.
As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time — a wildly unrealistic goal — despite it being the “largest and most complex submarine” in its history.
Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as “concurrent development.” Building systems before they’re fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer’s expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that’s not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America’s most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.
Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 million. Annual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.
Reining in the Military-Industrial Complex
One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.” Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon’s already enormous budget.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department’s wish list that have little to do with “defense” in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country’s “defense industrial base” and further supersize the military-industrial complex — an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders — from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress — benefit from such spending sprees.
Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration’s stubborn continuation of support for Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.
The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.
The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse — particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America’s major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.
Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won’t change that.
‘The graveyard of the Earth’: inside City 40, Russia’s deadly nuclear secret
The city’s residents know the truth, however: that their water is contaminated, their mushrooms and berries are poisoned, and their children may be sick. Ozersk and the surrounding region is one of the most contaminated places on the planet, referred to by some as the “graveyard of the Earth”.
City 40’s inhabitants were told they were “the nuclear shield and saviours of the world”
From the late 1940s, people here started to get sick and die: the victims of long-term exposure to radiation.
‘The graveyard of the Earth’: inside City 40, Russia’s deadly nuclear secret, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/20/graveyard-earth-inside-city-40-ozersk-russia-deadly-secret-nuclear Samira Goetschel, Wed 20 Jul 2016 Ozersk, codenamed City 40, was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. Now it is one of the most contaminated places on the planet – so why do so many residents still view it as a fenced-in paradise?
“Those in paradise were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.” (From the dystopian novel We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924)
Deep in the vast forests of Russia’s Ural mountains lies the forbidden city of Ozersk. Behind guarded gates and barbed wire fences stands a beautiful enigma – a hypnotic place that seems to exist in a different dimension.
Codenamed City 40, Ozersk was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme after the second world war. For decades, this city of 100,000 people did not appear on any maps, and its inhabitants’ identities were erased from the Soviet census.
Today, with its beautiful lakes, perfumed flowers and picturesque tree-lined streets, Ozersk resembles a suburban 1950s American town – like one of those too-perfect places depicted in The Twilight Zone.
Continue readingTODAY. A morally bankrupt organisation – the International Atomic Energy Agency
I do not know how this guy can sleep at night – his main job is propaganda- telling the world to trust in the “safety of the nuclear industry” – the latest effort is conning the Japanese.
The International Atomic Energy (IAEA) was set up in 1957 for the purpose of promoting the “peaceful” nuclear industry.
Already that was morally dubious, as the real reason was to distract attention from the guilt of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities, and from the industry’s true purpose – making nuclear weapons.
Over the decades, the IAEA has successfully pitched itself as the watchdog for nuclear safety. And to a certain extent, that is true. The IAEA’s inspection system does monitor nuclear facilities for safety, and compliance with commitments, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Obviously, given the nuclear industry’s potential for catastrophic accidents, and for spreading nuclear weapons and the danger of catastrophic wars, – it needed some sort of safety body to be able to continue to exist.
But when the crunch comes – what do we find?
We find the IAEA pushing for “safe” new nuclear power while the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, the biggest nuclear power station in Europe , is in the middle of a war.
We find the IAEA pretending that it is environmentally OK to permanently pour nuclear irradiated water into the oceans, from the wrecked Fukushima power plant, – thereby legitimising the ocean dumping of radioactive wastes
And now – the latest, (but I’m sure not the last), straw – the IAEA is pushing for the restart and regrowth of the nuclear industry in Japan.
Should Japan ever have set up a nuclear industry?
“An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors”– Amory Lovins
So why did they do it?
To assuage USA’s guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To turn a bad thing into a “good thing”: “Many Americans are now aware…that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was not necessary. How better to make a contribution to amends than by offering Japan…atomic energy” – Washington Post, 23 September 1954, p. 18, “A Reactor for Japan”
But now – the 2011 and never-ending Fukushima nuclear disaster is still there.. No worries – the nuclear lobby is all for restarting Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world’s biggest nuclear power station, with its 7 reactors, just about 200 km away for Tokyo, with its population of 37 million.
But the bit that gets me is: Rafael Gross is not only pledging IAEA technical assistance for the restart of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa., he is “sending a team of experts to assist Tepco’s effort to gain public trust.” The IAEA’s job clearly is to mislead the public on the dangers of nuclear energy
The ideology of war in Ukraine and Israel
by Thierry Meyssan, https://www.voltairenet.org/article220527.html 14 Mar 24
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are more similar than you might think, at least if you know their histories. The Ukrainian war didn’t start with the Russian military operation, but with the massacres in the Donbass, while the Gaza war didn’t start with the Al-Aqsa deluge, but 75 years earlier with the Nakhba. In the long term, those responsible for both wars share the same ideology.
Generally speaking, every war defines who “we” are and who “they” are. “We” are Good, while “they” are Evil.
Western leaders, while declaring that war itself is bad, claim that it is indispensable today in the face of aggression from Russia and Hamas. According to them, Russia, or rather its president Vladimir Putin, dreams of seizing our property and destroying our political system. After invading Ukraine, he will invade Moldavia and the Baltic states, then continue westwards. Hamas, on the other hand, is a hate-filled sect that begins by raping and beheading Jews out of anti-Semitism, and will continue by invading the West in the name of its religion.
It’s worth noting that both Israel and the USA were founded by their armies, the Haganah and the Continental Army. Today, the vast majority of their political leaders have spent their careers in the armed forces or secret services. But they’re not the only ones, since Xi Jinping is a military man and Vladimir Putin is a former member of the Soviet secret service (KGB).
