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Volodymyr Zelensky Is Washington’s New Jonas Savimbi – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on February 9, 2023

Zelensky also has replicated Savimbi’s ability to tell US political elites and the American people exactly what he knew they want to hear. Savimbi’s impressive skill at doing so was highlighted by a 1986 op-ed under his byline in the Wall Street Journal, in which he hailed the virtues of capitalism and democracy and pledged to make Angola a model of both values, if the United States helped UNITA oust the pro-communist government.

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Galen_Carpenter/2023/02/08/volodymyr-zelensky-is-washingtons-new-jonas-savimbi/

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Most advocates of aiding Ukraine in its fight against Russia do not merely contend that the move is justified to repel an act of aggression that threatens to legitimize wars of conquest. Instead, they portray Ukraine as a freedom-loving democracy and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a heroic democratic champion, who deserves even more U.S. military and financial assistance than he has already received.

The political and media love-fest accompanying Zelensky’s address to a joint session of Congress in late December 2022 was a prime example of such hero worship. David Frum, writing in the Atlantic, asserted that Zelensky “recalled us to ourselves” and our democratic values. Frum added that the Ukrainian president “came to the United States to thank us for supporting Ukraine. It is Americans who should thank him.” Others evaluated his congressional appearance in equally glowing terms.

Such fawning ignores Zelensky’s increasingly brazen violations of civil liberties and democratic norms. However, this is hardly the first time that US officials and the American news media have falsely portrayed one of Washington’s authoritarian clients as a committed democrat. The lengthy roster includes Nationalist China’s Chiang Kai-shek, South Vietnamese presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu, Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, and Afghanistan’s presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.

Perhaps the closest model for the blind support American admirers are currently according Zelensky, though, was the attitude that Americans (especially conservatives) displayed toward Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. Between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s (especially throughout Ronald Reagan’s administration), numerous political and media figures advocated greater US support for Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and its insurgency against Angola’s leftist government. In the process, they overlooked or concealed their “democratic” client’s massive flaws.

Presenting Savimbi with an award from the American Conservative Union and the Young Americans for Freedom, US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick lauded him as “one of the few authentic heroes of our time.” Kirkpatrick’s idealized portrait of Savimbi was typical of the conservative perspective in the United States. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) stated that “I have had the privilege of meeting Mr. Savimbi and have been extremely impressed by his honesty, integrity, religious commitment.” The conflict in Angola was, Hatch insisted, “a battle over ideologies: Soviet totalitarianism vs. freedom, self-determination, and democracy.” US aid to Savimbi would “send a strong signal to the world that we are determined to help freedom fighters” prevail. The dominant message from both the news media and the foreign policy blob today about the supposed imperative to support Zelensky and “democratic Ukraine” is eerily similar.

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Lock Up the White House Silverware!, by Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on December 31, 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky is in town!

PHILIP GIRALDI

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/lock-up-the-white-house-silverware/

In my humble opinion the surfacing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington last week was possibly the most disgusting example of the corruption of our country and its values since Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu arranged for a similar invitation to address a rapturous Congress back in 2015. Zelensky’s “surprise” visit had in fact been arranged over the course of several months and was a carefully choreographed performance intended to pay political dividends for both the White House, for the Democratic Party in Congress and for Zelensky and his political supporters at home. He met privately with President Joe Biden in the White House, where he presumably received most of what he was seeking as well as a pledge of total support until “Ukraine wins.” He subsequently was invited to address a Joint Session of Congress, a privilege that was most definitely not arranged at short notice, with House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi predictably calling on all Congressmen to attend. The session began with a three minute standing ovation from the assembled Representatives and Senators.

So the creepy little con-man was enabled to have his say in a video link that reached a global audience. That it consisted of a gaggle of lies to justify the rapid passage of hundreds of billions of dollars from the struggling American taxpayer to a nation renowned only for its reputation as the most corrupt in Europe was not noted by the audience. As it has been from the start Joe Biden’s war, it is inevitable that the Democrats in Congress should leap around and fill the chamber with cheers every time Zelensky opened his mouth to emit yet another inanity. But to their shame, many Republicans joined in on the celebration of the odd diminutive man Zelensky, whose beatification was passionately embraced by the national media to make sure no one missed out on the importance of the event. The New York Times report on the visit began by describing Zelensky’s status as “a national hero and global superstar, having forged a leadership style blending personal daring with deft messaging to rally his people at home and his allies abroad.” In part, that message included describing his struggle as engaging in a battle pitting “good against evil.”

