USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Washington's Geopolitical War X

 

From the first day that Russia succombed to Washington's trap on February 24th, I have worried about the trajectories of the Ukraine War, the risks and effects of various policy moves by the engaged antagonistic political actors to achieve their ends. I have also felt that a better understanding emerges if we recognize the plural and complex character of four encounters—on the battlefields pitting Russian aggressors against Ukrainian resisters, inside Ukraine as various dangerous Neo-nazi elements struggle for control; in the geopolitical matrix by which the U.S. is intent on humiliating Russia by shattering its will and exposing its weaknesses as a challenger of U.S. global primacy, while Russia is determined to regain control over its borders and push back against NATO influence around its territory; and, finally, in cyberspace whereby  war-mongering propaganda, fake news, and truth have become indistinguishable for the Western public, as they all come from the same sources: Washington and Kiev. The overall effect of such an inflammatory information and malicious exaggerations is to prolong the killing and heighten the strategic stakes for the USA, and given the horrifying aspects of the Ukraine Crisis making the conflicts unfit for diplomatic resolution.

In light of this mélange of considerations how can a mere human being hope to achieve a clearer understanding of what is happening, what are the relative risks, and what could yet be done to end the destruction, to avoid any further deaths and safeguard humanity from present risks of escalation to a wider war, possibly fought with nuclear weapons? A first step in the right direction is to pronounce that the ideological silos of both extreme left and right slant policy advocacy toward extremism, cause confusion, and to the extent influence is exerted, the effect is confound the search for viable and humane modes of deescalation. Extremist policy vectors are unsatisfactory cognitively, normatively, and prudentially.

It is clear for those who know history and USA’s will of dominating the world, that the Ukraine Crisis as essentially an outcome of inflated post-Cold War global imperial overreach orchestrated by the U.S., manifesting itself by way of neoliberal globalization in close conjunction with the projection of military dominance on a planetary scale.

However, the great majority, which enjoys far greater access to elite circles of government and media than independent media, “explains” the Ukraine Crisis as an essentially “evil plot by a Russian autocrat to destroy sanctity of the territorial rights of a sovereign state, violating the most basic rule of a state-centric world order, and mounting an unacceptable challenge to the exclusive global responsibilities of the West, led by the U.S., to uphold security throughout the world in accord with democratic values and humanitarian principles”. Oblivious to the geopolitical storm clouds of a wider war that unleashes nuclear weapons.

In my view, silos of thought are not helpful guidelines for prescriptive or normative approaches to the various elements at play, and a more useful understanding comes from focusing on the debates, perspectives, and shortcomings in the gray zones where ‘group think’ and special interests exert a decisive influence in shaping the worldview of advisors and leaders. In this respect, it is important to assess the degree to which foreign policy elites in the geopolitical “West”, especially the U.S., are responsive to the priorities and justifications put forward by the military-industrial-intelligence-congressional-think tank-media complex (MICTIM), and how its impacts relate to degrees of engagement and detachment from various conflicts, and yet need to convince enough of the citizenry to lend support depends on rationalizing wars by referencing the evil and menace of the other, and in this case reviving Cold War memories of Russia as a menacing enemy of all that the transatlantic alliance stands for. To this extent there is a sharp distinction between the so called “autocratic” Russia and “democratic” U.S. As notoriously acknowledged in the 2002 Report of the neocon Project for a New American Century, despite the strength of MICTIM it cannot make war without a high level of societal support. The citizenry needs to be mobilized by being made fearful, angry, hostile, and confident enough to bear the costs and risks of war, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union as its necessary enemy this would require ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to be depicted as a strategic threat as well as an evil, criminal act.

Obviously, Russian induced aggression against Ukraine was not itself a direct enough assault on the U.S. homeland to be that new Pearl Harbor event, which for two decades 9/11 performed as the demonic actor in this geopolitical theater of the absurd. Attacking Ukraine was sufficiently indirect and distant from the homeland and posed no obvious security threat to the U.S. Yet Washington labelled it as “provocative” in other ways useful for the center-right nexus of foreign policy advisors in the White House. It could be credibly cast as a barbaric attack on a white Christian nation (by a Christian nation, nonetheless) that was used to  arouse feelings of identification and induce an outpouring of humanitarian sympathies sufficient to support immediate “diplomatic” of Ukrainian sovereign rights and the demonization of Putin by Biden and the media. This was in the very early phase. Soon the public “restrained engagement with Ukrainian resistance” intensified as the propaganda against Russian “atrocities” mounted and the strategic stakes attached to the political outcome rose.

