Arrogance and Stupidity in Obama Regime Power Grab in Ukraine

You'd think having to contain the growing power of China would be enough of a priority that a U.S. regime wouldn't stir up trouble in a small country thousands of miles away and pick a wholly gratuitous fight with Russia. But the same blundering empire that engaged in a prolonged, pointless, sadistic war against Vietnam, that invaded Iraq just to prove it could overthrow governments it disliked (and to settle a grudge that a stupid man, George Bush, had towards the Iraqi dictator because he fell for a fabrication cooked up by the Kuwaitis to make it look like that dictator had tried to assassinate his father, George Herbert Walker Bush), that learns nothing from history and sticks itself in quicksand in Afghanistan, just couldn't resist trying to seize control of the small country of Ukraine on the border of Russia, where Russia has a critical naval base, and wrest it out of the Russian sphere of influence. The U.S.' junior EU partners even rejected a Russian offer of shared economic links with Ukraine.

Well, when you get greedy, sometimes things go badly. The trouble with the U.S. is it's too powerful. It needs to get its nose bloodied more. Apparently Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were not sufficiently chastening for it to stop making trouble.

So now, at a time when realpolitik would dictate focusing on how to contain China, the U.S. goes and creates a “trouble spot” right on Russia's border. And true to form, when the U.S. doesn't get its way, it immediately issues ultimatums and demands and inflicts punishments on the offending party, in this case Russia, for daring to defy the U.S. And if Russia doesn't knuckle under, why, that just proves that its President, Vladimir Putin, is a “thug” (the favorite epithet for him, liberally employed by U.S. politicians and the chattering elite who fill the media here, inflicting their propaganda and deranged worldview on the rest of us) who is “out of touch with reality” (a common characterization, including one attributed to Angela Merkel in a phone call to Obama, as whispered in the ears of the New York Times by some anonymous White House apparatchik). Then the amateur, laughable psychoanalysis of what “drives” Putin begins.

Hey bourgeoisie, here's a clue for you: any Russian leader who would LET you drive Russia out of such a strategically vital area on its border, with an irreplaceable naval base and access to the world's seas, would be guilty of political malfeasance. ANY Russia ruler at all qualified to be ruler would have to stop you!

Now that pathetic joker Joe Biden, VP of the U.S., the man who as Senator did more than anyone to place the sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, is flitting in and out of Ukraine and other states in the region, tongue-lashing Russia and “showing support” for the pathetically weak puppet government the U.S. just installed with mob violence and false flag snipers. (It's all in the previous essays below.) And U.S. Secretary of State John “Look Ma! Now I'm a Hawk!” Kerry called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to once again demand that Russia make the eastern Ukrainians who refuse to be ruled by the new puppet government in Kiev abandon the buildings they've seized, or else, we are informed by State Department mouthpiece Jen Psaki. Psaki tells us that Kerry "urged Russia to take concrete steps to help implement the Geneva agreement, including publicly calling on separatists to vacate illegal buildings and checkpoints, accept amnesty and address their grievances politically." Yeah, politically. Like through peaceful processes? And elections? Like the violent fascist-led mob backed by the U.S. and EU that seized power in Kiev DIDN'T do, you mean? Sounds so reasonable! Maybe if the U.S. and EU hadn't caused this fissure in Ukraine to split open we wouldn't be enduring this “crisis” in the first place, ya think? [Today in Kiev, apparently reading from the same script, Biden parroted the exact same words as Psaki, demanding that Russia make the eastern militants clear out of their strong points, “accept amnesty, and address their grievances politically.” And the U.S. announced it's sending troops to Poland and other new NATO states, apparently to reassure the insecure rulers of those states and lay down a tripwire in case of a hypothetical, far-fetched Russian invasion.]

The U.S. has managed to weaken itself, pointlessly, because now if it fails to roll Russia back and force it to abandon eastern Ukraine, Asian countries fearful of Chinese island land grabs and the expansion of Chinese power generally will have renewed doubts about the strength of the U.S. “commitment” to their security. Why create a needless test over Ukraine? It is idiotic! The U.S., scrambling to shore up this collapsing sand castle of a government it created in Ukraine and salvage the situation, is warning Asian nations not to take advantage of economic sanctions on Russia, apparently signaling that the U.S. will be displeased if Asia starts buying Russian petroleum and natural gas and otherwise undermine the punitive sanctions.