One wonders what feeds the phantasms of the political West and how they prevent us from grasping reality. Russia didn’t invade Ukraine any more than France invaded Rwanda. Moscow and Paris stopped the massacre of Ukrainians in the Donbass and Rwandan Tutsis. Both were driven by their “responsibility to protect” and implemented Security Council resolutions. Palestinians don’t rape and behead anyone for pleasure, even if some of them belong to a secret society that does. They don’t fight the Jews out of anti-Semitism, except for the historic branch of Hamas, but against the apartheid system of which they are victims.
Perhaps the first function of collective blindness is to erase our previous crimes: it was the “democracies” of the United States and members of the European Union who organized the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. It was Germany and France that signed the Minsk Accords to guarantee peace for Ukrainians in Donbass (2015), but never intended to implement them and, according to the confessions of Chancellor Angela Merkel and President François Hollande, used them to arm Ukraine against Russia. This violation of our word and signature constitutes, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, the gravest of all crimes, that “against peace”.
Similarly, it is the “greatest democracy in the Middle East”, Israel, which has stolen, metre by metre, by occupation and nibbling, most of the Palestinian Territories established by Security Council resolution 181 (1947).
These conflicts are not about resources, but territories. Since 1917, Dmytro Dontsov’s Ukrainian integral nationalists have consistently claimed sovereignty over Nestor Makhno’s anarchist Novorossia and the Bolshevik Donbass and Crimea. Of course, these territories were merged into Soviet Ukraine by Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, but Kiev cannot invoke recent history to claim them as its own. Similarly, since 1920, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionists have claimed sovereignty over the whole of Palestine, and eventually over the Egyptian Sinai, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – in short, all the territories from the “Nile to the Euphrates”. Of course, the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem consisted of the city and its suburbs, but that doesn’t allow them to evoke history for all these conquests.
It is often said that the age pyramid determines the aggressiveness of states. States with a majority of young people between the ages of 15 and 30 would by nature be inclined to war. But this is neither the case in Ukraine, nor in Israel. What’s more, it’s Palestine, not Israel that the age pyramid could push towards war.
The ideological question is probably the most important. Dmytro Dontsov and his henchman Stepan Bandera glorified the Ukrainian fighters, heirs to the Swedish Vikings, the Varegues, who had to slaughter the “Muscovites” to be able to feast in Valhalla. Today, it’s the “White Führer”, Andriy Biletsky, who has commanded the troops of the Azov Division in Mariupol, the 3rd Assault Brigade in Bakhmut/Artiomovsk and most recently in Avdeyevka/Avdiyevka. Similarly, Benjamin Netanyahu, son of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s private secretary, has not hesitated to compare the Palestinians to the ancient Amalekites. The implication is that they must all be exterminated as Yahweh commands, or else their race will re-emerge against the Hebrews. In the same way, the IDF has systematically destroyed all the universities and schools in the Gaza Strip and massacred 30,000 civilians under the pretext of fighting Hamas.
Dmytro Dontsov formed an alliance with Adolf Hitler as early as 1923, i.e. before he came to power, and became one of the administrators of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute, responsible for carrying out the Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy question. Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had formed an alliance with Dontsov in 1922, founded the Betar cadre school in Civitavecchi (Italy) with the help of Duce Benito Mussolini in 1935. He was unable to play a major role in the Second World War, dying in August 1940. There can be no doubt about the adherence of Ukrainian integral nationalists to Nazism and revisionist Zionists to fascism.
Incidentally, we find the territorial logic of fascist and Nazi regimes in the current discourse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At the same time, the Russian and Palestinian presidents, Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Abbas, constantly claim to be defending their peoples.
To find out more about Dmytro Dontsov’s integral nationalism, read:
“Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?“, by Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, November 15, 2022.
For more on Volodymyr Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionists read:
“The veil is being torn: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu“, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 23, 2024.
and “In Jerusalem, the ’Conference for the Victory of Israel’ threatens London and Washington“, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, February 13, 2024.
F-35A aeroplanes officially certified to carry thermonuclear bomb
The designation marks the first time that a stealth fighter can carry a nuclear weapon, in this case the B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb.
Breaking DEFENSE, By MICHAEL MARROW, March 08, 2024
WASHINGTON — The F-35A Joint Strike Fighter has been operationally certified to carry the B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb, a spokesman for the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) tells Breaking Defense.
In a statement, JPO spokesman Russ Goemaere said the certification was achieved Oct. 12, months ahead of a pledge to NATO allies that the process would wrap by January 2024. Certain F-35As will now be capable of carrying the B61-12, officially making the stealth fighter a “dual-capable” aircraft that can carry both conventional and nuclear weapons.
“The F-35A is the first 5th generation nuclear capable aircraft ever, and the first new platform (fighter or bomber) to achieve this status since the early 1990s. This F-35 Nuclear Certification effort culminates 10+ years of intense effort across the nuclear enterprise, which consists of 16 different government and industry stakeholders,” Goemaere said. “The F-35A achieved Nuclear Certification ahead of schedule, providing US and NATO with a critical capability that supports US extended deterrence commitments earlier than anticipated.”
Responding to follow-up questions from Breaking Defense, Goemaere said US disclosure policy prohibits the release of information on dual-capable aircraft among NATO partners. According to analysis by the Federation of American Scientists, as of 2023 approximately 100 older variants of B61 bombs are housed by NATO allies Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, who share the alliance’s nuclear strike mission. The first four nations are all planned F-35 operators, with the need to have a nuclear-capable aircraft a key reason for Germany signing onto the program.
The F-35A is certified to only carry the newer B61-12 variant, which will replace the older models………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists, noted the announcement is another milestone in America’s ongoing nuclear modernization effort.