Nevertheless, those Republicans whose heads were not wedged up their keesters did boycott the event, to the tune of only 86 out of 213 being present. It seems that some Republicans are against the war generally speaking while others actually believe that the billions going to Ukraine should be audited to determine whether it is being stolen or not. Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert attended but played with their cell phones and did not rise and applaud the stirring rhetoric coming from Zelensky, who was basically seeking many new weapons and lots more money justified not as “charity” but as an “investment” so he and Ukraine could work to bring rule of law, global security, democracy and freedom to the world. In the aftermath, one particularly delusional commentator has enthused how “There can be no more compelling or effective leader of the democratic free world today than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Fate has called upon him to rise to a level of courage and clarity few figures in history have demonstrated.”

In his speech, Zelensky clearly forgot to mention how he has eliminated freedom of speech and association in his own country as part of his war agenda, while also banning opposition parties and media and even harassing the Russian Orthodox Church. But the tweetosphere inevitably ignored those issues and erupted instead over the alleged bad behavior by some Republicans in not supporting such a great leader. One Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC), who is the anointed NBC television network’s Presidential Historian, tweeted, “For any members of Congress who refused to clap for Zelenskyy, we need to know from them exactly why.” Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) responded sarcastically to Beschloss, “Haul them before a Committee and force them to pledge allegiance to Ukraine and Zelensky or else face long-term imprisonment in a supermax. Refusing to clap for a foreign leader on command is a form of treason.”

And politicians too were inevitably prone to bombastic misrepresentation. Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia tweeted how “This disrespect is embarrassing. It embarrasses you, your constituents, the body we serve in, and our country. Huge numbers of President Zelensky’s people have been killed in a bloody war they did not seek. We must be able to debate foreign policy without mocking human suffering.”

Another lunkhead Democrat Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts declared war, asserting that “We’re in a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. And Ukraine is fighting on the frontlines of that struggle. Our support for Ukraine is sending a message to Moscow, it’s sending a message to Beijing. And it’s sending a message to other authoritarian regimes.” Auchincloss was apparently unaware that it is the United States government that has itself become more autocratic/despotic in that it is generally accepted that the president now has extralegally assumed the authority to allow war crimes to be committed in places like Syria, Afghanistan and Libya while also torturing people to death in secret prisons. The president and his Attorney General Merrick Garland are also rooting out “domestic terrorists” who generally speaking are white people who oppose Democratic Party policies.

Clearly, neither Beyer nor Auchincloss understands that a principled “debate” on foreign policy is not taking place at all in America, largely due to the ability of their party and colleagues to manage and control the process whereby it is possible to start an illegal/unconstitutional war that just might go nuclear without any real pushback from critics or the public.

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Putting an End to Volodymyr Zelensky’s Follies, by Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on November 22, 2022

Given the fact that Zelensky has been saying and doing everything possible to draw the US and NATO into fighting Russia on his behalf, I believe that the missile strike was quite plausibly a deliberate “false flag” attempt to start a much broader war.

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/putting-an-end-to-volodymyr-zelenskys-follies/

One week ago, the Ukrainian government may have deliberately attacked neighbor Poland in an attempt to draw the NATO alliance into its war with Russia. The incident involved a missile that hit a grain processing site inside Poland and killed two farmers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately blamed Russia for the incident even though he surely must have known that the missile had been fired from Ukraine, meaning that he may have been using a so-called “false flag” to create a false narrative of what had occurred. He also immediately called upon NATO to intervene, citing Article 5 of the NATO treaty which requires all members of the alliance to come to the aid of any individual member that is attacked. An attack on one is an attack on all. Poland is a NATO member and it currently hosts a permanent US military base.

The US mainstream media, most particularly the Associated Press and NBC News, immediately repeated the tale being told by Zelensky, but the “blame the Russians” narrative began to unravel. The remains of the missile revealed that it was of a type used for air defense that is in the Ukrainian arsenal, but not currently used by the Russians, and both Moscow and Washington surely had access to satellite imagery that would demonstrate the actual flight path of the missile that struck Poland.

Those in government and the media who wanted to be supportive of Zelensky began to suggest that the Ukrainian missile must have somehow malfunctioned to land in Poland, making it an unfortunate accident. But others more familiar with the performance characteristics of the weapon were skeptical, seeing something possibly more sinister in the tale.

By last Thursday the story had effectively disappeared in much of the mainstream media as it no longer conformed to the acceptable narrative that it was a Russian-launched missile, which Zelensky has since continued to insist to be the case. President Joe Biden, who was at the G-20 Summit conference in Indonesia at the time, to his credit, responded to the news by stating that there was no intelligence to confirm that the missile had come from Russia and that its apparent trajectory did not support that view. Ironically, Biden had authorized an additional $37 billion in aid for Ukraine the day before the incident in Poland took place.

