U.S. Nuclear Counterforce Option Against Russia A Boneheaded Idea

It appears that the U.S. Neocon warmongers still ensconced in Obama's administration have a new plan to teach those Russians a lesson. According to a Denver Post piece ('U.S. Pondering Tougher Responses to Russia', June 5, p. 13A):

"The Obama administration is weighing a range of aggressive responses to Russia's alleged violations of a Cold War -era nuclear treaty, including deploying land based missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy the Russian weapons."

Seriously? Hold strain, you haven't seen the half of it. As the piece goes on:

"The options go so far as one implied- but not stated explicitly - that would improve the ability of U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian territory."


So, in other words, start World War III. To rejuvenate memories again, let's recall that the Russians have retained a “limited use" nuclear doctrine by which they reserve the right to employ nukes if they feel overwhelmed by conventional outside forces, say NATO’s, see e.g.

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/russ-wellen/54873/russia-still-addresses-conventional-weapons-gap-with-u-s-via-nukes

As noted therein:

"On March 13, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ran a piece by Nikolai Sokov with the paradoxical title Why Russia calls a limited nuclear strike “de-escalation.” He writes, “In 1999, at a time when renewed war in Chechnya seemed imminent, Moscow watched with great concern as NATO waged a high-precision military campaign in Yugoslavia.” It became concerned both that “the United States would interfere within its borders” and that the “conventional capabilities that the United States and its allies demonstrated seemed far beyond Russia’s own capacities.”

In response, Russia

… issued a new military doctrine whose main innovation was the concept of “de-escalation”—the idea that, if Russia were faced with a large-scale conventional attack that exceeded its capacity for defense, it might respond with a limited nuclear strike.

Of course, such response would also occur  if there is any U.S. nuclear first strike, especially on Russian targets.  You can therefore take it to the bank that any such U.S. belligerent tomfoolery would be met with an all -out Russian nuclear strike on those nuclear weapons and the nations hosting them.


Now, the other side - because that's important. As the article notes (ibid.):

"Russia denies violating the treaty and has in turn claimed violations by the U.S. in erecting missile defenses."

Which is spot-on true as I have pointed out before, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/03/do-we-need-missile-defense-system-in-e.html

In an April 22, 2012, Wall Street Journal article ('Missile Gaffe Leaves European Unfazed', WSJ, today, p. A8) even Stefan Niesiolowski, chairman of the defense committee in the Polish Lower House of Parliament, noted such a missile system was not needed in Poland. Quoting him from the WSJ piece:

"There's no military threat and we haven't had a situation as secure as this in 300 years. The level of U.S. military engagement in Poland therefore is not of top importance."

WOW! No military threat? Then WHY do it? Obviously, to further antagonize the Russians,  having already dismissed Russia as a third rate nation after abusing a 1991 agreement in which NATO was not to have moved one millimeter further to the east if the Soviet Union was dissolved. Mikhail Gorbachev held up his end of the deal, the U.S. didn't. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-game-theory-perspective-on-ukraine.html

The ultimate bellicose move, of course, was instigating the coup in the Ukraine, which lies right on Russia's geographical doorstep. Let us see how close:




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.

In a  symmetrical situation  would the 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.

But see this is the problem with the Neoliberal Pax Americana meme: one standard for the U.S. and another for everyone else. And no other nation better dare try to extend hegemony outside its national borders.

According to the Post piece, quoting a Lt. Col. Joe Sowers:

"All the options under consideration are designed to ensure that Russia gains no significant military advantage from their violation."

Totally oblivious to the fact that it has been the U.S. trying to press such advantage. Indeed, Pentagon and White House officials are even considering admitting the Balkan nation of Montenegro into NATO - further arousing Russian ire (WSJ today, p. A5) .  Even Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson agreed back in MARCH, 2014, that if he was Putin and faced the sort of belligerence and upheaval in the Ukraine instigated by U.S. neocons (like Victoria Nuland) , he'd have made the exact same responses. Including going into the Crimea.