“The stage is set for the tactical nuclear weapons upgrade in Europe with full-scale production of the B61-12 and four NATO allies and the US fighter wing at Lakenheath upgrading to operate the bomb on the F-35A,” he said……………….. more https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/exclusive-f-35a-officially-certified-to-carry-nuclear-bomb/—
Today. My dilemma in writing about nuclear issues.
This might be a peculiarly Australian dilemma. I don’t know. The thing is – most people seem able to tolerate a bit of criticism of the nuclear industry. And indeed, when I post articles on my websites – nuclear-news.net and antinuclear.net, or on my newsletter, – that’s OK.
But if I bring in the subject of Ukraine, or especially of Gaza and Israel, – people get upset. What has that got to do with the nuclear industry? (Well, a lot really – as both situations bring us ever closer to the brink of nuclear war).
The big problem is this. As part of an Australian, and indeed worldwide, movement, for a safe clean nuclear-free world, my stuff is accepted as worthwhile. But, when I digress into examining what is going on in Ukraine, or worse, in Israel – then I am no longer to be trusted. Indeed, I am sometimes being called a Putin-lover, a communist. a terrorist – and especially anti-semitic.
As a consequence, then my anti-nuclear coverage is not to be trusted, either. It’s OK to be anti-nuclear – that’s a respectable opinion, as long as you’re pro Ukraine and pro Israel.
I really don’t know how to deal with this. It seems that, to be respected at all, it is necessary to conform to certain dogmas, such as “Russia is always evil” and “Israelis are holy victims”.
In my view – Putin is a murderous thug, but Russia is not always to blame, and Russian policies and aspirations should be viewed fairly.
Similarly, I think that the Jews, over history, have been terribly persecuted and murdered, but that doesn’t give Israel the licence to now do mass murder of the Gazan people.
There’s a dreadful conformity in Australia, and perhaps in all supposedly-white, English speaking countries. We must side with Ukraine, no matter what. And we must not be seen to be anti-semitic, no matter what.
So – I am left with the dilemma – should I ignore those two nuclear-war-trigger situations, in order to sound credible about nuclear matters?
Should I act “nice” about what Israel is doing, and pretend that I don’t notice? That is all too easy to do, in Australia, with its relentless media focus on sport.
Fatal Flaws Undermine America’s Defense Industrial Base
Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment.
In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private industry to do so.
Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never identifies private industry itself as a problem.
If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned enterprises. This allows the government to prioritize purpose over profits. Yet in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.
US defense industrial strategy built on a flawed premise
Beyond private industry’s hold on the US DIB, the very premise the NDIS is built on is fundamentally flawed, deeply rooted in private industry’s profit-driven prioritization.
The report claims:
The purpose of this National Defense Industrial Strategy is to drive development of an industrial ecosystem that provides a sustained competitive advantage to the United States over its adversaries.
The notion of the United States perpetually expanding its wealth and power across the globe, unrivaled by its so-called “adversaries” is unrealistic.
China alone has a population 4-5 times greater than the US. China’s population is, in fact, larger than that of the G7 combined. China has a larger industrial base, economy, and education system than the US. China’s education system not only produces millions more graduates each year in essential fields like science, technology, and engineering than the US, the proportion of such graduates is higher in China than in the US.
China alone possesses the means to maintain a competitive advantage over the United States now and well into the foreseeable future. The US, attempting to draw up a strategy to maintain an advantage over China (not to mention over the rest of the world) regardless of these realities, borders on delusion.
Yet for 60 pages, US policymakers attempt to lay out a strategy to do just that.
Not just China, but also Russia
While China is repeatedly mentioned as America’s “pacing challenge,” the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is perhaps the most acute example of a shifting balance of global power.
Despite a combined population, GDP, and military budget many times greater than Russia’s, the collective West is incapable of matching Russian production of even relatively simple munitions like artillery shells, let alone more complex systems like tanks, aircraft, and precision-guided missiles.
While the US and its allies appear to have every conceivable advantage over Russia on paper, the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven rather than purpose-driven society.
In Russia, the defense industry exists to serve national security. While one might believe this goes without saying, across the collective West, the defense industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize profits.
To best serve national security, the defense industry is required to maintain substantial surge capacity – meaning additional, unused factory space, machines, and labor on standby if and when large surges in production are required in relatively short periods of time. Across the West, in order to maximize profits, surge capacity has been ruthlessly slashed, deemed economically inefficient. Only rare exceptions exist, such as US 155 mm artillery shell production.
While the West’s defense industry remains the most profitable on Earth, its ability to actually churn out arms and ammunition in the quantities and quality required for large-scale conflict is clearly compromised by its maximization of profits.
The result is evident today as the West struggles to expand production of arms and ammunition for its Ukrainian proxies.
The NDIS report would note:
Prior to the invasion, weapon procurements for some of the in-demand systems were driven by annual training requirements and ongoing combat operations. This modest demand, along with recent market dynamics, drove companies to divest excess capacity due to cost. This meant that any increased production requirements would require an increase in workforce hours in existing facilities—commonly referred to as “surge” capacity. These, in turn, were limited further by similar down-stream considerations of workforce, facility, and supply chain limitations.
Costs are most certainly a consideration across any defense industry, but costs cannot be the primary consideration.
A central element of Russia’s defense industry is Rostec, a massive state-owned enterprise under which hundreds of companies related to national industrial needs including defense are organized. Rostec is profitable. However, the industrial concerns organized under Rostec serve purposes related to Russia’s national interests first and foremost, be it national health, infrastructure or security.
Because Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, it produced military equipment because it was necessary, not because it was profitable. As a result, Russia possessed huge stockpiles of ammunition and equipment ahead of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. In addition to this, Russia maintained large amounts of surge capacity enabling production rates of everything from artillery shells to armored vehicles to expand quickly over the past 2 years.