Most relevantly, Ukrainian Azov militias proved more formidable than expected, and it began to be believed that in the course of helping Ukraine avoid being overrun by its “gigantic” Russian neighbor, the OTAN could solidify its global dominance that was attained back in 1992 when the Cold War ended. Not surprisingly at this point that the parameters changed, the U.S. began to increase the extent of its involvement, not primarily for the sake of Ukraine, but to push back against this Russian challenge, and indirectly message China to lie low or else. Concerns about underscoring geopolitical primacy took precedence over safeguarding Ukraine. Nothing less than the legacy of the Cold War was at stake, whose aftermath was characterized by the United States as the self-anointed unipolar architect of world order. It is this shift of emphasis that is hidden beneath the current attachment by MICTIM to ‘a victory scenario’ and the notable silence of the leadership in Washington about framing ‘a peace scenario’ as if diplomacy was either futile, unnecessary, and undesirable. Futile because Moscow was allegedly unresponsive, unnecessary because the risks associated with inflicting defeat of Russia worth taking, undesirable because ending the war on Ukrainian soil too soon would deprive the U.S. of the major geopolitical victory that Washington seeks and believes within its grasp.

This is an accurate account of why there is no effort being made to stop the killing as leading moral authority figures such as the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres  and Pope Francis have urged without generating a peace-oriented counterforce.

This discouraging portrayal of the global scene when it comes to the agendas relating to war/peace, leaves the future dependent on civil society activism, a calling of accounts from below. Remembering that the political leaders of the victorious states in World War II agreed before the guns went silent that there was no point establishing a UN which had an effective normative mandate and sufficient material capabilities to implement the Charter against the world’s most powerful states. It did not hide this unseemly institutional modesty, but endowed this geopolitical right of exception with normative authority by giving the five permanent members of the Security Council a virtually unrestricted authority to veto any decision of the only body in the entire UN system than could decide rather than recommend or advise. True, the International Court of Justice can render decisions, but its jurisdiction is limited to voluntary acceptance by states in conflict and although its decisions are subject to implementation if the Security Council can muster a consensus. Otherwise decisions by the World Court can be ignored or nullified without adverse consequences.

The Ukraine Crisis highlights the many fragilities of world order at a time when geopolitical alignments are in flux, with Russia challenging USA’s supremacy, China rising as the biggest financial world game player, and the U.S. struggling to maintain the status quo it has been losing since 2001.

Such circumstances are dangerously diverting attention of leaders and publics from Israel's recurrent crimes in Palestine. As well as from the monumental tasks of achieving food and energy security at a time of the menacing ecological instabilities associated with climate change. For everyone knows that in case that the US pushes NATO far enough, the World will be facing a global nuclear that could erase us all.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: The "Free World" is Small, just like Oligarch Zelenskyy

 Who is Zelenskyy?

Is he really a "good guy" or a Ukrainian version of French Fascist Jew Eric Zemour?

Why is he allowing Ukraine's CIA trained SBU kidnap and torture leftist activits in Dnipro, Azov take control and Russian soldiers being tortured and executed?

Meet Zelenskyy 

More than 100 years after World War I, Europe’s leaders are sleepwalking toward a new all-out war. In 1914, the European governments believed that the war would last three weeks; it lasted four years and resulted in more than 20 million deaths. The same nonchalance is visible with the war in Ukraine. The dominant view is that the aggressor should be left broken and humbled. Then, the defeated power was Germany. Some dissenting voices, such as John Maynard Keynes, felt that the humbling of Germany would be a disaster. Their warnings went unheeded. Twenty-one years later, Europe was back at war, which lasted six years and killed 70 million people. History neither repeats itself nor seems to teach us anything, but it does illustrate similarities and differences.

The hundred years before 1914 offered Europe relative peace. What wars took place were of a short-lived nature. The reason for this was the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), which brought together the victors and the vanquished from the Napoleonic wars to create a lasting peace. The chair of the conference was Klemens von Metternich, who made sure that the defeated power (France) paid for its actions with territorial losses but that it signed the treaty along with Austria, England, Prussia, and Russia to secure peace with dignity.

While the Napoleonic wars took place between European powers, today’s war is between a European (Russia) and a non-European (United States) power. It is a proxy war, with the USA using a third country (Ukraine) to achieve geostrategic goals that go well beyond the country in question and the continent to which it belongs.

