Russia "Violating International Law"? How About the U.S.?

The nonsense now issuing from the Neoliberal fascist press is dumb founding as well as enraging. Oh, "there're no Nazi thugs destroying buildings or beating people"! Putin just made it all up as an excuse to invade Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula. Another blow dried bimbo on Kornacki this morning insisted: "Well, ya know, Russia is gonna do what it wants to do to advance its interests in the end!"

Yeah, so? The implication being that the goody two shoes, scrupulously lawful (when it suits its fancy)  U.S. wouldn't? WTF are you saying? Again, more protectionist smokescreen  blather to cover the tracks of the Neoliberal coup taking place in Ukraine, even proclaiming now an unelected gov't the "legitimate one".  But what is exponentially galling to me (and many others)  - who don't get our news from the putrid prostitute American Neolib corporate media- is the notion that the U.S. wouldn't be doing the very same thing as Russia if the tables and situation were turned.  But many Americans who are gobbling this propaganda of Russia "breaking international law" - as Obama spouted last night, don't even know where the hell Ukraine is! The map below should give them a clue:

 Note Ukraine abuts Russia on its southwest border. Note it carefully!  Now, try to conceive a juxtaposition of events and conditions whereby Florida (on the U.S. SE coast) has somehow become a separate protectorate  - say like Puerto Rico - and is suddenly taken over by hundreds of thousands of Cuban Castro sympathizers.  They localize attention at Miami where they essentially take over and raise Cuban flags. All this on a state right next to Georgia.

 

Would the then "symmetrical situation"  U.S. just sit back and let events unfold, especially if the commie Cubans were going around beating up upstanding citizens, defacing buildings, burning up synagogues or churches  etc.? In your dreams!  There'd be such a display of 'shock and awe' invasion it would make your head swim! So no one can prattle away nonsense and tell me the U.S. wouldn't do the very same thing Russia is now doing, if the situation were somehow reversed.

 

Thus, the crap former Ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor was trying to push on MSNBC this morning (supposedly the most "liberal" of the networks allotted to us) is absurd. Taylor, totally deficient in recent U.S. history and flouting of international law, actually declared:

 

"We ought to treat Russia as an outlaw state, and that means treating Putin and Russia like other outlaw states"

Oh, oh, you mean like the U.S.?

 

Has this mentally-challenged imp forgotten how the U.S. became an outlaw state in 2003, invading under bogus pretense the sovereign state of Iraq?   In the case of Bush's justifying the Iraq invasion and butchery (WHO estimates up to 600,000 Iraqis killed)  we beheld a perfect example of what moral philosopher  John Kekes called "rationalizing evil" ( 'The Roots Of Evil , p. 168).

 

Using every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of WMD (from a rat named 'curve ball') - the Bushies pumped up a bogus case for invasion, just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.

 

One idiot commenter  (it's incredible how many lurk all over the damned place) on a UK Guardian forum, in response to another who had pointed this out, scribbled:

 

"Oh wait! So you're going to use what Bush did back then to justify what Putin is doing now?"

 

Bush actually didn't "do it" on his own. He and his craven neocon slime confected an "Iraqi War Resolution" which MOST congress critters of BOTH parties then signed on to. So even if Bush and his cohort designed the plan, congress as the last bulwark to preventing an outlaw act could have stopped it. They didn't. Hence, it's on the U.S.  Putin is behaving in no different way now than the U.S. did then, in fact he has more justification on his side, given Ukraine's on his doorstep not 6,000 miles away!

 

Anyway, Bush’s aggression also exposed unsavory aspects about ourselves as a nation:  a willingness to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive, aggressive war just as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland. The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushies actually compared Saddam to Hitler!  Some 'Muricans actually swallowed this shit up and took it as gospel!

But WHERE are the objective voices and people to point this out now? Well, they are no place to be seen! It's perfectly okie dokie if WE invade another nation, just because a dictator made idle "threats" against a former president's daddy, but woe betide any nation that remotely tries to protect its own interests - which are geographically even more proximate.