Only relatively recently have Western analysts acknowledged this.
Continue reading
“military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.
the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven rather than purpose-driven society………………………………across the collective West, the defense industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize profits.
By Brian Berletic, Orinoco Tribune. February 24, 2024 https://popularresistance.org/fatal-flaws-undermine-americas-defense-industrial-base/
The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.
The report lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US DIB including a lack of surge capacity, inadequate workforce, off-shore downstream suppliers, as well as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.
In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because they were not profitable.
For example, the report attempts to explain why many companies across the US DIB lack advanced manufacturing capabilities, claiming:
Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital investment.
In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private industry to do so.
Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never identifies private industry itself as a problem.
If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned enterprises. This allows the government to prioritize purpose over profits. Yet in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the government and national interests, but rather the government and national interests are subordinated to it.
US defense industrial strategy built on a flawed premise
Beyond private industry’s hold on the US DIB, the very premise the NDIS is built on is fundamentally flawed, deeply rooted in private industry’s profit-driven prioritization.
The report claims:
The purpose of this National Defense Industrial Strategy is to drive development of an industrial ecosystem that provides a sustained competitive advantage to the United States over its adversaries.
The notion of the United States perpetually expanding its wealth and power across the globe, unrivaled by its so-called “adversaries” is unrealistic.
China alone has a population 4-5 times greater than the US. China’s population is, in fact, larger than that of the G7 combined. China has a larger industrial base, economy, and education system than the US. China’s education system not only produces millions more graduates each year in essential fields like science, technology, and engineering than the US, the proportion of such graduates is higher in China than in the US.
China alone possesses the means to maintain a competitive advantage over the United States now and well into the foreseeable future. The US, attempting to draw up a strategy to maintain an advantage over China (not to mention over the rest of the world) regardless of these realities, borders on delusion.
Yet for 60 pages, US policymakers attempt to lay out a strategy to do just that.
Not just China, but also Russia
While China is repeatedly mentioned as America’s “pacing challenge,” the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is perhaps the most acute example of a shifting balance of global power.
Despite a combined population, GDP, and military budget many times greater than Russia’s, the collective West is incapable of matching Russian production of even relatively simple munitions like artillery shells, let alone more complex systems like tanks, aircraft, and precision-guided missiles.
While the US and its allies appear to have every conceivable advantage over Russia on paper, the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven rather than purpose-driven society.
In Russia, the defense industry exists to serve national security. While one might believe this goes without saying, across the collective West, the defense industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize profits.
To best serve national security, the defense industry is required to maintain substantial surge capacity – meaning additional, unused factory space, machines, and labor on standby if and when large surges in production are required in relatively short periods of time. Across the West, in order to maximize profits, surge capacity has been ruthlessly slashed, deemed economically inefficient. Only rare exceptions exist, such as US 155 mm artillery shell production.
While the West’s defense industry remains the most profitable on Earth, its ability to actually churn out arms and ammunition in the quantities and quality required for large-scale conflict is clearly compromised by its maximization of profits.
The result is evident today as the West struggles to expand production of arms and ammunition for its Ukrainian proxies.
The NDIS report would note:
Prior to the invasion, weapon procurements for some of the in-demand systems were driven by annual training requirements and ongoing combat operations. This modest demand, along with recent market dynamics, drove companies to divest excess capacity due to cost. This meant that any increased production requirements would require an increase in workforce hours in existing facilities—commonly referred to as “surge” capacity. These, in turn, were limited further by similar down-stream considerations of workforce, facility, and supply chain limitations.
Costs are most certainly a consideration across any defense industry, but costs cannot be the primary consideration.
A central element of Russia’s defense industry is Rostec, a massive state-owned enterprise under which hundreds of companies related to national industrial needs including defense are organized. Rostec is profitable. However, the industrial concerns organized under Rostec serve purposes related to Russia’s national interests first and foremost, be it national health, infrastructure or security.
Because Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, it produced military equipment because it was necessary, not because it was profitable. As a result, Russia possessed huge stockpiles of ammunition and equipment ahead of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. In addition to this, Russia maintained large amounts of surge capacity enabling production rates of everything from artillery shells to armored vehicles to expand quickly over the past 2 years.
Only relatively recently have Western analysts acknowledged this.
Continue reading
February 2024: 10th anniversary of the conflict in Ukraine
Russia preferred to maintain the Ukrainian state and did not recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. It strove to find a solution that would protect the rights of Russian speakers (language, administrative autonomy) without removing them from Ukraine. The Minsk I (September 2014) and Minsk II (February 2015) agreements were neutralized by the Western signatories who later admitted having signed them only to give themselves time to arm and train the Ukrainian forces.
Russia’s categorical refusal to the inclusion of Ukraine into NATO since this would be followed by the installation of American missiles on its southern flank.
February 24, 2022, was not the beginning of a war with Ukraine but the last stage of the war that had begun in 2014.
Used as a disposable tool by the United States and NATO against Russia, Ukraine is in ruins and its future is in jeopardy.
22.02.24 – Europe – Samir Saul – Michel Seymour https://www.pressenza.com/2024/02/february-2024-10th-anniversary-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine/
In the coming days, we will surely hear about the so-called second anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Western governments, corporate media broadcasting the official pro-US line all day long, and “experts”-propagandists of this line will deliver their pseudo-analyses. All will be based on the double premise that the conflict in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, and that it consists of a Russo-Ukrainian war unilaterally provoked by Russia to satisfy the expansionist ambitions of “dictator” Putin.