Biden’s message seeking to deescalate the potential crisis was repeated by Pentagon and intelligence personnel during the day, though Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized that the US would continue to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” He also added that even though the missile was Ukrainian, the incident was Russia’s fault. He did not explain why that was so. NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg also promoted the same line as Austin, commenting that the incident was “likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory… This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears responsibility for what happened in Poland yesterday because this is a direct result of the ongoing war.”

Given the fact that Zelensky has been saying and doing everything possible to draw the US and NATO into fighting Russia on his behalf, I believe that the missile strike was quite plausibly a deliberate “false flag” attempt to start a much broader war. That such a war could easily turn nuclear reveals just how reckless Zelensky can be. One NATO country foreign diplomat based in Kiev told the Financial Times that “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

To be sure, Zelensky is capable of anything and no lie is too mendacious for the former comedy actor who is now basking in the glow of his celebrity. Hollywood personalities like Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are increasingly making the pilgrimage to Kiev to shake hands, embrace and do photo ops. And Zelensky’s calendar is also featuring some trips to the United States. On November 30th, he will reportedly be in New York City at a “live event” hosted by the New York Times with Sam Bankman-Fried, Larry Fink (CEO of Blackrock), and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as the main speakers.

Yes, Zelensky will be side-by-side with THAT Sam Bankman-Fried, if he shows up, who has also been much in the news lately for his having pulled off the largest currency fraud in history, creating losses for investors totaling multi-billions of dollars as a consequence of the collapse of his exchange-trading company FTX! And it just might be that Zelensky and Bankman-Fried already know each other. Bankman-Fried has been a major financial supporter of Democratic Party politicians, having donated $40 million for “get out the vote” projects in the recently completed election cycle. He is second only to George Soros as a Democratic Party funder, and also has separated donated to causes like unconditionally supporting Ukraine that the Democrats overwhelmingly favor. In April he hosted a conference at his $40 million home in the Bahamas which featured appearances by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and he has also been a generous supporter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

There has been considerable speculation that the unregulated and unmonitored flow of billions of dollars of US taxpayer provided money through Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government provided a perfect mechanism for large scale money laundering. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has been following the FTX-Ukraine story closely and observes that “The financial collapse of FTX… is exposing evidence that the Democrats, some Republicans, the Ukrainians and FTX organized an elaborate financial kickback scheme. The scheme involved promising members of Congress who sent money to Ukraine a hefty contribution from a Democrat benefactor. In this case, the owner of FTX [Sam Bankman-Fried]. Once the US dollars were credited to Ukraine’s account, President Zelensky and his partners diverted some of the proceeds to purchase crypto currency from FTX. FTX, in turn, sent some of those funds back to the cooperating members of Congress and the Democrat National Committee.”

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Zelensky Rejects Any Ceasefire With Russia

Posted by M. C. on July 25, 2022

Going down and the US will gladly follow.

The Ukrainian leader said Russia would use a pause in fighting to rest and prepare for a new offensive

by Kyle Anzalone

antiwar.com

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Russia would capitalize on any ceasefire to give its troops rest and to re-equip its military. He claimed that a break in fighting would prolong the war.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Zelensky said, “Freezing the conflict with the Russian Federation means a pause that gives the Russian Federation a break for rest. They will not use this pause to change their geopolitics or to renounce their claims on the former Soviet republics.”

Zelensky predicted a ceasefire would only last a few short years, then Moscow would resume its offensive. Russia “will rest and in two or three years, it will seize two more regions and say again: Freeze the conflict. And it will keep going further and further. One hundred percent,” he said.

The statements by Zelensky come as Russia has slowly captured a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. The US and its allies have sent billions in increasingly advanced weapons to Kiev. However, even long-range rocket systems have proven inadequate in aiding Ukrainian forces to retake territory.

Zelensky believes his forces will turn the tide and drive Russian troops out of Ukraine. He said, “The society believes that all the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead. Our people are convinced we can do it. And the faster we do it, the fewer will die.”

Russia President Vladimir Putin said last week that Ukraine proposed a workable offer in March, but Kiev broke off talks in April. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with Zelensky in Ukraine shortly before negotiations ended. Ukrainska Pravda reported Johnson discouraged Zelensky from making an agreement with Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced last week the Kremlin plans to seize more of Ukraine’s territory because of the Western arms transfers. “Now the geography is different, it’s far from being just the DPR [Donetsk] and LPR [Luhansk], it’s also Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and a number of other territories,” the Russian foreign minister said.

Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.

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Zelensky’s Call for Nuclear War

Posted by M. C. on March 18, 2022

Contrary to what Zelensky, President Biden, the Pentagon, the CIA, members of Congress, and other interventionists would like to believe, the war in Ukraine is not about freedom. It is about NATO, a corrupt bureaucratic entity that should have gone out of existence when the Cold War racket came to an end. 