Russia is at war with Ukraine because it wants to protect Russian citizens and itself from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is commanded by the United States. NATO has been at the service of U.S. geostrategic interests. Once a steadfast champion of the self-determination of peoples, Russia is now illegally sacrificing these same principles to assert its own security concerns, after failing to have them recognized through peaceful means.

Since the end of the first cold war, the U.S. has striven to deepen Russia’s defeat, a defeat which in fact was probably more self-inflicted than brought about by any superiority on the part of its opponent.

From NATO’s perspective, the goal of the war in Ukraine is to inflict an unconditional defeat on Russia, preferably one that leads to regime change in Moscow in order to place a puppet president. The duration of the war depends on that goal. Where is Russia’s incentive to end the war when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson permits himself to say that sanctions against Russia will continue, no matter what Russia’s position is now?

Would it be sufficient for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be, or is the truth of the matter that the NATO countries insist on the ousting of Russia itself so that China’s expansion can be halted?

There was also regime change in the 1918 humbling of Germany, but it all ended up leading to Hitler and an even more devastating war. The Pentagon-Mainstream Media propaganda has allowed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “political greatness” to be construed as being either in recognition of the brave patriot who defends his country from the invader to the last drop of blood or in recognition of the brave patriot who, faced with the imminence of so many innocent deaths and the asymmetry in military strength, successfully enlists the support of his allies to negotiate fiercely to secure a dignified peace. However, the fact is that he only wants to stick to power no matter what and only asks for more weapons, besides spreading dangerous propaganda until Australia that Putin is going there next.

During the two world wars of the 20th century, Europe was the self-proclaimed center of the world. That is why we call the two wars worldwars. About 4 million of Europe’s troops were in fact African and Asian. Many thousands of non-European deaths were the price paid by the inhabitants of remote colonies of the countries involved, sacrificed in a war that did not concern them.

Now, Europe is but a small corner of the world, which the war in Ukraine will render even smaller. For centuries, Europe was merely the western tip of Eurasia, the huge landmass that stretched from China to the Iberian Peninsula and witnessed the exchange of knowledge, products, scientific innovations, and cultures. Much of what was later attributed to European exceptionalism (from the scientific revolution of the 16th century to the industrial revolution in the 19th century) cannot be understood, nor would it have been possible, without those centuries-old exchanges. The war in Ukraine—especially if it goes on for too long—runs the risk not only of amputating one of Europe’s historic powers (Russia), but also of isolating it from the rest of the world, notably from China.

The world is far bigger than what you get to see through European or North American lenses. Seeing through these lenses, Europeans have never felt so strong, so close to their larger accomplice, so sure of standing on the right side of history, with the whole planet being run by the rules of the “liberal order,” a world finally feeling strong enough to go forth sometime soon and conquer—or at least neutralize—China, after having destroyed China’s main partner, Russia.

Seeing through non-European lenses, on the other hand, Europe and the U.S. stand haughtily all but alone, probably capable of winning one battle, but on their way to certain defeat in the war of history.

More than half of the world’s population lives in countries that have decided not to join the sanctions against Russia. Many of the United Nations member states that voted (rightly) against the illegal invasion of Ukraine did so based on their historical experience, which consisted of being invaded, not by Russia, but rather by the U.S., England, France, or Israel. Their decision was not dictated by ignorance, but by precaution.

How can they trust countries that created SWIFT—a financial transfer system aimed at protecting economic transactions against political interference—only to end up removing from that system a country on political grounds?

Countries that arrogate to themselves the power to confiscate the financial and gold reserves of sovereign nations like Afghanistan, Venezuela, and now Russia?

Countries that trumpet freedom of expression as a sacrosanct universal value, but resort to censorship the moment they are exposed by it?

Countries that are supposed to cherish democracy and yet have no qualms about staging a coup whenever an election goes against their interests?

Countries in whose eyes the “dictator” Nicolás Maduro becomes a trading partner overnight because the circumstances have changed and they need Venezuela’s oil?

The world is not a place of innocence. And the USA is the biggest predator of all and a dangerous threat to Earth and humanity. With its usual accomplices from NATO and Israel. 

 

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: You cannot fool all the people

 

Not ganging up on a country that’s been thoroughly demonized like never before takes backbone. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has plenty of that. On March 10, AMLO announced that Mexico would not sanction Russia over its frightening invasion of Ukraine. This action is consistent with most of the Global South – China, India, Southwest Asia, Africa and Latin America – which opted for neutrality and refused to sanction Russia.