According to the US/NATO/Kiev “narrative”, everything was peaceful and normal before February 24. On that day, without the slightest justification and warning, like lightning in a blue sky, a Russian invasion descended on innocent Ukraine. As good Samaritans, the USA and its camp rushed to the aid of the victim by becoming its source of dollars and weapons, not to mention mercenaries and NATO “advisers” to operate these weapons systems. The conflict was supposed to last at most a few weeks, which was all the time that was needed to bleed Russia, while economic “sanctions” would bludgeon it and open the way to a “popular uprising” on the model of the “colored revolutions” (i.e. a putsch sponsored by the Western camp to carry out regime change and install a new leadership which would place Russia under the control of US imperialism).
That is the official “story”, rehashed ad nauseam, by “major” media, with all analysis of what is happening shut out. Only pro-US/NATO/Kiev propaganda is permitted because it would not survive if serious analyses were also allowed. It turns out that censorship, presented as the practice solely of “authoritarian regimes” against which Western “democracies” are leading a worldwide struggle in the name of “values”, is very much at home in the West. It is endorsed, sometimes hypocritically, sometimes proudly.
In propaganda and the now culture, there is no history. Events occur as sudden appearances or random occurrences based on spontaneous impulses. The “good guys” (the US and those who are aligned with them) and the “bad guys” (those who stand up to them) are known in advance, nothing else. With this simplistic and distorting grid, a conflict only begins when the “bad guys” retaliate, and never before, when the “good guys” have taken the initiative to threaten or attack them, leading to the retaliation. These initial actions are simply erased from memory.
Choosing February 24, 2022 as the starting date of the conflict in Ukraine shows bias, myopia and ignorance. It is equivalent to becoming a sounding board for the official “narrative”, the primary aim of which is to conceal the central role of Western governments as initiators of the conflict in Ukraine. Their aim is less Ukraine itself than the utilization of Ukraine, first against the Soviet Union, then against Russia.
A conflict that dates back to 1945
The Ukrainian question went through four phases: from 1945 to 1956, it was a war of sabotage and terrorism; from 1956 to 1990, there was a lull; from 1990 to 2014, a new conflict was brewing; in 2014, the war began.
As early as 1945, well before February 24, 2022, the ancestor of the CIA recruited German Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators. Surrendering to the Americans, Reinhard Gehlen put his network of agents in Eastern Europe at the service of the US. Ukrainian ultranationalist collaborator Stepan Bandera joined Gehlen in Germany and, with his organization, waged a bloody war against the USSR in Ukraine, a Soviet territory. The USSR won and the KGB assassinated Bandera in 1959. It was in 1954 that Khrushchev transferred the Crimean peninsula to the Republic of Ukraine, then part of the USSR.
Latent tension since 1991
Continue readingAnother $61 billion to kill more Ukrainians in an unnecessary and losing war
The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine.
The Biden-Schumer Plan to Kill More Ukrainians JEFFREY D. SACHS, Feb 08, 2024, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-biden-schumer-plan-to-kill-more-ukrainians
President Joe Biden is refusing to fold a losing hand as he bets with Ukrainian lives and U.S. taxpayer money. Biden and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer propose to squander the lives of tens of thousands more Ukrainians and $61 billions of federal funds to keep Biden’s disastrous foreign policy failure hidden from view until after the November election.
The $61 billion will make no difference on the battlefield except to prolong the war, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the physical destruction of Ukraine. It will not “save” Ukraine. Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.
$61 billion is not nothing. This worse-than-useless outlay would exceed the combined budgets of the U.S. Department of Labor, Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and the Women, Infant, and Children nutrition program.
Almost exactly 10 years ago this month, Biden did much to put Ukraine on the path to disaster. This is well known to those who have looked carefully at the facts but is kept hidden from view by the White House, the Senate Democrats, and the mainstream media that back Biden. I have previously provided a detailed chronology, with hyperlinks, here.
Ukraine’s security can only be achieved at the negotiating table, not by some fantasized military triumph over Russia.
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush, Sr. and his German counterpart Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union accepted German reunification. When the Soviet Union disbanded in December 1991, with Russia as the successor state, American leaders decided to renege.
President Bill Clinton began NATO expansion over the vociferous opposition of top diplomats like George Kennan and the opposition of his own Secretary of Defense, William Perry. In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski upped the ante, with a plan for NATO to expand all the way to Ukraine. He famously wrote that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be a great power.
Russian leaders have repeatedly made clear that NATO expansion to Ukraine is understandably the reddest of Russian redlines.
In 2007, President Vladmir Putin stated that NATO enlargement to that date was a cheat on the 1990 promise, and that it must go no further. Despite these clear warnings, including by his own diplomats, George W. Bush Jr. committed in 2008 to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea.
William Burns, now CIA director, and then the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, wrote a famous memo entitled “Nyet means Nyet,” explaining that Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement was across Russia’s political spectrum. Most Ukrainians themselves were also firmly against the plan, favoring neutrality over NATO membership. The Ukrainian Rada declared Ukraine’s state sovereignty in 1990 on the basis of becoming “a permanently neutral state.” In 2009, the people of Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych, who ran on a platform of neutrality.
In early 2014, the U.S. decided to help bring down Yanukovych in a coup. This was standard U.S. deep-state operating procedure, one used on dozens of occasions around the world. he CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and NGOs like the Open Society Foundation went to work in Ukraine. The point person was Victoria Nuland, who was first Richard Cheney’s principal deputy foreign policy advisor, then George Bush Jr.’s ambassador to NATO, then Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, and by 2014 Assistant Secretary of State.
This time, the Russians caught the conspiracy on tape, in an intercepted call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State). Nuland explains to Pyatt that Vice President Joe Biden will help choose and cement the post-coup government. The 2014 Ukraine team, including Biden, Nuland, Jake Sullivan (then and now Biden’s national security advisor), Geoffrey Pyatt, and Antony Blinken (then the deputy national security advisor), remains the Ukraine team today.