Zelensky’s Call for Nuclear War

by Jacob G. Hornberger

n an emotional appeal that left some members of Congress with tears in their eyes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeated his plea that U.S. officials impose a “no-fly zone” over his country. What he failed to mention during the course of his talk, is the virtual certainty that such an action would lead to nuclear war between the United States and Russia. 

Contrary to what Zelensky, President Biden, the Pentagon, the CIA, members of Congress, and other interventionists would like to believe, the war in Ukraine is not about freedom. It is about NATO, a corrupt bureaucratic entity that should have gone out of existence when the Cold War racket came to an end. 

Zelensky wanted Ukraine to join NATO. So did Biden, the Pentagon, the CIA, and other interventionists. For some 25 years, Russia has made it clear that that is a “red line” for Russia. Why? Because if Ukraine joins NATO, the Pentagon and the CIA will be able to establish their nuclear missiles, tanks, weaponry, and military bases on Russia’s border. Russia has steadfastly opposed that notion as fiercely as the U.S. government would oppose the same thing happening in Cuba or along the Mexico border.

Moreover, all the way up to the invasion, Russia made it clear that if Zelensky gave up his hopes and dreams of having Ukraine join NATO, there would be no Russian invasion of his country.

Alas, Zelensky could not let go of his love for this Cold War dinosaur. His love of NATO got the best of him. In the final analysis, he decided to sacrifice tens of thousands of his citizens in the hopes that Ukraine could defeat Russia in a war and then join NATO. He undoubtedly figured that he could induce Biden, the Pentagon, and the CIA to come to his aid. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Biden, the Pentagon, and the CIA misled Zelensky into believing that he could count on their support once Russia invaded Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

And now that Zelensky realizes that his high-stakes gamble might not pay off, he’s willing to sacrifice the American people in a nuclear war with Russia. In other words, if he’s going down, which is very possible, he wants millions of Americans to go down with him — again, not for freedom, but for NATO. He wants millions of Americans to be willing to die for NATO, just like tens of thousands of Ukrainians are now dying for NATO.

Let’s break down exactly what a “no-fly zone” is that Zelensky wants the Pentagon to establish over Ukraine. It involves U.S. fighter aircraft shooting down Russian military planes over Ukraine. Those Russian planes would contain Russian soldiers, perhaps even hundreds of Russian soldiers in transport planes.

That’s not all. From the ground, Russian forces will be firing missiles intended to shoot down American planes. Thus, it would be necessary for American planes to fire missiles at the ground with the aim of knocking out those anti-aircraft missile facilities. People near those areas would be incinerated. (In fact, when U.S. officials established a “no-fly zone” over Iraq during the 1990s, I recall one incident in which an errant U.S. missile killed a young boy tending his sheep.)

The moment one Russian plane is shot down, the United States and Russia will be in a state of war. At that point, anything can happen. All bets are off. The war might remain conventional, in which case the United States would be almost certain to win, given its vast military superiority. 

But it then becomes in Russia’s interests to employ tactical nuclear weapons. But if that’s the case, everyone know where that is going to lead. Therefore, almost immediately both sides would have to calculate whether to be the first to fire their strategic missiles. There would be little time for thought and reflection. In a nuclear war, no one wants to be firing his nuclear arsenal second. It becomes in the interests of both nations to fire their nuclear arsenal first.

That’s what Zelensky is willing to risk with his call for a Pentagon-enforced “no-fly zone” over Ukraine — the entire United States radiated — hundreds of millions of Americans suddenly and unexpectedly killed in an all-out nuclear exchange — most of our country destroyed — just so that Ukraine can join NATO. 

Statists are referring to Zelensky as a “George Washington.” But George Washington would never have been willing to sacrifice even one American or even one foreigner, much less millions of innocent people, for the sake of joining a corrupt bureaucratic entity like NATO or any other “entangling alliance.”

With friends like Zelensky, who needs enemies?

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Washington’s Crocodile Tears Over Ukraine’s Destruction

Posted by M. C. on February 28, 2022

While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/february/25/washingtons-crocodile-tears-over-ukraines-destruction/

Written by Daniel McAdams

As of this writing, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is hunkered down in his bunker somewhere in Kiev, as the sound of the encroaching war gets closer and closer. A grim scene, to be sure.

All the US and EU kisses and roses leading up to this end have turned to dust and barbed wire, as a no-doubt deeply bitter Zelensky has nothing left but to cry out in anger:

Zelensky earlier: “Who is ready to fight with us? I do not see anyone. Who is ready to give Ukraine a guarantee of NATO membership? Everyone is afraid.” — ASB News / MILITARY〽️ (@ASBMilitary) February 25, 2022

The chips are down, as much of the US-equipped and backed Ukrainian military appears to have turned and ran as Russian forces approached. That is not to say that there has not been death and destruction on both sides. The battle for Kherson was brutal, with plenty of Russian losses. But nevertheless, as of this writing, it has fallen to Russian control.