So what is really behind all this U.S. huff and puff?  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. The problem for the U.S. now is that countries like Russia and China are no longer prepared to kowtow to the spread of the Neoliberal Empire based on this misbegotten Nitze doctrine. They are going to aggressively engage and protect their own spheres of influence as robustly as the U.S. would for its own.

Russia, for its part, and after the U.S. has moved its influence right up to its border, is not prepared to sit still and wait for hammers to fall.

Of course, Russian aggression will be a key topic in the G-7 summit tomorrow. But perhaps these misfits would be better served focusing on U.S. and NATO aggression provoking the Russians to react as they have. See :NATO's Warmongers:

  http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/brian-cloughley/54851/the-belligerent-alliance-natos-warmongers

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/62512/french-rap-us-and-nato-for-playing-russian-roulette-with-ukraine

------

[1] Morris Berman: 2006, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, W.W. Norton, page 118.


 

The "Neoliberalism Frankenstein" - If You're Against It You Should Be Rooting for Greece and Russia!

Is it true as salon.com author Patrick L. Smith opines in a recent piece,

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/12/neoliberalism_is_our_frankenstein_greece_and_ukraine_are_the_hot_spots_of_a_new_war_for_supremacy/

 that we Americans have all become supine and surrendered to the mind -fucking U.S. media, and so are unable to discern truth from propaganda any more? Smith observes:

"Americans have by now surrendered to a blitz of propaganda wherein Russia and its leadership are cast as Siberian beasts, accepting as truth tales the National Enquirer would be embarrassed to run"

 It seems so, as polls disclose too many of us are siding with the Neoliberal media machine in two of the last arenas where Neoliberal world supremacy is at stake: Greece and the Ukraine. In the former a 'gun' is being held to the country's head to pay up all its owed debts despite the fact most level-headed people familiar with the structuring know it can't work. Putting the Greeks and their new PM in a hopeless, losing wicket position.   As Smith points out:

"At writing, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s imaginative new finance minister, has just made his first formal effort to present European counterparts with new ideas to get foreign debts of €240 billion ($271 billion) off the books and the Greek economy back in motion. These ideas can work. Even creditor institutions acknowledge that Greece cannot pay its debts as they are now structured. But at a session in Brussels Wednesday, the European Union’s arms remained folded."

Why the obstinacy? Because if Greece is allowed to restructure so will Spain and likely Portugal too. This the Neoliberal debt mongers cannot afford to allow. (And let's note that Barbados too is under the neolib gun, after the most recent credit downgrade, as the vultures of the IMF circle getting ready to pick the country's bones.  In Bim's case, of course, it was a profligate gov't that allowed the situation to get out of control.)

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine - the West's Neoliberals have handed PM Petro Poroshenko an "offer he can't refuse" - a la the Godfather when he had his hit men chop that thoroughbred's head off and place it in the bed of the movie mogul who refused to cooperate (giving the Godfather's godson a movie role.) The West, featuring the EU and its U.S. ally as well as NATO puppets, want that Ukraine gem in their Neoliberal constellation - backed up right against Russia's border.  They refuse to allow it to be a buffer state  - which is exactly what's needed now.  Smith again:

"Also at writing, the Poroshenko government in Ukraine appears to have recommitted to a cease-fire signed last September in Minsk and promptly broken. It is not surprising given Kiev’s very evident desperation on all fronts. But neither would it be if Poroshenko once again reneges. There is a sensible solution on the table now, but these are not people who have so far been given to one."

Again, why not accept the sensible solution? Because that is not what Neoliberal supremacy is all about. Like a Frankenstein monster created by economic dimwits who believe in the deus ex machina of markets with humans as its cogs, they are all about absolutism. Solutions must therefore be all or none, with the 'none' being no Russian input that can be respected. Ukraine is therefore dictated to be a satellite in the greater NATO conglomerate and subject to Neoliberal debt rules.

