{"id":228221,"date":"2023-01-30T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=228221"},"modified":"2023-01-27T05:43:50","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T05:43:50","slug":"tanks-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/tanks-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tanks & Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Jan 2023 – <\/em>\u00a0Never in memory has it been so daunting to figure out what\u2019s going on during a major international crisis as with the Ukraine affair. That sad truth owes much to the total absence of truthful reporting and honest interpretative analysis by the MSM. We are served heavy portions of falsity, fantasy and farrago crudely mixed into a narrative whose relation to reality is tenuous. The near universal swallowing of this confection is made possible by the abdication of responsibility \u2013 intellectual and political \u2013 by America\u2019s political class, from Washington\u2019s high & mighty down through the galaxy of unthink tanks and self-absorbed academia.<\/p>\n

Now, the legion of scripters for this fictional story are working with renewed energy to incorporate a few fresh elements: the Biden\/NATO decision to send an eclectic array of armor to buttress Ukraine\u2019s faltering forces; and the mounting evidence of crippling, incremental dismantling of its army by Russia\u2019s superior military. As always, that reaction turns out to be an exercise in avoidance behavior. The roughly 100 tanks slated to arrive in piecemeal fashion over the coming year will be a \u201cgame-changer.\u201d Putin\u2019s army is a proven \u201cpaper tiger.\u201d \u201cDemocracy\u201d is destined to prevail over despotic barbarism. Or so we are told in stomach-churning doses of snake-oil. I guess that we all have ways if amusing ourselves.<\/p>\n

A systematic refutation of this mythic construction is both superfluous and futile. It has been done over the past year by able, experienced and thoughtful analysts who actually know what they are talking about: Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Colonel Scott Ritter and a handful of others who together are relegated to obscure websites and scorned by the MSM. Attached is an acute analysis by Ritter of the actual military value of the infusion of tanks and other armor, and what that move augurs for the war\u2019s future trajectory.<\/p>\n

By way of introduction, I am adding my own assessment of the present strategic picture and where we are headed. It is based on inference \u2013 to some extent \u2013 as well as my reading of the conflict\u2019s genealogy.\u00a0 The main points are made in blunt, declaratory sentences. That strikes me as necessary to break through the fog of fabrications (lies) and calculated distortions which obscure what should be evident.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The crisis\u2019 starting point was in February 2014 when the Obama administration inspired and orchestrated a coup in Kyiv that usurped the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Victoria Nuland was there in Maidan Square cheer-leading and conniving together with her brother in color revolution Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. They collaborated with violent, extreme ultra-nationalist groups with whom Washington actively had been cultivating ties for a number of years.\u00a0 Those ultras dominate Ukraine\u2019s security service and the government\u2019s key policy body, the Security Council, to this day.<\/li>\n
  2. The Maidan coup was the culmination of the deeply rooted American objective of incorporating an anti-Russian Ukraine into the Western organizational orbit: NATO above all – as President George W. Bush sought to do as early as 2008. The picket-fencing of a Russia kept at the margins of an American directed Europe had been an objective since 1991. The emergence of a strong, highly effective leader as represented by Vladimir Putin quickened the perceived need to keep Russia weak and boxed in.<\/li>\n
  3. The Donbass uprising\/secession, provoked by the Maiden coup attended by the coming to power of rabid elements dedicated to subjugating the country\u2019s 10 million or so Russians, resulted in the autonomy of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as well as the integration of the Crimea (historically and demographically part of Russia) into the Russian Federation. From that moment on, the United States fashioned and executed a strategy to reverse both\u00a0shifts, to put Russia back in its place and to draw a stark line of separation between it and all of Europe to its West.<\/li>\n
  4. Ukraine became a de facto American protectorate. Key ministries were salted with American advisers, including the key Ministry of Finance headed by an American citizen dispatched from Washington. A massive program of arming, training and generally reconstituting the Ukraine army was undertaken. (In the Obama years, the overseer of the project was Joe Biden). Washington also used its influence to undercut the Minsk II accords wherein Ukraine and Russian signed onto a formula for peaceful resolution of the Donbass issue, supposedly underwritten by Germany and France. We now know from candid public testimony that Kyiv, Berlin and Paris had no intention from the outset of implementing it. Rather, it was device to buy time for strengthening Ukraine to the point where it could retake the \u2018lost\u2019 territories by inflicting a military defeat on Russia.<\/li>\n
  5. Preparations were made by the Biden administration to heighten tensions to the point where an armed conflict was inescapable. The sporadic shelling of Donetsk city (where 16,000 civilians were killed between 2015 and 2002 \u2013 official estimate by UN commission) was increased several fold, Ukrainian army units assembled en masse<\/em> along the demarcated boundary. Russia preempted. The rest is history.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (The above recitations are a matter of public and documented record.)<\/p>\n