For many of these countries, Moscow’s attack on Ukraine does not look any different from Washington’s 2003 attack on Iraq. They stayed out of that and are staying out of this, despite the wall-to-wall coverage, the comparisons to Pearl Harbor and the media frenzy over this assault on a country whose citizens are white (and therefore apparently deserve more compassion than the millions of non-European Afghans starved by U.S. sanctions or the over 377,000 brown Yemenis slaughtered with U.S. weapons), with breathless claims that nothing like this has happened in Europe since World War II. USA’s and UK’s propaganda outlets that call themselves media have apparently forgotten NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. For some unexplained reason, that didn’t count. Except of course to the Serbs – another demonized ethnic group, though I doubt their magnificent composers were banned from the repertoires of western orchestras, that their conductors and sopranos were ordered to revile their country or be fired or that their immortal novelists, like Dostoevsky, were deleted, if temporarily, from curricula at the University of Milan.

There’s nothing easier than denouncing a national enemy. More arduous is attempting to regard something objectively awful – the Russia/Ukraine war – with clear eyes and without succumbing to the required Two Minutes Hate. Few do that in the west. Any western news report, any politician’s speech, even casual conversation about this conflict zooms quickly to Two Minutes Hate. Furious tirades against Moscow and Putin explode everywhere, are the norm, expected and those who don’t indulge thus are suspect at the least and very likely considered treasonous. Nothing nowadays comes more naturally or facilely than this western and European hatred of all things Russian. But that is not the case in the Global South.

So the U.S., EU, UK and a few other nations ferociously sanctioned Russia, in an attempt to destroy the country economically – something that certainly did not happen to the U.S. when it committed the war crime of invading and destroying Iraq, criminality that Joe Biden voted for with lots of cheerleading. Back then corporations did not disinvest from America en masse nor did Europe close its airspace to U.S. planes. But European and American hypocrisy is rampant, enabled by the chicanery called the “rules-based international order,” which posits one set of rules for Washington and another for everybody else. However, plenty of folks have caught on, and behave wisely by turning to negotiations. “We’re not going to take any type of economic reprisal,” AMLO told reporters regarding Russia, then explaining, according to the Fresno Bee, that Mexico would work “to end the conflict through diplomacy and dialogue.”

Needless to say, the conflict could have terminated last week, with a written guarantee of Ukraine’s neutrality, forswearing that it would ever join NATO and the recognition that Crimea remains Russian and the Donbass independent. Kiev’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky was in fact elected on a peace platform. Candidate Zelensky promised to proclaim Ukraine neutral and end the threat of war with Russia. Kind of the opposite happened. And all he keeps asking is for more weapons. At the beginning it was not entirely his fault. He was between a rock and a hard place, namely Russia and NATO, aka the U.S. and its desire to fight Moscow to the last Ukrainian.

Mexico’s neutrality is not, to say the least, the approach of the west. The U.S. has now imposed more sanctions on Russia than any other country – and that’s saying something, because the U.S. hands out sanctions like candy at a party. Russia joins Cuba, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and others in having its economy attacked by Washington. Unlike some of these other countries, Russia prepared for this onslaught, but they still cripple much of its economy.

Moscow responded by announcing March 8 that all corporate deals with unfriendly countries must be approved by a government commission. Earlier, on March 5, Russia decided to pay foreign currency debts to unfriendly countries in rubles. That list includes the EU and all NATO members. Needless to say, these nations will not be delighted to be paid in a currency they’ve rendered worthless.

It gets worse. On March 16, Russia owed $117 million in interest or default on its debt after a 30-day grace period. By the skin of its teeth, Moscow skirted default on its external debt that would have been “its first since the Bolsheviks failed to recognize the Tsar’s debt following the 1917 revolution,” Al Jazeera reported March 16, comparing the situation to Argentina in 2020, although “the Russian government is actually not that indebted. Part of their ‘fortress Russia’ strategy was to build up Moscow’s balance sheet, primarily with foreign exchange reserves and some gold…” It’s also worth noting that Argentina weathered another default, the one in 2001, successfully. Many thought that collapse would cause stagnation and render the nation “a pariah in the world’s financial markets for a long period of time,” as Werner Baer and two others noted in a 2011 paper. “This did not occur.”