 

Thus, the irony inherent in Obama telling Putin he's "violating international law" might at least be easier to swallow if the towering blatant hypocrisy weren't already imbued in U.S. policy-   including targeted drone strikes in more than half a dozen Middle East nations - whose sovereignty is being regularly trashed.

Why has this country veered so far off course? Most of it can be traced to the document known as NSC-68 prepared by Paul Nitze of the National Security Council – completed by 1950. The document essentially contained the blueprint for unending strife and undeclared wars, all of which would be invoked on the basis of a zero tolerance threshold for foreigners’ misbehavior. The putative basis? To enable U.S. agitation, overthrow (or assassination) of democratically-elected leaders, e.g. Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954,

 

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

 

 and large and small occupations (ranging from the few thousand troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to more than 200,000 in Iraq by 2006.) 

The motivating force of the document was clear in this regard:

“a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere”
 

In other words, any place for which the U.S. even remotely construes a “defeat of free institutions” gives it license to intervene at will. This critical aspect is described thusly by Morris Berman[1]:

“Nitze emphasized the importance of perception, arguing that how we were seen was as crucial as how militarily secure we actually were. This rapidly expanded the number of interests deemed relevant to national security”.

In other words, it provided the formula for unending war, and the building of Empire. Gore Vidal pinpoints the emergence of the American Empire when he notes[2]:

“Since 1950 the United States has fought perhaps a hundred overt and covert wars. None was declared by the nominal representatives of the American people in Congress…they had meekly turned over to the executive their principal great power to wage war. That was the end of that Constitution”.

The key point to note here is not only did the U.S. invoke a specious doctrine[3] to entitle it to engage in warfare wherever it deemed the “need” (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) but also to take out democratically elected leaders where and when they threatened U.S. corporate interests, such as Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953)- threatened U.S. Oil interests, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954)- threatened United Fruit Corp. by giving land to farmers, and Salvador Allende in Chile (1972)- strategic interests threatened.

Even when specious doctrines weren't invoked, lies and deceptions often were in order to involve the U.S. in massive troop deployments and years of ruinous (to lives and treasure) military intrusions. For example, LBJ employed the ruse of the North Vietnamese firing on the Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters in August, 1964 as the basis to ramp up the Vietnam War. Similarly, Bush and Cheney employed the ruse that Saddam had "WMD" to justify Operation "Iraqi Freedom" (a bogus name if ever there was one) and invade Iraq - which had not one damned thing to do with 9/11. (Though the numskulls who watched FAUX News would argue with that!)

What is most disconcerting in the present crisis' context, is that we can't even get an opposing POV from the Democrats. The  lips  of these lily-livered, co-opted Neoliberal wimps are uniformly sealed. Oh, except when they blurt out  or tweet bollocks, as a moron Dem from CT did yesterday, i.e. along the lines of: #Ukraine: "Putin playing with fire in Crimea!"

Putin "playing with fire"?? How about the U.S. and its resident neocons  playing with fire. Deliberately destabilizing the gov't in Kiev for months in advance, with visits by  Crazy Johnno McCain,  Neocons at the NED,  as well as manipulations by Neocon Victoria Nuland at State, i.e.  to topple the originally elected government of  Viktor Yanukovych and insert her pal "Yats" - a reich-wing, ultra-nationalist stooge.   The objective being to make it a NATO Neolib outpost right on Russian's SW border!  (Imagine if the Warsaw Pact still existed, doing a similar think to Florida!) As pointed out by smirkingchimp blogger Mike Whitney:

"In order to topple Yanukovych, the US had to tacitly support fanatical groups of neo-Nazi thugs and anti-Semites"

But, after their almost unified stance against Edward Snowden's whistleblowing on the NSA perfidy,  I've pretty well given up on the Demos anyway. They're only useful for invoking as a last minute counter measure if the Rs have someone or something  a million times worse. As one blogger on Smirkingchimp.com once put it: "They're no different from the repukes except they lube you up first."