The Russian reaction to the U.S. coup, contrary to the blather of the bourgeois commentariat in need of a cover story to hide the responsibility of their own side in provoking this situation, is not part of some pre-planned Putin “plot” in which Russia is going to “invade” country after country, another domino “theory” concocted to justify U.S. aggression and invert reality. Nor is it just anti-Imperialists like me who say the Russian reaction is predictable and provoked by Western action. Self-described “conservative” University of Chicago “International Relations” professor John J. Mearsheimer, a promoter of what is called “realism” theory in I.R., thinks so too, as he has stated publicly (on PBS NewsHour). [1] But hey, that's not my problem. They're going to keep forcing me to give them my money and shovel it into the maw of their gargantuan military and secret police establishment, no matter what.

But as usual, the U.S. is trying to dress its naked power play in the finery of high moral principle. “International order is at stake,” pompously trumpeted Ben Rhodes, deputy “national security adviser” to Obama. “Our policy on Ukraine is not targeted at Russia specifically, it is targeted at upholding the international order that we believe has been violated.”

If we parse “international order” correctly, that makes perfect sense. The “international order” in question is the system in which the U.S. holds global dominance, and all other nations must give way before U.S. demands and desires. Failure to do so is a violation of “the international order,” by definition. Once you understand the U.S. view of the world, there's nothing opaque about such statements.

Rhodes also thought it was brag-worthy that the U.S. got a meaningless vote through the toothless UN General Assembly taking Russia to task over the Ukraine situation (aka “crisis”). The U.S. managed to line up barely half the members of the General Assembly- 100- behind its scolding of Russia for reunifying Crimea by popular referendum of Crimea's inhabitants.

“One of the reasons you saw that vote in the UN was that Asian nations don't like precedent being set that a sovereign nation's territorial integrity can be violated with impunity,” crowed Rhodes. [My emphasis.]

Like the U.S. DIDN'T do when it invaded and conquered Iraq, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, (during the regimes of Bush the Younger, Reagan, Bush the Elder, and Lyndon Johnson), overthrowing unwanted regimes? Or when Reagan invaded Lebanon? And mined Nicaragua's harbors, and committed much murder and mayhem in that country, both with a proxy terrorist army and U.S. military “Special Operations Forces”? Or when the U.S. “secretly” bombed Laos and Cambodia, and invaded Cambodia? Or on scores of other occasions in U.S. history, including when it took a huge chunk of Mexico by force and incorporated it into the U.S. in 1848? (The Mexicans didn't get to vote on that either.) Or its invasions and conquests of the Philippines, and of Cuba? One could go on, and on, and on. But why bother? Clearly people like Rhodes, and all those who labor in the vineyards of the Western propaganda system, are completely immune to obvious facts. Their ideological fanaticism is such that they can make such brazenly hypocritical statements from within their glass castles, secure that no one will throw a stone back at them. Or if someone does, the stone-thrower can be dismissed with contempt as a brainwashed ideologue out of touch with reality!

Oh, and Rhodes had something to say about deaths resulting from the Ukrainian puppet government's allied fascist forces attacking pro-Russian Ukrainians in the east at one of their checkpoints:

“We are looking into it. We have been very clear that we do not support any types of violence and we want to see de-escalation.” Right. Just the opposite of when fascist-led mobs besieged the seat of government in Kiev, and were burning the place down, and hurling Molotov cocktails at police and shooting them. The U.S. was all for violence then, and in fact Obama himself demanded that the then-President PERMIT the mob to take over by withdrawing the security forces.

Rhodes repeated the U.S. demand that Russia should quell the rebellion against the new puppet government: “The road map laid out in Geneva requires pro-Russian forces to lay down their arms and vacate those buildings. As long as they are there, the risk of this type of confrontation is acute,” added Rhodes. Of course, the eastern Ukrainians weren't at Geneva and didn't agree to anything. It's kind of like France and Britain negotiating with Hitler to give Germany part of Czechoslovakia- and then telling Czechoslovakia what happened! Little wonder the easterners immediately announced after the Geneva confab that they weren't budging, notwithstanding Russian public calls for them to stand down. (Not that I think Russia is trying too hard to get them to, and why should it?)