Smith in his essay rightly puts it thus:

"There is something tragically irrational driving both of these crises. The genesis of each, at least nominally, is the question of whether markets serve society or it is the other way around. Economic conflict, then, has been transformed into humanitarian disasters. This is what Greece and Ukraine have most fundamentally in common.
 

It is in search of a logical explanation of the illogic at work in these two crises that something else, something larger, emerges to bring them into a coherent whole. Washington has so many wars going now, none declared, one can hardly keep the list current. But the most sustained and havoc-wreaking of them is unreported. This is the war for neoliberal supremacy across the planet. Greece and Ukraine are best viewed as two hot fronts in this war, a sort of World War III none of us ever imagined."

And he nails it right there! "World War III" going on right now,  yet most of us are somnolent, or better, comatose under the haze of Neoliberal puppet media propaganda. The barrage on the nightly news has been so effective, the poorly informed are left with their mouths agape as those brutal Russians (backing the separatists)  emerge with pretty well the same "evil" aura as ISIS.  No surprise that like the brainwashed denizens of Oceania - in the scene where the uber villain Goldstein is depicted on the giant theater screen - they go nuts clamoring for blood and action.  DO they not know that action more fully ensnares them as complicit bait in their future slavery and destitution  in a perpetual war state? Frankly, they no longer care. Having lost the ability to critically and logically think, thanks to the bastardized vocabulary of Newspeak, their brains have now been colonized by "Big Brother" to his own ends.

The people of Oceania were no longer authentic beings in their own right but mere extensions of Big Brother and his will to power, to keep grinding their bodies and state resources up in a never-ending war to attain global domination. SO it is with the "Neoliberal Frankenstein" and how it now seeks to grind Greece and Ukraine into more fodder for its misbegotten global ends.

Smith asserts that "Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein" and also says "it is profoundly undemocratic, never mind that the English and American variants of democracy are the mulch from which it arises." He also adds:  "It is also unrelentingly absolutist because it is intimately related to the myth of America’s providential exception, neoliberalism can tolerate no alternative".  His definition (formal) starts out:

"Neoliberalism denotes the revival since the 1970s, plus or minus, of English liberalism as expounded by Locke in the 17th century and numerous others in the 18th—Adam Smith and his “invisible hand,” most famously. John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, are notable among 19th century apostles."

But then goes into a lengthy discourse comparing early and 18th century forms of  liberalism to the neo-mutant. Let's just cut to the chase here and give Smith's core definition:

"Classical liberalism in its neo phase denotes not thought but belief, ideological conviction. It is the ideology of radical deregulation, radical corporatization, radical privatization—prisons? water? kindergartens? human health?—maximal profit without regard to consequences, and the radical devaluation of any serious consciousness of the communities in which all individuals are suspended."

I would add to this columnist Jay Bookman's insight from a 1998 Baltimore Sun piece ('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad'):

“The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative."

And there is Henry Giroux's insight on Neoliberalism:

"As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. "
 

Thus we see where the yen to cut social insurance arises, and why profit is amplified for the richest, and  also how  the wealthier nations  especially benefit by placing newcomer additions in regimes of adversely structured debt. This is exactly why the West's Neolibs are determined to make Ukraine part of the Neoliberal imperative and orbit. It follows from this that the true liberal must inveigh against this mission and that means siding with Russia. At least to the extent that the Ukraine outcome ends essentially in a draw - translated to mean neither in the West's orbit or Russia's but a separate buffer state. (This was advocated by Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson two years ago.)

But this may be difficult given as Smith writes:
 

"I was astonished many times as a correspondent to see how readily foreign leaders and their finance ministries drank the Anglo-American Kool-Aid. Here I single out Continental Europe as especially disappointing. A long social-democratic tradition notwithstanding, almost all European leaders—and every last technocrat in Brussels—went down like sticks of butter when neoliberals at State, Treasury and in the think tanks launched the post-Berlin Wall campaign."

Thus, the Europeans have now become puppets of the U.S. which let's face it, is the primary force bearer - the 'cop of the world' there to enforce Neolib standards. Hence, the threat to send lethal weapons to the Ukrainians - who will then get to actively fight for their own Neoliberal debt enslavement.