Kiev in the main may well fall within the next 12-24 hours. Russian troops are already in the city. And Zelensky is in his bunker with fewer and fewer to take his calls. The cavalry he believed was promised him will not be coming to rescue him. Ukraine will be de-militarized and Ukraine will be neutral. Once held up as a great ally of Washington and Brussels, Zelensky is alone.

It brings to mind that great quote I often recycle from RPI academic advisor John Laughland, written as the early US-backed color revolutions rampaged through the former Soviet world in the early 2000s:

It is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you.

Zelensky has now learned the bitter truth, which previously favored foreign leaders also learned. Most of their lessons have been evenharder than Zelensky’s (at least to this point).

The bitter truth is that Washington’s foreign policy establishment never actually considered Zelensky – or his predecessor Poroshenko – to be allies or partners of the United States. Overflowing with a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and extreme cynicism, Washington’s elites have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to “regime-change” a Russia that, after its post-Yeltsin recovery, would no longer take its direction from them.

The false gods of American exceptionalism are jealous ones indeed.

The American foreign policy establishment wanted a perpetual “Yanks to the Rescue” Russia, whereby US “consultants” and spooks would ensure that the most obsequious candidate would continue to win and rule. A string of Russian presidents who would, à laShevardnadze and a whole string of other post-Soviet leaders, run the country like a family business: lots of biznis deals for family members…and maybe 10 percent for the “big guy.” 

Americans are victims (willing or not) of a mass media system as propagandistic as any that existed during Soviet Communism. The “party line” is established and it is unwaveringly followed whether the favored flavor is Fox or MSNBC. When it became obvious that Yeltsin’s one-time understudy, Vladimir Putin, wasn’t going to play that way, the party line came down that he must be demonized.

Not carefully studied and where appropriate opposed (on the basis of actual US interests), but rather Putin had to be demonized and, ultimately, “regime-changed.”

Discourse in the US is so infantile that just writing this objective truth will no doubt land this author in the “Putin’s puppet” purgatory. Not for the first time.

Most Americans will not have heard – and those who have likely do not care – that twice when the Ukrainian people elected a president who was in favor of maintaining good relations with its Russian neighbor the US intervened and overthrew the government. First time in the 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” and then the fateful 2014 “Maidan” revolt, which was explicitly and overtly supported by senior US government officials on the ground in Kiev including Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland and the late neocon warmonger Sen. John McCain. 

In the meantime tens of millions of dollars flow from the US taxpayer to favored think tanks, civic organizations, and media outlets via the National Endowment for Democracy (sic) and numerous US-funded related organizations. The goal is the same: manipulate Ukraine so that it remains on Washington’s preferred path (toward conflict with Russia). 

It is fashionable – particularly over the past two days – for even antiwar and “restraint”-promoting scribblers and jaw-boners to fall into tune with the warmongers’ songbook of “Russian aggression” as the sole cause of recent bloodshed and destruction.

While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means. That lesson should have been learned with the fall of Soviet communism itself, but the “victors” were too full of hubris to pause for a moment of humility.

Wishing reality was one thing and accepting that it is another are two very different things. The distinction must be made or the mass mental illness of “American exceptionalism” can never be cured. Otherwise the consequences next time the tectonic plates shift may be far closer to home.

Whether America and the EU like it or not, the era of ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” is well and truly over. Its end is not to be mourned but to be celebrated. The only pro-America foreign policy is non-intervention in the affairs of others.

Ukrainian President Zelensky is unlikely to survive his turn being America’s cat’s paw to wrong-foot Russia. While he sits in his bunker contemplating his fate, he may well be visited by the ghosts of Saddam and Gaddafi and all those who preceded him in this position. God help him.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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‘Nobody ever gets points for saying anything good about Russia’: Stephen Cohen says, as Rep. Schiff spreads ignorance about Putin — RT World News

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

According to the researcher, Putin’s chief ambition is “to rebuild Russia from the disaster into which it fell in the 1990s” after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The last thing Putin wants is instability. He’s trying to build economy at home and economic relations with countries abroad because he sees that as a way to modernize Russia.

The Russia researcher said that Moscow is currently focused on ties with China, but Putin would like to have good trade relations with Europe and the US as well.

https://www.rt.com/news/479380-stephen-cohen-schiff-putin/

US Congress heavyweights like Adam Schiff deeply misunderstand Russia but keep on bashing Moscow because it has become “politically advantageous” in Washington, Russia researcher Stephen Cohen said.