Meanwhile, embedded Neocons such as Paul Roderick Gregory at FORBES, are trying to goad Obama into precipitous action by calling him a "paper tiger" e.g.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2014/03/01/alarm-putin-will-not-stop-with-crimea-paper-tiger-obama-will-do-nothing/


 This is not productive or conducive to our own national security, but it's the standard modus operandi of neocons with Neoliberal market aspirations of controlling other nations' destinies.

Let us hope cooler heads continue to prevail, and that Obama can summon at least part of the courage JFK had to during the October, 1962 missile crisis- when he faced down Gen. Curtis Lemay and other war hawks who demanded he bomb and invade Cuba. Kennedy told them to stick it up their wazoos, thereby avoiding a nuclear war.

Yes, according to the Neolib mouthpieces and their neocon nonsense blabbing this morning: "Russia is greatly reduced from what it was with the former  Soviet Union".

Maybe. But they still have more than 3,000 ICBMs bearing multi-megaton hydrogen war heads. NO matter how much the crazies in this  country want to go 'nuke 'em' or as one nut proposed ,"blow up a Russian train station so no troops can move in"  - believe me, it would be a bad idea!

Stay tuned!  See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/54563/heard-the-one-about-obama-denouncing-a-breach-of-international-law

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/54548/the-road-to-war
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[1] Morris Berman: 2006, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, W.W. Norton, page 118.

[2] Gore Vidal: 2002, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunders Mouth, p. 124.
[3] Of course, the ignominious “Bush Doctrine” – crafted under the auspices of the 2002 National Security Strategy – was even more noisome and outrageous, allowing for pre-emptive war as it made Iraq the gold standard for precedence. See: Berman, op. cit., p. 203.

IRAQ WAR An Unnecessary Waste? Of Course!

It was sad yesterday morning watching the CBS Early Show to see a number of former American troops bemoan what's been happening in Iraq - with apparent "terrorists" and "al Qaeda" affiliates re-taking towns such as Fallujah. They decried the current events, and what they were seeing and even expressed some reservations about the value of invading in the first place. It is indeed good that they did so, because the entire operation was a sham and illegal from the get go.

As I observed in previous blog posts, evil predicated on an intent to "do good" is one of the mot virulent forms. It is virulent because it can operate as evil under the guise of a good cause, or a moral crusade. Such was the basis for the whole sordid Iraq invasion.   Bush and his minions truly believed they were doing good at the time they demanded congress vote on The Iraq War Resolution in 2002, never mind what we later discovered[1].

Bush’s aggressive foreign policies also exposed unsavory aspects about the U.S. as a nation.  For example, one willing to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive war by invasion as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland in 1939.  In the case of Fallujah, just over nine years ago, in November 2004, the United States military carried out an atrocious war crime at the behest of its civilian leaders. Having already committed what America's chief jurist at the Nuremberg trials called "the supreme international crime" -- aggressive war  (under Article IV)-- the American military now declared a whole city full of innocent civilians to be a "free fire zone" and proceeded to pulverize the town with bombs, missiles, chemical weapons and finally a ground attack by thousands of troops.

Is this anything to be "proud" of? On the contrary, it's enough to make a sober observer and true patriot  ( as opposed to the paper variety) - VOMIT.  Especially as the orders came  after the American military had cut vital supplies of food and water to the city -- another brazen war crime.  And by the way, let us bear in mind here that any given soldier has as his duty to FIRST follow his conscience rather any orders or commands from superiors. This was in fact, one of the higher injunctions in Article IV and was applied to all the Wehrmacht troops, as well as SS riff raff rounded up after World War II. They were informed in no uncertain terms that "following orders" could not be used as an excuse for what they did because they had the higher moral  duty to disobey those unlawful orders and heed their consciences.