They may never have heard of FDR's famous words that "Necessitous men cannot be free men" but who knows, they may instead buy into the old Nazi saw "Arbeit Macht Frei" - the sign hanging over Auschwitz.

The same applies to the case of Greece, as Smith observes:
 

"It is preposterous. Greek debt can be efficiently restructured so that losses are minimized and properly shared. This is a European crisis in the final analysis, not Greece’s alone; behind every incautious borrower is an incautious lender. Yet there is no hint of open minds among Europe’s leaders, notably the Germans. What, we have to ask, is this all about?"

Again, what it's about is the Neoliberal imperative. The ability to structure debt in the most adverse way possible to convert nations into debt slavery states and their citizens into slaves for the Neoliberals.  How accomplished? Well, via the draconian conditions required by the EU and the IMF: the privatization of numerous state-held assets, including airports, rails and the entire port of Piraeus. Also,  divestment of the most profitable of these first.  Leaving the gov't impecunious and a beggar beholden to the Neoliberal empire.

If you consider yourself to have any skin at all in this ongoing war, you need to back Greece and Russia as bulwarks against Neoliberal advance. If not, then you are part of the problem not the solution and if the whole world turns into a slave state for the richest, you must share the blame.
 

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-zuesse/60991/gallup-americans-fear-of-russia-soars

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dean-baker/60995/greece-does-battle-with-creationist-economics-can-germany-be-brought-into-the-21st-century

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/60987/putin-heads-off-a-us-russia-war

and:

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/16/ukraine_is_the_new_iraq_why_history_is_repeating_itself_in_eastern_europe_partner/

Plutocrats Plus - Why Neoliberalism Is Bad For Us All

Author Thomas Frank in a recent essay ('Plutocracy Without End: Why the 1 Percent Always Defeats the Middle Class') wrote:

"The One Percent have already broken every record for wealth-hogging set by their ancestors, going back to the dawn of record-keeping in 1913. But what if it all just keeps going? How much fatter can the fat cats get before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores balance?"

How much fatter can the fat cats get? Much fatter indeed! We've already seen the Gini coefficient, one of the best measures of inequality, rise to its highest level in decades - accelerating most since the Reagan era and the massive cut in the top income tax rates. People bitch and moan about paying taxes, but don't understand that they are what keeps our society afloat. No taxes, then no roads, no schools, no benefits......and no armies! The problem with the myopic Right is that they want all the taxes to go for armies and weapons and none for the domestic foundation. But this is a fool's thinking because without domestic security at its basic level, in terms of providing roads, bridges, water mains, sewer lines and means for people to not only subsist but thrive, you are looking at a banana republic.

The problem with the Neoliberal, pro -free market idiom is that it denies the most basic security for the majority of citizens. In this way it feeds economic inequality while it rewards the speculator and banker class. It also helps to corrupt the political class via unregulated campaign contributions.

Jay Bookman aptly noted('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad', in The Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1997):

"The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative. In times of crisis, however, that premise cannot be sustained politically. In times of trouble it is human nature to seek security and protection and to be drawn toward those who promise to provide it. That is how men such as Adolf Hitler, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin came to power, with disastrous consequences."

This description of the New World Neoliberal Order is exactly why the seeds of its own destruction are built into it, have been built into it.  Even as I read (in the New York Times) yesterday of the collapse of multi-employer Pension benefits funds, and how many union workers can no longer receive pensions, it occurred to me that if congress doesn't act, this is a situation that can rapidly destabilize.  There's only a small critical threshold between mass suffering and mass unrest- as we've seen all over, from the Arab Spring, to the Ukraine.