“Being highly-critical of Russia is good politics in the United States,” Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University, told the Grayzone’s Aaron Mate in an interview, uploaded online on Monday.

Nobody ever gets any points for saying anything good about Russia – and only rarely for advocating any kind of partnership with Russia.

Cohen said that “politically it’s advantageous to a lot of people to bash Russia,” and even some of the “progressive” Democratic Party candidates in the 2020 presidential race employ rhetoric, which is hostile toward Moscow.

It has become an American way of life to blame Russia when things go wrong. Of course, sometimes Russia is to blame, but not all the time. And yet that’s become part of our discourse.

The US Democratic Party’s lead impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has invoked Russia a lot during the trial in the Senate. Democrats want to oust President Donald Trump because they believe he briefly suspended military aid to Ukraine while trying to pressure Kiev into investigating the dealings of his chief 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Sending weapons to Ukraine serves America’s “abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism,” Schiff argued.

Cohen, however, said that shipping weapons to Kiev would effectively amount to the US turning its back on Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to resolve the conflict with Russia through peaceful means. Instead, he thinks Washington should focus on encouraging the neighbors to negotiate.

“If Zelensky had full American backing for his peace talks with Putin – that would help him a lot.”

Speaking on the Senate floor, Schiff accused Moscow of trying to undermine the faith in democracy and government institutions around the globe.

Cohen argued that the congressman misunderstands what Russian President Vladimir Putin actually “sees as his own historical mission,” and it is almost the opposite of what Schiff attributes to him.

According to the researcher, Putin’s chief ambition is “to rebuild Russia from the disaster into which it fell in the 1990s” after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The last thing Putin wants is instability. He’s trying to build economy at home and economic relations with countries abroad because he sees that as a way to modernize Russia.

The Russia researcher said that Moscow is currently focused on ties with China, but Putin would like to have good trade relations with Europe and the US as well.

“The notion that he wants to foster discord in the very countries, with which he wants what he calls ‘modernizing trade relations’ is just ignorance on the part of Adam Schiff. Because Schiff runs his mouth a lot about Russia, we get to hear the kind of ignorance… that dominates a large segment of policy-makers in Washington.”

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Adam Schiff’s Very Scary Warmongering Speech – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2020

The same goes for arguments that it’s actually NATO’s aggressive expansion to the east that has led to a needless buildup of tensions, not Russia’s drive to the west. Recent examples include an article in the National Interest arguing that NATO has “empowered some of the most historically anti-Russian elements in that region – Ukrainian Banderites [i.e. followers of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera], Polish nationalists, Balkan Islamists” – elements that, not unreasonably, have sparked Russia’s worst fears – or one in the Nation stating that NATO’s drang nach osten is “the primary cause for the new and very dangerous Cold War.”

Articles like those are verboten as well because they go counter to the new line that Russia is entirely to blame.

https://original.antiwar.com/daniel_lazare/2020/01/23/adam-schiffs-very-scary-warmongering-speech/

by

All the usual suspects are praising Adam Schiff’s marathon two-and-a-half-hour Senate speech on Wednesday to the skies. Neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin calls it “a grand slam” in the Washington Post. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin describes it as “dazzling” on CNN. New York Times columnist Gail Collins says it was “a great job” and that Schiff is “a rock star” for pulling it off.

But in fact it was the opposite – a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.

What is that orthodoxy? It’s that Russia invaded poor innocent Ukraine in 2014, that it interfered in the US presidential election in 2016 in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and propel Donald Trump into the White House, and that it’s now trying to smear Joe Biden merely because he had allowed his son to take a high-paying job with a notorious Ukrainian oligarch at a time when he was supposedly heading up the Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

As Schiff put it with regard to Donald Trump’s famous July 25 phone call urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Biden’s activities:

“This investigation was related to a debunked conspiracy theory alleging that Ukraine not Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. This narrative propagated by the Russian intelligence services contends that Ukraine sought to help Hillary Clinton and harm then-candidate Trump…. This tale is also patently false and, remarkably, it is precisely the inverse of what the US intelligence community’s unanimous assessment was that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in sweeping and systemic fashion in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.”

So even though the Financial Times reported during the 2016 election campaign that the threat of a Trump victory was spurring “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they have never attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election,” articles like that are now down the memory hole because Schiff says they’re Russian propaganda that US intelligence agencies have determined to be false.

The same goes for arguments that it’s actually NATO’s aggressive expansion to the east that has led to a needless buildup of tensions, not Russia’s drive to the west. Recent examples include an article in the National Interest arguing that NATO has “empowered some of the most historically anti-Russian elements in that region – Ukrainian Banderites [i.e. followers of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera], Polish nationalists, Balkan Islamists” – elements that, not unreasonably, have sparked Russia’s worst fears – or one in the Nation stating that NATO’s drang nach osten is “the primary cause for the new and very dangerous Cold War.”