But in the case of the Iraq "war" (actually an occupation, as contrasted with WW II which was a REAL war, the one my dad fought in, including several REAL battles such as the Battle of Buna (New Guinea) all the above applied with special force.

The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushie PR actually compared Saddam to Hitler! Never mind that Saddam was the one being pounded by the most devastating shock and awe attack since the Blitzkrieg launched by Hitler on Poland in 1939. But this sort of human evil had been strenuously reasoned and formally justified by Bushie Neocons like William Kristal, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney! In addition, the U.S. corporate media acted as a willing accomplice, fully complicit in spreading the hysteria that led to the Iraq invasion on March 17, 2003.  Hence each and every one of these actors, agents share blame in manifesting human evil, including the devastating costs exacted on Iraqi civilians. Far from malignant human evil emerging without rationality or reason, it instead erupted as if from multiple cancerous cells becoming malignant.


We the citizens also played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed unpatriotic or even "terrorist sympathizers."  Many of  us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example, references “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni[2]”  In a nutshell, too many Americans have “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions.[3]”

Back to Fallujah: So many of the former grunts seen on the CBS segment saw it as their stellar, singular "saving" battle,  in a glorious crusade against them terrible 'terr'ists  - and in addition, the
"most iconic moment" of their righteous , god fearin' campaign (now tainted because heir conquest hadn't held). But  they might want to attend to the facts of the event  - ass opposed to the Pentagon pushed PR and malarkey. So it is well that they see these facts detached in time from all the bravado and hype of the moment. In this case, they'd do well to pick up on  an eyewitness report of the attack from a BBC reporter in the city at the time:

Excerpt:

"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."

Is this something to be proud of? No, not at all. No more than the Nazi mass killings of Polish Jews in Warsaw and other ghettoes, or the slaughter of Russian Jews during Operation Barbarossa. The sad fact, and it's a brutal one for many of these troops to process - is that Iraq was a totally useless and wasteful exercise. Not only that, it was illegal under Article IV of the Nuremberg laws. It was another sordid example of what transpires when a people are driven by ideology and militarism into a conflict in which they have no business. Much like LBJ used the pretext of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to drive the country into Vietnam and the loss of 58,000 lives.

True, Saddam was no angel, not one bit. But the Bushies' exploitation of the false "al Qaeda" narrative to justify an American invasion actually back fired, because now the real al Qaeda likely has taken up residence in the chaotic vacuum left behind. What the invasion did, which had been controlled up until then, was unleash the sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites which Saddam had neutralized by his anti-religious, secular power. Once Saddam was removed from power, the Sunnis and Shi'ites were free to go at each others' throats - and all the American occupation did was delay it.

Of course, there's no going back now. We already wasted $4 trillion there, which we could have better used to repair our crumbling infrastructure here at home. What one does hope is that in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan - we finally re-learn the lessons we ought to have learned after Vietnam. That is to stay the fuck out of places where our immediate domestic security isn't threatened.  Were all those troops" fighting for my freedom"? Hell no! They were fighting for Wall Street, the Bushie opportunist Oil imperialists and their privateer companies (like Halliburton) and the advance of Amerikkan Neoliberalism.

It's about damned time future troops understand what they're getting into before they enter some hyped- up "crusade" - and they also understand that when they sign onto a "volunteer army" (even for later supposed "benefits")  they become de facto mercenaries in the service of war capitalists.

To that end, all citizens also need to understand how Bush is now trying to whitewash his crimes using the venue of his Bush Library. To see Rachel Maddow's  take down of this nonsense, go to one of my previous blog posts here:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-exposes-bush-library-for.html

 

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[1] We now know an Iraqi (codename ‘Curveball’) made the whole WMD baloney up in order to trigger regime change to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs.

 

[2] Jacoby, Susan, The Age of American Unreason., 310.

[3] Ibid.