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
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,
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]:The motivating force of the document was clear in this regard:
“a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere”
“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.