Articles like those are verboten as well because they go counter to the new line that Russia is entirely to blame. Declared Schiff:

“Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.”

As for Biden, a New York Times editorial said about his son’s unfortunate new job back in 2015:

“Sadly, the credibility of Mr. Biden’s [anti-corruption] message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices…. Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”

We must all put such sentiments behind us now Russia is seeking to “weaponize” such information, according to Schiff, and deploy it “against Mr. Biden just like it did against Hillary Clinton in 2016 when Russia hacked and released emails from her presidential campaign.” If Russia wants to weaponize it, then it’s best for the rest of us not to breathe a word of it lest people think we’ve been weaponized as well.

Bottom line: we must impeach Trump, according to Schiff’s epic presentation, not only because he’s overstepped his proper constitutional bounds, but because he’s part of a grand Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation, undercut US security, undermine faith in US intelligence agencies, and “remake the map of Europe by dent of military force.” In order to counter this all-encompassing threat, it is our patriotic duty to do the opposite by believing the CIA and redoubling US defense. If anyone tells us that Biden was guilty of a flagrant conflict of interest, we must stop up our ears because that’s what Moscow wants us to think. If anyone says that the entire Russian-interference narrative is just a silly conspiracy theory based on a paucity of facts and an abundance of paranoid speculation, we must do likely because it’s just the Kremlin trying to worm its way into our minds.

When in doubt, just remember to bleat: America good, Russia baa-aa-aad.

But while it would be nice to dismiss this as a joke, it’s not. Schiff’s emergence as leader of the Democratic impeachment drive means that the party is re-grouping along the most retrograde Cold War lines. As reckless and appalling as Trump’s behavior is in the Persian Gulf, the emerging Democratic worldview is shaping up as no less extreme. Because it sees Russia as mounting a multi-pronged offensive, the clear implication is that the US must respond in kind. This means more troops deployments, more forces mobilized to counter Russian threats from Venezuela to the Middle East, more TV talking heads going on and on about this or that Kremlin conspiracy, and more labelling of people like Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein as Russian assets.

Remember, this is the Los Angeles neocon who backed the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and Saudi Arabia’s unprovoked war against Yemen, an assault that, since March 2015, has cost 100,000 lives and brought half the country to the brink of starvation. He supported Obama’s war in Libya and called for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria and relies on arms manufacturers and military contractors for major financial support.

But while Bernie supporters may have thought that Democrats were edging away from such views, they’re plainly in the wrong. Schiff’s new-found prominence shows that the neocons are back in the saddle. Impeachment advocates should be careful of what they wish for because the anti-Trump forces are turning out to be no less dangerous than those helping him to remain.

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Adam is Confused | The Unveiled Feminist

Posted by M. C. on October 10, 2019

Never mind that both Adam Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sound like they  should be investigating Joe Biden, given that then-vice-president Biden himself bragged at length about threatening to withhold aid from the Ukraine government if a prosecutor who was investigating Biden’s son were not fired.

https://theunveiledfeminist.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/adam-is-confused/

The Unveiled Feminist

Adam Schiff, the Democrat representative from California’s 28th district, is once again prey to delusions.

During Congressional testimony on Sept. 26, the frustrated screenwriter and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee performed his version of President Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming without evidence that there was an attempt by the President to put mafia-like pressure on  Zelensky. But Schiff’s every word was immediately contradicted when Trump had the transcript of the conversation released to the public.

Since then, an unchastened Schiff has repeated his slander over and over again in the Democrat party’s continuing doomed attempt to overturn the 2016 election. Schiff claims to have information based on second- and third-hand stories provided by a leaker, whom the Democrats call a “whistleblower” to keep his identity from the citizenry. The leaker is thought to be a CIA employee who was spying on the White House, for reasons yet to be explained.

But for Schiff, the important point is that poor Zelensky is the hapless victim of intolerable pressure from Mr. Trump, that Trump has jeopardized American national security, violated his oath of office, and threatened “our democracy.” And let’s not forget “obstructed justice.”

And it’s deja vu all over again, except more boring, predictable and annoying.

And what, according to Schiff, was Trump’s nefarious aim? To get dirt on his possible -though unlikely -opponent in the 2020 election, former vice-president Joe Biden. Or as Mr. Schiff would say, “[he] abused the power of his office for personal gain.”