It is a team of bunglers. They thought that Yanukovych’s overthrow would quickly usher in NATO expansion. Instead, ethnic Russians in Ukraine virulently rejected the Russophobic post-coup government that was installed by Nuland, and called for autonomy of the ethnically Russian regions. In a referendum, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.
Obama, Biden, and their team armed the post-coup government to attack the ethnically Russian regions, thinking this would be the end of it. Yet the regions resisted. Ukraine and the breakaway regions signed the Minsk Agreements to bring an end to the fighting and give constitutional autonomy to the ethnically Russian Donbas. The Minsk II agreement was backed by the UN Security Council, but the U.S. privately agreed with the Ukrainian government that it was okay to ignore it.
In 2021, after 7 years of fighting and more than 14,000 deaths in the Donbas, Putin called on newly elected President Biden to stop NATO enlargement and engage in negotiations with Russia over mutual security arrangements. Biden rejected Putin’s call to end the gambit of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.
In February 2022, Putin launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) invasion to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called for negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality. Within a month, a framework agreement to end the fighting was reached between Ukraine and Russia, based on Ukraine’s neutrality and an end to NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine. Biden stepped in to stop the deal, with the U.S. informing Zelensky that the U.S. would not support neutrality.
Biden and team had still more failed tricks up their sleeve. They firmly believed that U.S. financial sanctions—freezing Russia’s assets and cutting it out of the SWIFT banking system—would cripple the Russian economy and cause Putin to relent. In fact, they expected that the ensuing economic crisis would topple him. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.
Then they expected that NATO weaponry would trounce Russia on the battlefield. That too did not happen. Then they expected that Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” in the summer of 2023, backed by Pentagon and CIA planners, would defeat Russia. Instead, Ukraine lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead and wounded—its military hardware destroyed.
The entire war, including the loss of Ukrainian territory, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, and the utter waste of more than $100 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to date, could easily have been avoided.
Now, Biden and Schumer want to throw more Ukrainian lives and more tens of billions of dollars at this glaring failure. They want to do this in a rushed vote, without any Congressional let alone public oversight, without hearings, and without any strategy. The fact is they want to save Biden from the embarrassment of a decade of puerile and failed plotting, at least until the November election.
There remains one answer for Ukraine’s security: diplomacy and neutrality. That solution doesn’t cost lives or money. It was Ukraine’s choice before the 2014 coup and again in 2022 until stopped by Biden. It is the path that Biden and the Senate Democrats still refuse to take.
Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.
WANT TO KNOW INFO, 31 Jan 24
Over the last 20+ years, WantToKnow.info has summarized over a thousand news articles on deep corruption within our military and intelligence systems. Going deeper, we have gathered a comprehensive collection of verifiable resources, videos, books, and declassified government documents. In this information center, we’ll present a sobering investigation into the US war machine: what it is, who benefits, and who pays the price. The true impacts of US military-intelligence activities in countries all over the world are examined, from World War II to our present moment in time.
Conflict, war, and perceived national security threats provide a common focus for military and CIA partnership. Military activity is heavily informed by CIA intelligence, and public support for this activity is secured by pro-war narratives and voices flooding our media system. What is really going on behind closed doors and on the battlefields is rarely covered in the news, if only for a brief glimpse.
The mainstream press often downplays how ineffective, harmful, and wasteful our current national security strategy is. Over the past century, the CIA’s covert actions have led to countless deaths, human rights abuses, and the undemocratic toppling of numerous foreign governments. While entrenched bureaucracy may be responsible for some of these government agency failings, deeper covert actions within our government have led to chaos and suffering in America and all over the world. Major cover-ups and horrific crimes within the military-intelligence complex continue to remain largely hidden from public awareness.
What is presented in this information center will likely be challenging, sad, and shocking for those who want to know. Yet real information can be empowering. It helps us understand the root causes of human and environmental suffering: the money, players, and belief systems that drive the machine. It invites us to question authority in healthy ways, across political differences. Yet most importantly, challenging information can paradoxically remind us of the greater good. It is the courage of the people and the love for the common good that bring these injustices to light—fueling open dialogue and constructive action.
Unaccountable Military Spending
The military keeps a lot of little things secret. Most people know the phrase “follow the money.” Unfortunately, following the money is impossible when it comes to keeping track of the flow of US taxpayer dollars at the Pentagon. The US military has consistently failed to keep track of the money it spends. As the defense budget speeds towards $1 trillion, the Pentagon failed an independent audit of its accounting systems for the sixth consecutive year in 2023.
In 2022, the Pentagon couldn’t properly account for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. That figure increased in 2023, with the department insufficiently documenting 63% of its now $3.8 trillion in assets. We’ve covered the shocking extent of military waste and trillions missing from US DoD accounts since 2003, as documented here.
In 2021, President Joe Biden declared that the United States was “not at war” for the first time in 20 years. However, this is far from the case. Even members of Congress are uninformed about the presence of US military forces in countries all over the world. This is partly due to the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted in 2001, which allows for secret operations primarily conducted by the CIA. Investigations have indicated that the United States has pumped millions into fighting more than a dozen “secret wars” over the last two decades. Since 2008, the US has supported at least nine coups in African countries, with a vast network of military bases scattered across the continent.
Going deeper, military black budgets are even more challenging to calculate. Military black budgets fund classified government programs, psychological operations, special forces operations, occult shoulder patches created for top secret programs, and other clandestine military activities. Former intelligence contractor and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast network of over a dozen spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, funded by a $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013. When the US Space Force was created in 2019, an investigation by Forbes revealed how much of the US Air Force budget was shrouded in secrecy, where “literally hundreds of line items in the proposed budget” were classified.