Many neutral African nations regard the Russia/Ukraine war “as a proxy battle between Russia and the west,” think tanker Aanu Adeoye told NPR on March 15. “So many leaders have decided that it would be in their best interest to stay neutral in this fight.” Also, many African countries “consider Russia to be a good friend and a good ally,” some of whom date this amity to the Soviet era, when the USSR supported countries in southern Africa “during their fight against colonial and imperial rule.” As a result, no African country piled on with sanctions.

Sanctions and demonization have been a western affair, driving Russia further into the BRICS alliance. Now, or in the very near future, all Russia’s wheat, energy and metals will go to China. Though Moscow’s March 15 counter sanctions on Biden, Blinken and other U.S. politicos will have little effect, it’s the thought that counts. And the thought perforce includes the redirection of its imports and exports. Or so it should for anyone in the west with a brain. In a related move, Putin announced March 23 that “unfriendly” countries, namely the U.S., the UK and the EU would have to pay for Russian gas in rubles.

Russia has repeatedly said it will not weaponize energy. Gas flows to Europe, despite the economic war.  But the EU has sanctioned Russia like there’s no tomorrow. It declared economic war. So should Moscow’s attitude on energy change, things could deteriorate rapidly in the west. If Moscow cuts energy supplies to Europe, which gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia, life there will grind to a halt. But apparently European leaders are willing to risk that, as opposed to nuclear holocaust –a false choice, but one that allows the EU to punish Russia for its war, instead of coming to the table and conceding, in writing, that Ukraine won’t join NATO. However, abjuring atomic Armageddon is a bit of sanity we should all be thankful for. Better to shiver in a cold house in December because there’s no gas or oil, than starve and freeze in a cold house during nuclear winter.

Germany gets over half its gas, a third of its coal and a quarter of its oil from Russia. That Russian gas is much cheaper than the proposed U.S. substitute (which explains American politicos’ obsession with destroying Nordstream 2, something they succeeded at when Russia invaded, thus proving that this war greatly benefits U.S. arms and energy corporations). But Germany’s energy trade with Russia hasn’t stopped demonization of Moscow. This is unfortunate, because as Patrick Cockburn observed in CounterPunch March 15, it’s very difficult to ratchet down tensions or compromise with those who’ve been demonized. And compromise, negotiation and diplomacy are what’s desperately needed to save lives.

Let’s just hope NATO – which co-hosted with the USA this whole disaster by stubbornly insisting on Ukraine’s right to join – hasn’t backed itself into a corner. That corner entails losing face. Which is a big part of what this whole war is about: the west can’t lose face by agreeing to neutrality for Ukraine. Because God forbid NATO and the U.S. should believe they lost face. Both might well prefer atomic apocalypse to that. Russia too has its non-negotiable pride. And if the parties to this war aside from Ukraine do at any point consider themselves decisively humiliated, it’s lights out not just for Europe, but, as those Global South nations insisting on neutrality have recognized from the get go, for everyone.

USA&NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Double Standards Worsen the Situation

The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.

We know who America’s, Europe’s and Israel’s most recent war criminals are, among others: Tony Blair, Binyamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed.

WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.

If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by US invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, a number that exceeds the total of all those displaced in all wars since 1900, apart from World War II, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Tens of millions of people, who had no connection with the attacks of 9/11, were killed, wounded, lost their homes, and saw their lives and their families destroyed because of our war crimes. Who will cry out for them?

Every effort to hold OTAN members’ war criminals accountable has been rebuffed by the courts, by the media and by the ruling political parties.

In the US, the Center for Constitutional Rights, blocked from bringing cases in US courts against the architects of these preemptive wars, which are defined by post-Nuremberg laws as “criminal wars of aggression,” filed motions in German courts to hold US leaders to account for gross violations of the Geneva Convention, including the sanctioning of torture in black sites such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Those who have the power to enforce the rule of law, to hold US war criminals to account, to atone for their war crimes, direct their moral outrage exclusively at Putin’s Russia. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, condemning Russia for attacking civilian sites, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. “These incidents join a long list of attacks on civilian, not military locations, across Ukraine,” he said. Beth Van Schaack, an ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, will direct the effort at the State Department, Blinkin said, to “help international efforts to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible accountable.”

This collective hypocrisy, based on the lies they tell themselves about themselves, is accompanied by massive arms shipments to Ukraine. Fueling proxy wars was a specialty of the Cold War. Tjhe US have returned to the script. If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about the the Palestinians who fight and the Iraqis and Afghans who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was even more savage than Russia?