Never mind that both Adam Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sound like they  should be investigating Joe Biden, given that then-vice-president Biden himself bragged at length about threatening to withhold aid from the Ukraine government if a prosecutor who was investigating Biden’s son were not fired. And never mind that other sources had already wondered in print  about Hunter Biden being a threat to his father’s presidential prospects.

If Schiff’s and Pelosi’s true purpose was to get Joe Biden out of the race, they couldn’t have hit on a better plan.

This morning Schiff inflicted yet another addled and sanctimonious lecture on the American people. During a press conference following Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s no-show for a deposition before Congress, Schiff insisted again and again that the Congress “is a co-equal branch of government.”

Speaking to reporters, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Democrats’ point man on the impeachment inquiry, called the administration’s efforts to block Sondland’s deposition “further acts of obstruction of a coequal branch of government.”

But the House is not a co-equal branch of government. It is one of two parts of the legislative branch of government. If the House is co-equal to anything, that thing is the Senate, which many consider the upper chamber of the legislative branch. The House has 435 voting members, each representing one district. And at the moment, it is the only part of the government that is under Democrat control, with 235 Democrat seats versus 197 Republicans (and 1 Independent and 2 recently resigned vacancies.)

You’d think a big-shot Committee Chair would know that.

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BREAKING– It Was All a Lie!… Ukrainian Government Did Not ...

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Unasked Questions About US-Ukrainian Relations | The Nation

Posted by M. C. on October 4, 2019

How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the case, and not only in Ukraine.

https://www.thenation.com/article/unasked-questions-about-us-ukrainian-relations/

Is US national security being trumped by loathing for Trump?

By Stephen F. Cohen

The transcript of President Trump’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine’s recently elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has ignited the usual anti-Trump bashing in American political-media circles, even more calls for impeachment, with little, if any, regard for the national security issues involved. Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public, which, if any, foreign leaders will now feel free to conduct personal telephone diplomacy with an American president directly or indirectly, of the kind that helped end the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that his or her comments might become known to domestic political opponents? Consider instead only the following undiscussed issues:

§ Even if former vice president Joseph Biden, who figured prominently in the Trump-Zelensky conversation, is not the Democratic nominee, Ukraine is now likely to be a contested, and poisonous, issue in the 2020 US presidential election. How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the case, and not only in Ukraine. The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country’s constitutionally elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass. All those fateful events infused the Trump-Zelensky talk, if only between the lines.

§ Russia shares centuries of substantial civilizational values, language, culture, geography, and intimate family relations with Ukraine. America does not. Why, then, is it routinely asserted in the US political-media establishment that Ukraine is a “vital US national interest” and not a vital zone of Russian national security, as by all geopolitical reckoning it would seem to be? The standard American establishment answer is: because of “Russian aggression against Ukraine.” But the “aggression” cited is Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for anti-Kiev fighters in the Donbass civil war, both of which came after, not before, the Maidan crisis, and indeed were a direct result of it. That is, in Moscow’s eyes, it was reacting, not unreasonably, to US-led “aggression.” In any event, as opponents of eastward expansion also warned in the 1990s, NATO has increased no one’s security, only diminished security throughout the region bordering Russia.

§ Which brings us back to the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation. President Zelensky ran and won overwhelmingly as a peace-with-Moscow candidate, which is why the roughly $400 million in US military aid to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, figured anomalously in the conversation. Trump is being sharply criticized for withholding that aid or threatening to do so, including by Obama partisans. Forgotten, it seems, is that President Obama, despite considerable bipartisan pressure, steadfastly refused to authorize such military assistance to Kiev, presumably because it might escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (and Russia, with its long border with Ukraine, had every escalatory advantage). Instead of baiting Trump on this issue, we should hope he encourages the new peace talks that Zelensky has undertaken in recent days with Moscow, which could end the killing in Donbass. (For this, Zelensky is being threatened by well-armed extreme Ukrainian nationalists, even quasi-fascists. Strong American support for his negotiations with Moscow may not deter them, but it might.)

§ Finally, but not surprisingly, the shadow of Russiagate is now morphing into Ukrainegate. Trump is also being sharply criticized for asking Zelensky to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of Russiagate, even though the role of Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine itself in Russiagate allegations against Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016 is now well-documented.

We need to know fully the origins of Russiagate, arguably the worst presidential scandal in American history, and if Ukrainian authorities can contribute to that understanding, they should be encouraged to do so. As I’ve argued repeatedly, fervent anti-Trumpers must decide whether they loathe him more than they care about American and international security. Imagine, for example, a Cuban missile–like crisis somewhere in the world today where Washington and Moscow are militarily eyeball-to-eyeball, directly or through proxies, from the Baltic and the Black Seas to Syria and Ukraine. Will Trump’s presidential legitimacy be sufficient for him to resolve such an existential crisis peacefully, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962?

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