Arms Industry Corruption
Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons.
— Arundhati Roy
The US dominates the global arms sales industry. Data released in 2023 indicates that the U.S. sold weapons to nearly 60 percent of the world’s authoritarian nations in 2022. Year after year, half of the Pentagon budget doesn’t go to those fighting on the battlegrounds. It goes to corporate weapons contractors who profit lavishly from war. As one defense executive flat-out told Reuters at Europe’s biggest arms fair, “war is good for business.”
From the Middle East, Ukraine, China, Saudi Arabia, and to Nigeria, US arms sales have done little to promote stability and democracy in geopolitically impacted regions. Read an incredibly comprehensive report by The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which illustrates how US arms sales have only fueled unnecessary conflict and war.
Powerful banks like JP Morgan Chase and asset management firms like Blackrock and Vanguard have emerged as major players in the business of war. Some of the world’s biggest banks fund the deadly cluster bomb trade, even as more than 100 countries have banned the unethical use of cluster bombs.
These powerful financial entities are top shareholders of weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Together, the arms industry and the elite financial sector receive more federal money than most federal agencies. In 2022, Lockheed Martin received $106 from the average taxpayer, which is four times more than what taxpayers spent on primary and secondary education. Few Americans would support these war profiteers if they knew where their tax money was going.
Roughly two-thirds of current conflicts — 34 out of 46 — involve one or more parties armed by the United States. In some cases U.S. arms sales to combatants in these wars are modest, while in others they play a major role in fueling and sustaining the conflict. Of the U.S.-supplied nations at war, 15 received $50 million or more worth of U.S. arms between 2017 and 2021. This contradicts the longstanding argument that U.S. arms routinely promote stability and deter conflict. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………..more https://www.wanttoknow.info/military-intelligence-corruption-information
Zelensky Courts JPMorgan, Bank of America & Bridgewater CEOs At Davos, Urges More Money From West
Zero Hedge, BY TYLER DURDEN, WEDNESDAY, JAN 17, 2024
As expected, anything related to Ukraine presented at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos has been focused on more weaponry and seeking more vows of integration among Western allies.
“Ukrainians need predictable financing throughout 2024 and beyond,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told World Economic Forum participants. “They need a sufficient and sustained supply of weapons to defend Ukraine and regain its rightful territory.”
As for President Zelensky, in addressing world leaders at the forum he emphasized that the West needs to help Ukraine achieve air superiority if his forces are to have a chance to emerge victorious against Russia……………………………………
At the summit, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised that Washington will keep up its support for Ukraine, however while keeping things vague – following Biden’s proposed foreign defense budget request being reject by GOP members in Congress; and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg suggested Ukraine is moving closer to entry into the alliance.
Stoltenberg acknowledged a “serious battlefield situation” but also said there is “cause for optimism” after nearly two years of fighting, and NATO’s constant support.
Below is a portion of the NATO press readout based on his panel speech:
………… Ukrainians are now firmly oriented to the West, aspiring for membership in NATO and the European Union. The Secretary General also stressed that “support for Ukraine is not charity; it’s an investment in our own security”.………
But realistically, the prospect of Ukraine gaining full NATO membership would be a process of years, and would likely trigger WW3 with Russia–so to some degree this is all empty posturing.
But here’s what’s happening at Davos which is arguably more important to Kiev at the moment:
Ukraine is seeking new ways to finance its rebuilding plans as vital aid from the West slows down. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reportedly has plans to meet JP Morgan’s CEO at the World Economic Forum.
Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy is reportedly planning to meet JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon at the World Economic Forum in Davos to seek new ways of financing its rebuilding plans.
JP Morgan, the biggest US bank with almost half a trillion dollars of market capitalization, has already been advising Ukraine on financing reconstruction.
It’s as yet unclear if any firm promises were made or agreements struck at the Davos meeting which also included Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, as well as Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio.
According to further details of who was in attendance via Fox Business: “Other meeting attendees included David Rubinstein of the private equity firm Carlyle Group; billionaire entrepreneur Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Technologies; Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund; Steve Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity fund; and Philipp Hildebrand, representing BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager.”
Additionally, “Dimon was accompanied by Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s asset-management unit. The White House was represented by Penny Pritzker, of the super-wealthy Pritzker family and a major Democratic Party donor.” Pritzker has been appointed Biden administration’s special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/zelensky-courts-jpmorgan-bank-america-bridgewater-ceos-davos-urges-more-west
Nuclear disasters–in–waiting
RICHARD STONE, Science 4 Jan 24
Having taken a heavy toll on Ukraine’s ecosystems and water resources, the war with Russia threatens to create a another environmental disaster: damage to the region’s extensive nuclear infrastructure—including 15 power reactors and three research reactors.
“There continues to be a highly precarious nuclear safety and security situation across Ukraine,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement after explosions were heard near the Khmelnitsky Nuclear Power Plant and its two Soviet-era reactors on 28 November 2023—the second near-miss in a single month at the site. “All of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities remain vulnerable, either directly if hit by a missile or indirectly if their off-site power supplies are disrupted.”
Russia’s assault on Ukrainian nuclear sites began on the very first day of the full-scale invasion. On 24 February 2022, troops overran the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, infamous for the explosion and fire there in 1986 that sent a plume of radioactive smoke into Western Europe. During 5 weeks of occupation, Russian soldiers ransacked labs and kicked up radioactive soil and dust as they dug trenches and slogged through contaminated forests in the exclusion zone around the defunct plant. To the east that spring, Russian troops frequently shelled the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, damaging a hall containing a subcritical nuclear reactor.