    Where are we now?<\/em><\/strong> Here, inference takes precedence.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. The Biden administration has committed itself to escalation by the deployment of previously precluded heavy weapons systems. It has strong-armed its Western European allies to provide armaments, too. Why? The people driving policy in Wahington cannot stomach the prospect of a defeat. \u00a0That is to say, a Russian crushing of the Ukrainian army, its incorporation of the claimed four provinces, and the fatuous Western narrative shown to be little more than a string of lies. Too much in the way of prestige, money, and political capital has been invested for that outcome to be tolerated.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Moreover, just as Ukraine has been used cynically as an instrument for bringing Russia to its knees, so is the denaturing of Russia as power seen as integral to the global confrontation with China that dominates all strategic thinking. The option of working out terms of co-existence and non-coercive competition with China has been rejected outright. America\u2019s near entire political class is determined to reinforce the country\u2019s global hegemony and is girding itself to do so. The rest of the country has yet to be informed, and it is too distracted to bother paying attention to the self-evident signs of what\u2019s afoot. The strategic program was laid out in Paul Wolfowitz\u2019s notorious memo of March 1991 which has become Scripture for most of the foreign policy community. (It\u2019s contents, along with the genesis of the Neo-Cons who adopted it long ago as holy writ – and made the historic transformation from just one sect to being the semi-official doctrinal faith of the entire American imperium – is examined in a long piece that I distributed a few months ago, also attached).<\/p>\n

      The absolute failure to crash the Russian economy, thereby to open the way to political change in Moscow, and to render its supplement to Chinese power nugatory is a disappointment; but that does not faze the true believers. The United States has unified a bridled Collective West as its willing pawns who acquiesce in whatever moves Washington wants them to follow.<\/p>\n

      The signal event that punctuates that extraordinary subordination was the Germany\u2019s agreement to allowing the United States (and associates) to blow up the Nordstrom II which successive Berlin governments had deemed essential to meeting German industry\u2019s energy needs. One can rationalize it as the readiness of the Schulz to \u201ctake one for the team.\u201d What team? What overriding national interest? The annals of history record no comparable instance of a sovereign state inflicting such severe damage on itself on its own volition.<\/p>\n

      An additional plus from the Ukraine affair, in the eyes of American policy-makers, is the crystallization of an international system whose foundational structure is bipolar \u2013 a \u201cwe vs they\u201d world similar to the Cold War – is convenient insofar as it places few demands on intellectual imagination or skillful diplomacy for which they have neither aptitude nor appetite.<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. All members of the Collective West have signed on to the Biden escalation plan. So, too, – of course \u2013 the dominant factions in Zelensky\u2019s government. There is good reason to think that the purpose of CIA Director William Burns sudden visit to Kiev a few days before the Abrams tank deployment was announced was to ensure that there would be no defectors among Zelensky\u2019s inner circle or other senior officials who might get cold feet at the prospect of Ukraine becoming the battleground for a Russo-American war with effects similar to what it had endured from 1941 \u2013 1944. Burns visit was followed almost immediately by a massive purge of the leadership ranks along with officials at lower levels. The official line, accepted by the ever-pliable MSM, has been that this purge represented a virtuous anti-corruption campaign \u2013 albeit in the midst of a full-scale war. We\u2019ve been told that Burns came all that way to clear up a few minor issues (and perhaps to take the baths?) Zelensky himself had become too much of an asset as the heralded savior of Ukraine to be disposed of himself \u2013 as was Diem in Vietnam in 1963. Burns doubtless offered guarantees that he was secure \u2013 whomever else was going to be tossed overboard.<\/li>\n
      2. It is near impossible to see how the United States\u2019 objectives can be reached in Ukraine. However, the neo-cons have no \u2018reverse gear\u2019 \u2013 to use Alexander Mercouris\u2019 apt phrase. They have instigated a crusade aimed at securing America\u2019s global dominance \u2013 forever and anon. Ukraine is a waystation on the road to that visionary Jerusalem. In their grand scheme, though, they have failed to bother with a coherent, feasible strategy for resolving the current crisis.
        \nAs for President Biden, he looks to be only nominally in charge. He has been entirely captured by the Neo-Cons. He hears no other voices. As a life-long, instinctive hawk, he leans in their direction. He is old, weak and perhaps suffering from early-stage Parkinson\u2019s.<\/li>\n
      3. Before the end of the year, we all are likely to face the moment of truth. Russian forces will be on the Dnieper and, in some places, beyond it. Ukraine\u2019s army will be on its last legs \u2013 Abrams, Leopard IIs, Challengers, Bradleys etc. notwithstanding.\u00a0\u00a0 What does the outwitted and feckless Biden bunch do then? Anything is possible.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        ________________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

        \"\"<\/a> Michael Brenner is professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh; a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS-Johns Hopkins (Washington, D.C.), contributor to research and consulting projects on Euro-American security and economic issues. Publishes and teaches in the fields of US foreign policy, Euro-American relations, and the European Union. mbren@pitt.edu<\/a> – <\/strong><\/em>More<\/a>\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        26 Jan 2023 – \u00a0Never has it been so daunting to figure out what\u2019s going on during a major international crisis as with the Ukraine affair, due to total absence of truthful reporting and honest interpretative analysis by the MSM. We are served falsity, fantasy and farrago whose relation to reality is tenuous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":125356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[2314,1268,1138,1748,728,378,2881,1855,2571,688,112,818,278,961,70,2810,1594,1365,481],"class_list":["post-228221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","tag-corporate-media","tag-european-union","tag-fake-news","tag-fake-report","tag-integrity","tag-journalism","tag-journalistic-ethics","tag-mainstream-media-msm","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-peace-journalism","tag-pentagon","tag-proxy-war","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-volodymyr-zelenskyy","tag-war-economy","tag-war-journalism","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228221","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=228221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}