{"id":204022,"date":"2022-01-31T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=204022"},"modified":"2022-01-28T05:51:01","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T05:51:01","slug":"lets-not-have-a-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/01\/lets-not-have-a-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s Not Have a War"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 Jan 2022 – The U.S. foreign policy establishment, chasing decades of failures, appears to be seriously considering the unthinkable in Ukraine. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bad idea<\/p><\/div>\n

Joe Biden last week said the American response in Ukraine would be proportional to Vladimir Putin\u2019s actions. \u201cIt depends,\u201d the president posited, thoughts drifting like blobs in a lava lamp. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing if it\u2019s a minor incursion\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Alarms sounded all over Washington. The rip in the national political illusion was so severe, Republicans and Democrats were forced to come out agreeing, leaping into each other\u2019s arms in panic. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who increasingly looks like a man about to miss a historically important free throw, said of a potential Russian invasion, \u201cWe can make crystal clear the stark consequences of that choice.\u201d Republican Senator Ted Cruz said Biden \u201cshocked the world by giving Putin a green light to invade Ukraine.\u201d The National Security Council issued a statement through Jen Psaki that any Russian move into Ukraine would be \u201cmet with a swift, severe, and united response.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a later press conference, Biden explained he had to cut things short because, \u201cYou guys will ask me all about\u00a0Russia.\u201d He appears days from pulling his pants down to show reporters the electrodes White House chief of staff Ron Klain has probably attached to his testicles by now.<\/p>\n

This is a rerun of an old story, only with a weaker lead actor. Six years ago, Barack Obama gave an\u00a0interview to\u00a0<\/a>The Atlantic<\/a><\/em>\u00a0quashing Beltway militarists\u2019 dreams of war in Ukraine:<\/p>\n

The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-Nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do\u2026 This is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then as now, both blue and red propaganda outlets howled. The \u201ccore interest\u201d of the Washington consensus is war. It isn\u2019t just big business, but our biggest business, one of the last things we still make and export on a grand scale. The bulk of the people elected to congress and a lion\u2019s share of the lobbyists, lawyers, and journalists who snuggle in a giant fornicating mass in the capital are dedicated to the upkeep of the war bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

Their main purpose is growing the defense budget and militarizing the missions of other government agencies (from State to the Department of Energy to the CIA). Washington think-tanks exist to factory-generate intellectual justifications for foreign interventions, while attacking with ferocity \u2014 as if they were emergencies like pandemics or deadly hurricanes \u2014 the appearance of ideas like the \u201cpeace dividend\u201d that threaten to move any of their rice bowls to some other constituency.<\/p>\n

Both Biden\u2019s comments and the \u201cObama doctrine\u201d were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as \u201cour\u201d interests separate from Washington\u2019s war pig clique. The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.<\/p>\n

These people consistently lose popularity contests to cannibals and fingernail-pullers, and their playbook \u2014 one play they run over and over, never deviating despite decades of disaster \u2014 is designed to reduce every foreign policy situation to contests of force. Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, which a compliant press happily calls regime change.<\/p>\n

Obama looked at the big, muddy stretch of land atop the Black Sea called Ukraine and asked if its strategic importance was worth war. Meaning, real war, with an enemy that can fight back, not third-world pushovers in Iraq or Libya who offer as much resistance as the British colonial enemies\u00a0Blackadder\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>officers once described as being \u201ctwo feet tall and armed with dried grass.\u201d His answer was an obvious no. Ukraine has less strategic importance to the United States than Iraq, Afghanistan, even Kuwait for that matter.<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rblfKREj50o<\/p>\n

No one will say it out loud, but the greatest argument against U.S. support for military action of any kind in Ukraine is the inerrant incompetence of our missions and the consistent record of destabilizing areas of strategic interest through our involvement, including in these two specific countries. At the moment the Berlin Wall fell the United States had almost limitless political capital with these soon-to-be ex-Soviet territories. We blew it all within a few years. Now that we\u2019re really in trouble in Ukraine, why would we keep to the same playbook that got us here?<\/p>\n

Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country\u2019s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. Since we\u2019re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.<\/p>\n

Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.<\/p>\n

We back Our Men in Havana to the hilt, no matter how corrupt they may become in their rule, a process we call \u201cdemocracy promotion.\u201d The cycle is always ends the same way, whether we\u2019re talking\u00a0about Hamid Karzai<\/a>\u00a0or Ayad Allawi or Boris Yeltsin. The white hat ally turns out to be either overmatched or a snake, usually the latter, and siphons off Western aid to himself and his cronies in huge quantities while smashing opposition by any means necessary. That brutality and corruption, combined with efforts to implement our structural adjustment policies (read: austerity, and the de-nationalization of natural resources) inevitably results in loss of popular support and\/or the rise of opposition movements on the right, the left, or both.<\/p>\n

Rising discontent in turn inspires further requests from the puppet for security aid, which we happily provide, since that ultimately is the whole point: selling weapons to foreigners to fill those Washington rice bowls. You will soon hear it in the form of increased calls for defense spending amid the Ukraine mess, but we\u2019ve been at it forever.<\/p>\n

We started selling drones to \u201callies\u201d\u00a0under Obama<\/a>\u00a0and escalated the practice under Trump with billions in sales to peaceful democratic havens\u00a0like the UAE<\/a>, who had already used them to massacre civilian populations, children included, in Yemen. We continued escalating such sales under Biden,\u00a0adding countries like Qatar<\/a>\u00a0to our list of excellent customers in part with the idea of using the country as a base for \u201cover-the-horizon\u201d strikes in an Afghanistan bereft of \u201cboots on the ground.\u201d Even after our disastrous wars finish, we find ways to continue them.<\/p>\n

This is relevant to Russia and Ukraine because we\u2019ve cycled through at least half of the usual failure process with both countries. Just a couple of decades ago we essentially controlled the Kremlin, but so completely mismanaged that situation with aggressive backing of a notoriously corrupt Yeltsin regime that Vladimir Putin was able to consolidate power with widespread backing of a public initially much disposed to us. Ukraine we treated as a pawn nation from the start, backing a series of leaders who shamelessly looted the country before forcing them into a miserable Sophie\u2019s Choice, about which the American public still knows little.<\/p>\n

In 2013, Ukraine was proceeding down a path of integration into the E.U. Paul Manafort client Viktor Yanukovich, always described in America as an outright puppet of Moscow, was actually a proponent of Euro-integration at this point. \u201cYanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine to have closer ties to Russia<\/a>\u201d is how Reuters correspondent Liz Piper described his attitude, quoting him as saying to those wanting to go back to Russia\u2019s arms, \u201cForget about it.. forever!\u201d But Putin\u2019s ferocious tactics, including intense economic and military threats, pushed Yanukovich to back out of the EU deal, and take instead an economic trade package with Russia that included $15 billion and the lowering by a third the price the country paid for natural gas from Russia.<\/p>\n

This, in turn, spurred a Western response via the \u201cMaidan revolution,\u201d really a U.S.-backed coup, in which Yanukovich was replaced with someone more suitable to our foreign policy geniuses. \u201cYats is our guy<\/a>\u201d is how our current undersecretary for political affairs Victoria Nuland put it, insisting that Arseniy Yatsenuk be Ukraine\u2019s next leader, even though Ukrainians might have preferred former boxer Vitaly Klitschko. When apprised some of the E.U. countries were uncomfortable with a coup, Nuland famously said, \u201cFuck the E.U.\u201d Forget gunboats, here was F-bomb diplomacy!<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=L2XNN0Yt6D8&feature=emb_imp_woyt<\/p>\n