Shelling has also flared up repeatedly around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, a complex of six reactors that constitutes Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Russia captured the plant in March 2022 and the reactors were shut down 6 months later, eliminating the risk of a core meltdown. Still, a prodigious amount of nuclear material remains there: The reactor halls hold 1380 tons of fresh and spent uranium oxide fuel, and two repositories store an additional 2100 tons of spent fuel laced with nasty long-lived radionuclides—the ingredients, many Ukrainians fear, of a “dirty bomb” that would use conventional explosives to spread radioactive isotopes……………………………………….
The presence of IAEA observers at the Zaporizhzhia station since September 2022 has deterred the theft of dirty-bomb ingredients. But a major missile strike on one of its spent fuel repositories could turn the plant itself into a dirty bomb, spreading radioactive contamination in a radius of up to 30 kilometers, says Volodymyr Borysenko, a nuclear engineer with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP).
Even a smaller strike could contaminate the reactor complex. And the spent fuel is also at risk from repeated electricity blackouts that have struck the plant, the latest in early December 2023. Diesel-fueled generators can supply power for up to 10 days, but a prolonged outage could be dangerous, as power is needed to pump cooling water into the plant’s uranium reactor cores and pools holding spent fuel.
A lesser known radioactive risk is situated about 150 kilometers upstream from the Zaporizhzhia plant on the Dnipro River. During the Cold War, the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant was one of Europe’s largest uranium ore processing facilities. The complex accumulated some 40 million tons of tailings—leftovers of milling uranium—and other foul residues before it closed in 1992. By early 2022, Ukraine, with help from the European Union, had fenced off highly contaminated areas. But a missile or artillery strike on a tainted building or dump could disperse radioactive dust over the nearby city of Kamianske.
One relative bright spot is Chornobyl, where Ukrainian scientists are restoring labs damaged early in the war. But large parts of the exclusion zone remain off limits because of the threat of mines and unexploded ordinance, says ISPNPP Director Anatolii Nosovskiy. Complicating matters for radiation monitoring, he says, the Ukrainian army has built defensive fortifications in the zone, near the border with Belarus…………………. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn7987
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: A Bright Constellation in a Very Dark Sky
By John Reuwer, World BEYOND War, December 1, 2023 https://worldbeyondwar.org/treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons-a-bright-constellation-in-a-very-dark-sky/
For those of us unable to bury ourselves completely in our ordinary lives of family, friends, and work to avoid seeing the tragedies of horrific violence unfold all around us, these are dark times indeed. The multiple wars that started after September 11, 2001 have only multiplied, and rarely end, imparting suffering to tens of millions of people around the globe. The risk of nuclear war is greater than anytime since the Cuban missile crisis, with all nine nuclear states building new nuclear weapons, several increasing their totals for the first time in 35 years, and several practicing nuclear war games on each other’s borders. At least one is threatening to use nuclear weapons if anyone challenges its aggression. The global military budget is well over $2 trillion dollars a year to wage current wars and prepare for the next ones. Two nuclear armed alleged democracies seem determined to carry out genocide in Gaza.
So it was wonderful to spend three days at the United Nations in New York amid hundreds of bright people attending the second meeting of states parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The 63 governments who have ratified the Treaty, for whom it is now international law to eschew any activity supporting nuclear weapons and to try to remediate the enormous harms already done by them, meet yearly to see how they are doing, help each other implement the law, and encourage others to join.
Accompanying the diplomats are doctors, lawyers, scientists, activists, scholars, and victims from many organizations, living the antidote to despair – each working hard to advance the sanity of this treaty among a world awash in nuclear madness. Leading the dozens of civil society efforts was the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was the ten-year driving force behind the negotiation of the TPNW in 2017. This was a major international treaty driven primarily by civil society, and a potent reminder that ordinary people can make a huge difference in a world usually dominated by the rich and powerful.
Leaders of civil society organizations were allowed to present their views in the plenary sessions along with the government representives. These statements were supplemented by educational sessions on dozens of topics. Most powerful for me were the young students from many countries who condemned nuclear weapons as creating insecurity and violating their right to life, who demanded more inclusion of youth and women in policy making. Scientists reminded us of the climate and agriculture research predicting that even a limited regional nuclear war will darken the earth’s skies enough to cause mass starvation of billions after the blast and fallout kills the first hundred million people. Representatives of the indigenous peoples who were harmed by weapons production and testing in the U.S., Australia, Khazakstan, and the Pacific gave stirring testimony of the loss of their land and multigenerational health, demanding justice for what they have suffered. The parties to the TPNW formally agree to address their concerns for healing and remediation. Several of the remaining Hibakusha (nuclear bomb survivors) from Japan shared their incredible stories and pleas for never again. Lining the hallways were works of beautiful art from the dawn of the nuclear age to the present. Concerts, vigils, prayer services, and protest marches were held at city venues nearby.
Representatives from the organizations that we count on to rescue us during disasters all made statements that there will be no meaningful help after multiple nuclear explosions . This included the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, the World Medical Association, the International Council of Nurses, and the World Federation of Public Health Associations. All of these bodies agree with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War that the only way to assure that nuclear weapons will not cause an unmitigated disaster for humanity is to eliminate them. The principle means of doing that will be educating as many people and leaders as we possibly can about the threat these weapons pose.
I noticed among the many statements decrying nuclear weapons a sentiment that I heard less frequently at antinuclear events in the past – that war itself is the problem, and that we would do well to oppose all war rather than expend energy supporting one side or the other in any given war. This created the opportunity to introduce folks to World BEYOND War, whose mission is replace war with a just and sustainable peace.
Mingling with capable people dedicated to preserving life and our future through the TPNW illuminated the world that often seems dark with hatred and killing, and energized me to continue the current work of creating space for peace and human dignity.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 