The Paul Street Report, 3.10.2023

I want to add to my list of false Western narratives on the Ukraine War. In previous essays[1], I – with no love for the fascist war criminal Vladimir Putin – have critiqued eight such narratives so far: (i) “Russia’s criminal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine was completely unprovoked by the US and NATO”; (ii) “the [world’s top imperial state aggressor state the] United States has legitimate claim to present itself as a defender of international law and democracy in the struggle with global lawlessness and autocracy”; (iii) “the Ukraine War is a fight between democracy and autocracy;” (iv) “ ‘civilization’ is most especially and urgently at stake in white and European Ukraine”; (v) “Russia wants to wipe Ukraine off the map and absorb it fully into Greater Russia”; (vi) “the US and NATO have no ulterior and imperial motives other than defending Ukrainian democracy and self-determination”; (vii) “the US isn’t investing much in the Ukraine War”; (viii) “the risk of nuclear war is too small to worry about.”

Here are four more false Western narratives:

IX.  “We Want Peace”

Again and again, Western policymakers and spokespersons have portrayed Putin as the sole obstacle to peace negotiations. This is incorrect. Washington has showed no interest in real blueprints for peace, one excellent example of which was published on CounterPunch last December 20th.  This lack of interest reflects the United States’ imperial understanding of the war as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, regardless of the disastrous impact of the conflict on the people of Ukraine (and on Putin’s cannon fodder conscripts) and notwithstanding the danger of a widened, even potentially nuclear war.

A critical moment in the prevention of peaceful settlement took place in early April of 2022, after a fifth round of peace talks in which Russia and Ukraine “appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement” (Fiona Hill and Angela Stent in Foreign Affairs) under which Russian forces would have returned to their pre-invasion lines and Ukraine would have pledged not to seek NATO membership in return for security pacts with a number of countries.  Russia was prepared for a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin.  And then it all ground to a halt with reports of Russian war crimes and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s sudden and unexpected visit to Kyiv, where he told Zelenskyy that “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin,” the West was not.

Just days after Johnson left Kyiv, Putin stated that negotiations “had turned into a dead end.” That was the last real shot of suspending the conflict. Here we are more than a year out with Zelensky getting yet more  US/Western weaponry and talking about defeating Russia so resoundingly as to take back Crimea, where most of the population is Russian-speaking and prefers incorporation in Russia.

As the great critic of US imperialism Noam Chomsky noted early on, there’s never been any great mystery about how to step back from the catastrophic brink: the West can pursue a policy of pressure and aggression, pouring fuel on the fire “with the possibility of nuclear war. Or we can face the reality that the only alternative is a diplomatic settlement, which will be ugly—it will give Putin and his narrow circle an escape hatch. It will say, ‘Here’s how you can get out without destroying Ukraine and going on to destroy the world.’” Further:

“We know the basic framework is neutralization of Ukraine, some kind of accommodation for the Donbas region, with a high level of autonomy, maybe within some federal structure in Ukraine, and recognizing that, like it or not, Crimea is not on the table. You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, ‘I don’t like hurricanes,’ or ‘I don’t recognize hurricanes.’ That doesn’t do any good…That’s the alternative to the destruction of Ukraine and nuclear war. You can make heroic statements, if you’d like, about not liking hurricanes, or not liking the solution. But that’s not doing anyone any good.”

X.  “We Care Deeply About the Ukrainian People”  

A core Western assumption is that the US  and NATO care deeply about the Ukrainian people. Really?  The West doesn’t show concern for the Ukrainians by continuing to fuel the war until Russia is completely defeated and humiliated, something that seems highly unlikely (see below) and whose prospect could well prompt Putin to use nuclear weapons. The American Empire’s  war masters seem no less ready to sacrifice Ukrainian lives in the pursuit of strategic geopolitical goals vis-a-vis Russia than Zbigniew Brzezinski was to sacrifice Afghan lives to bring down the Soviet Russian regime in 1979.  As Chomsky told Nathan Robinson last April:

“But the U.S., following Brzezinski in its brilliance…organized radical Islamist fanatics from all over the world, including Osama bin Laden, to carry out the fight to ensure that the Russians stayed in, killing maybe a million Afghans and wrecking the country. Brzezinski was asked about that by the interviewer. [The interviewer said],’Do you think this was worth doing?’ [Brzezinski] said ‘Look, what’s the fate of Afghans as compared with the importance of bringing down the global enemy?’ That’s us. That’s [what] Hillary Clinton [said] a couple of days ago, saying ‘let’s do that [in Ukraine, playing what she called ‘the Brzezinski trick’ – P.S]. Let’s draw the Russians into Ukraine, fight a harsh guerrilla war, be really tough on them. It’ll exhaust them, destroy them, we’ll bring them down.’ Of course, on the side, Ukraine will be wiped out. Okay, that’s us now, at the liberal end of spectrum.”

You don’t show concern for Ukrainians by throwing them further into a deadly slaughterhouse.

+XI. “The Notion That the West Could Have Averted the Invasion is Russian Propaganda”

The conventional Western wisdom is that Putin was never interested in diplomatic efforts to prevent an invasion of Ukraine. Determined to “restore the reach of the Soviet empire,” the dominant Western narrative runs, the Moscow autocrat assaulted Ukraine just to slake his revanchist lust for land, resources, power, and grandeur. Not true. A more accurate history was advanced by what MSNBC editor Zeeshan Aleem last April called “a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades.” As Aleem noted:

“Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia’s willingness to go to war over Ukraine’s NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion… But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraine’s future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.”

Mafia chiefs don’t admit weaknesses.

Among the US-based Russia experts Aleem cited: John Mearsheimer, an international relations scholar at the University of Chicago; Thomas Graham a former special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007; Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; George Beebe, former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney; Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Emma Ashford, resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. These and other experts who questioned the notion that Washington couldn’t have prevented Putin’s invasion by addressing his concerns over Ukraine’s potential NATO membership argue  in the “realist” tradition of US Cold War architect George Kennan, who lived to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and warned about the “red line” danger of pushing NATO up to nuclear weapons-stocked Russia’s border.

One can agree or disagree with the many former US-Russian policymakers and academic experts who have questioned the reckless approach led by the imperialist Joe Biden administration, but the implication that they are all dupes of the Kremlin is of course absurd.

XII. “Ukraine is Winning, Winning”

“Ukraine is winning and will prevail reasonably soon, kicking Russians troops out of their country, thanks to Western weapons, the impact of US-led Western economic sanctions on Russia, the superior fighting spirit Ukrainian troops and citizens animated by aggrieved Ukrainian nationalism.” This does not appear to be the case.  Edward A. Kolodziej, Emeritus Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of the book “Global Governance: Evaluating the Liberal Democratic, Chinese, and Russian Solutions,” recently spoke with News Bureau editor Phil Ciciora about the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the one-year mark.  Sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause, Dr. Kolodziej noted with approval that “the high morale of the Ukrainian people, NATO’s unprecedented political, economic and military support for Ukraine, and Ukraine’s success in repelling the Russian invasion have decisively frustrated Putin’s ill-considered invasion.” Still, Kolodziej tells Ciciora that he sees neither side scoring a decisive victory as the bodies pile up in a long deadlock:

“There’s a disquieting geopolitical reality that’s gradually settling in. Given the present and foreseeable balance of military capabilities as well as human and materiel resources on each side, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that neither side can outright ‘win’ the war. While it’s impossible to predict the dynamic evolution of a war, it would appear that stalemate, at a mounting cost in blood and treasure, will be the lamentable result. Despite the vast amounts of arms supplied to Ukraine by the U.S. and its Western allies, the balance of military forces between Ukraine and Russia in the coming year means neither side will break through against the other…The U.S. insists that its shipments of weapons, some of which will not reach Ukraine before its projected spring offensive, are sufficient. Well, they are certainly enough to sustain a stalemate, but scarcely enough to provide Ukraine with the means to break through Russian lines…Despite…heavy losses, Putin is doubling down. The Russian economy has largely weathered Western sanctions. Russian oil and gas revenues continue to support the war. New conscripts and convicts are replenishing Russia’s armed forces. Domestic support of the war effort remains high as many Russians accept Putin’s false narrative that Ukraine, in league with NATO, attacked Russia. What dissent is raised against the Ukraine invasion is immediately quelled by prison or worse… there are reports that China may be prepared to abandon its faux neutrality by providing Russia with weapons and munitions. Chinese military assistance to Russia is more likely to reinforce the stalemate in Ukraine than to provide Russia with sufficient arms to achieve a breakthrough… The danger, of course, is that the regional conflict in Ukraine will metastasize into a global one.”

The criminally invaded Ukrainians have no monopoly on the fighting spirit of nationalism. US and European military, financial, and political support of Ukraine has certainly helped fuel Russian war nationalism.  Biden, the head of the world’s leading aggressor state, recently popped up in the capital of Ukraine, a country with a 1,427-mile border with Russia – a border that has been repeatedly crossed by invading Western armies that killed millions of Russian people.  Did that by any chance help Putin sell the war to Russians as national defense against the imperialist West? Of course it did. How could it have been otherwise?

Last December, for what it’s worth, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mike Milley said that the war is unwinnable for either side by military means.

Why Study History?

When in my history-teaching days I used to give an opening lecture (regardless of the specific course in question) on Why Study History? I would advance this as an example of a mistaken belief repeated again and again in defiance of George Santayana’s advice that people should know history in order not to repeat it: “This war will be over quickly.” It rarely turns out that way. In some cases, corpses pile ever higher for a long period after the outcome has been determined. How many US troops (many tens of thousands) and Southeast Asians (millions) perished well after it was clear to US imperial leadership itself that the US-Amerikan Reich could not in fact achieve maximal objectives and stop anti-imperial national consolidation under the Hanoi regime in Vietnam (though not without devastating the country in ways that helped stop Vietnam from becoming a model of successful development outside the world capitalist system)? The US has won a couple of “splendid little [imperial] wars,” it is true: William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt’s rapid defeat of decrepit Spain and Daddy Bush’s Desert Storm overnight victory  – replete with epic war crimes like the mass aerial slaughter known as the Highway of Death  – over much weaker Iraq. But far more common is the long deadly slog, where many military experts now say the Ukraine War is headed.

They Play with Our World Like It’s Their Little Toy

The human meat grinder rolls on. Death, maiming, crippling, and death, and more death, maiming, crippling and death until the War Pigs call it off. Bob Dylan, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Come, you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothing
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

You fast all the triggers
For all the other to fire
You sit back and watch
While the death counts get higher
You hide in your mansions (and dachas)
While young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And gets buried in the mud

Professor Kolodziej might have added that “a global” conflict war would stand a strong chance of involving nuclear weapons and triggering a war capable of ending life on Earth. Biden himself has said that the war could lead to “Armageddon” – a reflection that has hardly stopped him from pouring more and more US weaponry into the conflict.

One thing that might merit attention is a comparison between the number of almost completely white people who lived in Ukraine prior to Putin’s criminal invasion and the number of very disproportionately nonwhite people living on planet Earth.  The first number is roughly 44 million.  The second number is roughly 8 billion. White Ukrainian lives matter, of course – not that Western policy is about preserving those lives (see above) – but how about humanity as a whole?

China Next?

Meanwhile speaking of global war between nuclear powers, it’s hard not to detect the Biden administration and US war and diversion media trying to manufacture mass consent for a conflict with China. It all seems a little ham-fisted to the trained eye.

China floats “spy balloons” over  US territory to gather information on US military capabilities? Seriously?