 But in the case of the Ukraine, the unrest was fomented by U.S. Neoliberals and their neocon sidekicks,  driving NATO expansion to the east. The cover story sold is that the people wanted "freedom" and being aligned with the EU and the West. The truth is that if they go that route they will become economic slaves to the Neoliberal  Economic Order. Indeed, once the IMF and EU funds go through one of the first offsets will be cutting public pensions and abolition of all rigid price controls, as well as painful cuts to public subsidies. Those Ukrainians pining for "freedom" would have been better served to have pondered FDR's famous words:

"Necessitous men cannot be free men."

And looked before they leaped into the Neoliberal Abyss (which they might have asked EU Sovereign debt victim Greece about).

Meanwhile, Thomas Frank goes on to observe (ibid.):

"That we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for example, about how inequality contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that cannot survive."


Marx's dialectic theory of history is one thing, but a more germane or relevant destabilizer is that without adequate income, with only debt to purchase the capitalist goods manufactured - the whole edifice of the consumer economy (and our GDP) collapses.  The reason is simple, and one evident to anyone with basic math skills: it is consumption that supports 70 percent of our GDP. Take away that consumption, and kaput! The economy dives into depression, irrespective of what the Fed, Obama, congress or anyone does.

Thus, once the Neoliberal Order of Globalized capital was established, the seeds for its future destruction were sown. Recall that it was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ( 'Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism', 1916) who first sounded the warning that mobile finance capital was designed to continually leverage labor to the lowest common denominator. Lenin clearly showed in his treatise how the Political and Economic Elite, simply by the expedient of export capital, could indirectly exploit raw materials from poor nations, or use the latter as captive labor markets. Meanwhile, that same exported capital would ensure working conditions degraded at home. Under such a scheme, financiers would continually divert capital to foreign locales where it would generate the highest return and refrain from aiding industry in their own countries.

That working conditions have degraded at home is self evident to the most cursory reader who follows economic conditions. We still have more than 24 million people under-employed or unemployed and we have a Middle Class losing more ground every day, even as the Elites talk wildly of cutting their Social Security and Medicare benefits - the last barriers between them and penury ...

Then there are the millions trapped in minimum wage jobs with no chance of advancement. Nor is there any motivation in our congress to help them by increasing their wage to a living wage, despite the fact that such a move could actually extend the life of their market Neoliberalism - since it would permit workers to purchase the goods that prop up the GDP without going into debt.

Finally, there are the tens of thousands of recently graduated college students mired in debts accrued that they now must pay off, but with no decent job prospects by which to do so. Do the Neoliberals care at all about the plight of these students or their families? Not at all! Their message is basically, "Sink or swim!" 


Will the Neoliberals quit while they're (relatively ) ahead? Not on your life! They want to add the Ukraine to their potpourri of misery, saddle them with endless debt and poverty like they did the Russians post-1990,. They also want to double down on the global Neoliberal order itself - this time using TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership, another way to screw with us like the earlier GATT and NAFTA.

Are people paying attention? Maybe, maybe not. It is painful to watch as many of our citizens simply hunker down with their TVs, DVDs, notebooks, Twitter, Facebook or other entertainment and refuse to understand that the active citizen must come to the fore if the Neoliberals are not to send our nation into a plutocracy.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has released the draft text of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, currently being negotiated in secret by 12 Pacific Rim nations.   It would be well for every citizen who thinks of him (or her-)self as more that than consumer to read it, and do so carefully.

Your future, and especially that of your offspring, may well depend on it. You need to know of the massive collision coming - heading right toward you - before it happens.  If an informed citizenry is the basis for democracy, why are we being kept in the dark? Perhaps because we no longer have a democracy  but a corporatocracy!

But that is the other prop the Neoliberals depend upon: citizen inertia, stupidity or belief in impotence, i.e. that they only have "opinions" - which carry no weight.  Also, they don't want citizens pursuing truth - information outside the media they promote, which is more invested in propaganda.

If we each do our part, as opposed to retreating, we may yet wake the Neoliberal New World Order up to the fact that poverty stricken indigents (replacing well paid, economically secure citizens) is the last thing it needs.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/55716/msnbc-can-be-trusted-by-the-established-order-thats-a-problem