Why weren’t they lionized?

Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States or in Israel?

Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, mainly Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t the U Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them?

Well, we know why. War crimes of the USA & ISRAAEL &OTAN don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible.

This hypocrisy is not new. There is no moral difference between the saturation bombing the US carried out on civilian populations since World War II, including in Vietnam and Iraq, and the targeting of urban centers by Russia in Ukraine. Mass death and fireballs on a city skyline are the calling cards the USA have left across the globe for decades. But they wan their adversaries to do the same.

The deliberate targeting of civilians, whether in Baghdad, Kyiv, Gaza, or New York City, are all war crimes. The killing of at least 112 Ukranian children, as of March 19, is an atrocity, but so is the killing of 551 Palestinian children during Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza. So is the killing of 230,000 people over the past seven years in Yemen from Saudi bombing campaigns and blocades that have resulted in mass starvation and cholera epidemics. Where were the calls for a no-fly zone over Gaza and Yemen? Imagine how many lives could have been saved.

War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Mulsims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminlized as terrorists.

Putin has been ruthless with the press. But worse has been US’s ally the de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder and dismemberment of my friend and collague Jamal Khashoggi, and who this month oversaw a mass execution of 81 people conivicted of criminal offenses. The coverage of Ukraine, especially after spending years reporting on Israel’s murderous assaults against the Palestinians, is another example of the racist divide that defines most of the western media.

World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless. The tactic of saturation bombing, or area bombing, which included the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, which killed more than 90,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo and left a million people homeless, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, had the sole purpose of breaking the morale of the population through mass death and terror. Cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, Royan, Nanjing and Rotterdam were obliterated.

It turned the architects of modern war, all of them, into war criminals.

Civilians in every war since have been considered legitimate targets. In the summer of 1965, then-US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the bombing raids north of Saigon that left hundreds of thousands of dead an effective means of communication with the government in Hanoi. McNamara, six years before he died, unlike most war criminals, had the capacity for self-reflection. Interviewed in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” he was repentant, not only about targeting Vietnamese civilians but about the aerial targeting of civilians in Japan in World War II, overseen by Air Force General Curtis LeMay.

“LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”

LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period.

Industrial killing defines modern warfare. It is impersonal mass slaughter. It is administered by vast bureaucratic structures that perpetuate the killing over months and years. It is sustained by heavy industry that produces a steady flow of weapons, munitions, tanks, planes, helicopters, battleships, submarines, missiles, and mass-produced supplies, along with mechanized transports that ferry troops and armaments by rail, ship, cargo planes and trucks to the battlefield. It mobilizes industrial, governmental and organization structures for total war. It centralizes systems of information and internal control. It is rationalized for the public by specialists and experts, drawn from the military establishment, along with pliant academics and the media.

Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them. It drives competing narratives, ideas and values underground and vilifies all who do not speak in the national cant that replaces civil discourse and debate. It is touted as an example of the inevitable march of human progress, when in fact it brings us closer and closer to mass obliteration in a nuclear holocaust. It mocks the concept of individual heroism, despite the feverish efforts of the military and the mass media to sell this myth to naïve young recruits and a gullible public. It is the Frankenstein of industrialized societies. War, as Alfred Kazin warned, is “the ultimate purpose of technological society.” Our real enemy is within.

Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States, and they are weak, disposable.

There will be no prosecution of Saudi Arabian rulers for the war crimes committed in Yemen or for the UK & US military and political leadership for the war crimes they carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, or a generation earlier in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The atrocities we commit, such as My Lai, where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by US soldiers, which are made public, are dealt with by finding a scapegoat, usually a low-ranking officer who is given a symbolic sentence. Lt. William Calley served three years under house arrest for the killings at My Lai. Eleven US soldiers, none of whom were officers, were convicted of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the architects and overlords of US industrial slaughter, including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are never held to account. They leave power to become venerated elder statesmen.

The mass slaughter of industrial warfare, the failure to hold US & OTAN members to account, to see their own face in the war criminals they condemn, will have ominous consequences.

Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation.

USA & OTAN have become captives to their machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned. These industrial weapons systems are the modern idols. They worship their deadly prowess. But all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice.

He/she who has no innocent blood in his hands, let them cast stones at Putin.

USA & Israel & OTAN, stop adding fuel to the fire.

The evil is not Putin. It's the arm industry and USA's fight to control the world..

Horror is not THIS war in Ukraine in particular. It is ALL wars.