Some apparatchik on Biden's plane even fed reporters on board the line that it wasn't forces from Kiev that were involved, as if he could know for sure. The fascists who now control the Kiev "security forces" have previously attacked eastern militants to try and dislodge them from buildings they've seized.

The anonymous apparatchik went on to make more threats against Russia, saying the U.S. would impose “costs” on it if the rebellious Ukrainians in the east didn't slink off into the night with their tails between their legs. Yeah, count on that happening.

As the U.S. well knows, projection of power at distances requires naval power. It was a U.S. Navy officer who wrote the book on this, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, by Alfred Thayer Mahan, in 1890- a book that is currently in vogue in China, note. I'm sure the Russians know exactly what the U.S. is up to by threatening its continued tenancy in Sevastopol, Crimea, by its Black Sea Fleet, and the U.S. knows too. It is trying to cut Russia off at the knees, reduce its power some more. Other than that base, Russia has one naval base outside its territory, a small one in Syria. The U.S. has, oh, only about 750 military bases of all kinds all over the planet. It has a couple of dozen bases just on the island of Okinawa. This is some empire we're talking here! And it can't stand rivals.

But given the already weak state of Russia, and the continuing rise of China as the only significant potential competitor to the U.S., as I said, it strikes an objective observer as quite an indulgence to pick a fight with Russia over Ukraine. But the U.S. has been picking fights since 1812, when it invaded what is now Canada to try and rip off some territory, burned York, Ontario, and the British had to teach the U.S. a lesson by marching down to Washington, D.C., and razing it in retaliation in 1814. (The U.S.' provocation of burning York and other towns is usually omitted in the U.S. version of what happened, just as the fact that the Iranian “hostage crisis” was precipitated by the U.S. letting the hated Shah into the U.S. is omitted in the retelling of this alleged, and unforgivable atrocity by Iran against the U.S. By the way, zero “hostages” were killed, zero “hostages” were harmed- but 250,000 Iranians lost their lives under the tyrannical reign of the Shah, who was installed in a CIA coup in 1953. But man, those Iranians have a lot to answer for over what they did to the U.S.!)

The greedy U.S. thinks it can swallow the whole of Ukraine, but it's looking more and more like the country will split between eastern and western halves, as the economic, cultural, and linguistic links the easterners have with Russia are too strong to be suppressed by a weak, newly installed puppet regime, and if bloody civil war breaks out, Russia will aid the easterners. At best, a prolonged period of instability, insecurity, illegitimate government, and violence is in store. Unless NATO is hankering for a land war in Ukraine, Russia ultimately will not be expelled, and either Ukraine will be split, or the entirety of Ukraine will have to accommodate to Russian interests. [2] The West, which caused the trouble in the first place to a large degree, will screech to high heaven about the awfulness and crudity and thuggishness of Russia and see it all as the culmination of some deep dark Russian plot. The truth is, the plot here is the EU-U.S. plot, which is unraveling, predictably. Blinded by imperial hubris, they couldn't see the obvious; that Russia couldn't, and wouldn't, allow itself to be forced out of a critical strategic area on its own border.

1] Mearsheimer on PBS NewsHour March 4, 2014. Video clip here:

2] Geoffrey Pyatt, of all people, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and one of the chief coup plotters, as glaringly revealed by the infamous intercepted phone call between him and his boss, Assistant Secretary of State, said this on CNN: "The geography and balance of power is such, there is no military solution to this crisis. The fact is that militarily, as Crimea showed, Ukraine is outgunned." Gee, maybe you guys should have thought this through better in advance. Look before you leap.

And the new Ukrainian “prime minister,” the one hand-picked by Victoria Nuland, as we know from that same phone call, popped up on NBC TV's “Meet the Press” (U.S.) to rattle his beggar cup for alms from the Superpower: "We need a strong and solid state. We need financial and economic support. We need to overhaul the Ukrainian military. We need to modernise our security and military forces. We need real support." Hey buddy, you missed Christmas. Mail your wish list to Santa Claus, address: the North Pole. Maybe he'll leave a surprise under your Christmas tree this December.