Covid-19 resulted from  a Chinese lab leak because – get this – the US Energy Department, yes, the Energy Department, says so, and this gets widely reported in US media despite the fact that the department’s “finding” comes with “low confidence” and most of the intelligence department thinks the conclusion is “weak? For real?

China is warned by the US State Department against selling Russia arms…and then the Biden White House approves $619 million in lethal arms sale to Taiwan, including hundreds of missiles for F-16 fighter jets, in what CNN calls “a move that will likely further inflame already heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing.” Hello?

US military support of Ukraine is surely meant among other things to send a message to Beijing regarding Taiwan.

With the intensifying US conflict with China as with the Ukraine War, things are presented to US-American media consumers/subjects in the usual historically de-contextualized fashion.  The victims of amnesia-inducing US news are told nothing about the ongoing history of Washington’s campaign to restrain China’s economic development and its capacity to function as a global power and as a hegemon even in its own region – roles that the US plays quite aggressively both near and uniquely far from its shores.

Missing from the dominant media coverage and commentary is just exactly how it is that the blood-soaked, parasitic, and plutocratic -capitalist United States has any legitimate right to dictate geopolitical conduct far from its own borders and up to the very territorial edge of other nuclear superpowers.

The latest US moves have China’s president Xi Jinping and his new foreign minister Qin Gang breaking polite form to openly note the growing likelihood of “conflict and confrontation” with the US in East Asia.

The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven, as usual, and it is richly bipartisan, with both US parties railing against China.

Imagine Russia and/or China moving to cripple the US economy while militarily backing nations who challenged Washington’s authority in the Western Hemisphere. Gosh, remember how close the world came – just One Minute to Midnight [2]– to annihilation when the Soviets briefly violated the United States’ holy Monroe Doctrine  by contesting US terrorism in the Caribbean in the fall of 1962? (there’s that “why study history” thing again).

It’s All Good: The Right People are in Charge

Here’s something to keep in mind, something Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin know very well about but that may not be recognized by Western liberal lefties who have decided to go “balls to wall” for full NATO-backed “Ukrainian working-class victory” over Russia:

“The Russians [as Chomsky told Nathan Robinson last year]  have plenty of nuclear weapons. But they have a very limited warning system. They use old-fashioned, long obsolete, radar-based warning. That means up to the horizon. The U.S. uses a satellite warning system. So if anything happens anywhere, on the ground, in Russia, we have instant knowledge of it. …Russia [by contrast] doesn’t know anything until shortly before the attack hits, which means they’re very prone to mistaking an accidental warning as an actual missile launch.”

But hey, what, us worry? World War III? It can’t happen here, not on this planet, ruled by such wise and benevolent men as Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin, Vladimir Putin, Valery Gerasimov, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Xi Jinping, and Chang Wanquan and with the comforting material base of peace granted to humanity by such prudent and caring outfits as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, and BAE Systems.

What could go wrong?

Notes

1.  See Paul Street, “The War in Ukraine One Year In,” CounterPunch, February 24, 2023;  Paul Street, “Beware Distraction: Why is ‘Civilization’ Supposedly Most at Stake in Ukraine?,” The Paul Street Report, March 7, 2023.

2. As Wikipedia accurately reports (see the Michael Dobbs book to which this note is attached), ‘Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Александрович Архипов, IPA: [vɐˈsʲilʲɪj ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ arˈxʲipəf], 30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Soviet nuclear torpedo launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such an attack likely would have caused a major global thermonuclear response, destroying large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. As flotilla Commodore as well as executive officer of the diesel-powered submarine B-59, Arkhipov refused to authorize the captain and the political officer’s use of nuclear torpedoes against the United States Navy, a decision which required the agreement of all three officers. In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, then director of the U.S. National Security Archive, credited Arkhipov as “the man who saved the world.”’   Noam Chomsky discusses other near US-Russian nuclear war near misses (and much more worth reflecting upon