Putin responded by annexing Crimea, which in turn led to the moment when Barack Obama made his decision to drop the bluff and stop the escalation. His reasoning was simple: Ukraine was always going to matter more to Russia than to the United States, and when push came to shove, he, Obama, wasn\u2019t going to war over it. Moreover, because the hawks in Washington would never come out and say they would, either \u2013 \u201cIf there\u2019s somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it,\u201d he challenged \u2013 the issue instead would keep being presented as an improper defiance of consensus:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow\u2026 And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses\u2026 You are judged harshly if you don\u2019t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obama was nearing the end of his term. In saying all this he was probably motivated in part by a desire to spite the Hillary Clinton loyalists in the national security establishment he imagined would soon be taking over. They had crossed him on several important issues, including the question of whether or not to cooperate with Russia\u00a0on Syria<\/a>, and he was taking his soon-to-be-freed petty side out for an early test drive. But he wasn\u2019t wrong to identify that Washington bureaucrats were more wedded to the militarization playbook than the public interest.<\/p>\n

Six years later, even the NatSec dingbat brigade knows the public won\u2019t buy the idea of risking nuclear war over Ukraine, which is why they\u2019re pulling out stops to Twitterize the situation by introducing piles of other arguments and hypotheticals, like that the mad dictator won\u2019t stop in Kyiv. \u201cHe wants to evict the United States from Europe,\u201d said former intelligence officer, Brookings fellow, and ubiquitous Russiagate character Fiona Hill just\u00a0wrote in the\u00a0<\/a>New York Times<\/a><\/em>. This is absurd, but we will surely go through the process now of being told this is Hitler all over again, that Biden must be more Churchill than Chamberlain, etc. Headlines about $200 million in arms sales to Ukraine will turn to $500 million, a billion, etc., and other regional allies will be hit up with fresh sales calls.<\/p>\n

Normally it\u2019d be clear how this story ends, but Biden\u2019s \u201cgaffe\u201d raised real concern that the war party will overcompensate with a catastrophic macho gesture (news that Biden is now \u201cweighing<\/a>\u201d the deployment of more troops and warships to the region should fill all with confidence, for instance). There are people in Washington who think a pipeline of Javelin missile sales is worth having to watch for Russian subs popping up in New York harbor, and they are the same people in charge of this very heavy decision on the horizon.<\/p>\n

There are people who will read this and cry, \u201cWhere\u2019s your outrage against Vladimir Putin? Why don\u2019t you denounce him?\u201d To which I say, fine, I denounce him. Then what? When you\u2019re done wailing, you\u2019re still faced with deciding whether or not to go to war with Russia, which is not a real choice, unless you\u2019re an idiot or General Jack Ripper-insane. Unfortunately, the Nulands and Blinkens who\u2019ll be making this call just may fit those descriptions.<\/p>\n

The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of the first triggers for the revolt against \u201cexperts\u201d that led to the election of Donald Trump. Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives pushing Iraq back to the eighth century.<\/p>\n

The more recent crew is made up of Extremely Online, Ivy-educated fantasists who rarely leave their embassies abroad and view life as an endless production of\u00a0Sloane\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0The Good Fight<\/em>, soap operas about exclusive clubs of fashionably brainy pragmatists with the guts to color outside the lines and \u201cget things done.\u201d Lines like \u201cYats is our guy\u201d make them tingly. This is perhaps the only subset of people on earth arrogant and dumb enough to think there\u2019s a workable plan for pulling off a shooting war with Russia.<\/p>\n

The truth is there\u2019s nothing to be done at this point. We had our chance. Both Russia and Ukraine should have been economic and strategic allies. Instead, we repeatedly blew opportunities in both places by trying to flex more and more muscle in the region (including, ironically, via election meddling). Now there\u2019s no winning move left. Conceding this means abandoning conventional wisdom, and the people we\u2019re now relying on to see the light have shown little ability to do that.<\/p>\n

In a situation with only two choices, bad and horrifyingly worse, God help us if the playbook wins again.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Matthew C. Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for <\/em>Rolling Stone, author of several books, a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary<\/em>, co-host of <\/em>Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on <\/em>Substack.<\/p>\n

Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

25 Jan 2022 – The U.S. foreign policy establishment, chasing decades of failures, appears to be seriously considering the unthinkable in Ukraine. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":141731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1035,112,278,961,70,118,1594,481,2534],"class_list":["post-204022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-eastern-europe","tag-pentagon","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-war","tag-war-economy","tag-warfare","tag-wwiii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}