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Denmark sacks defense chief as Red Sea failures pile up for NATO

The Cradle | April 4, 2024

The Danish government fired Chief of Defense Flemming Lentfer on 3 April after it was revealed that the top military official failed to report flaws in the HDMS Iver Huitfeldt’s air defense and weapons systems that emerged during an attack last month by the Yemeni armed forces in the Red Sea.

“I have lost trust in the chief of defense,” Troels Lund Poulsen, Denmark’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, told reporters on Wednesday night. Poulsen reportedly learned about the failure from the Danish military outlet Olfi.

“We are facing a historic and necessary strengthening of Denmark’s defense forces. This places great demands on our organization and on the military advice at a political level,” the Danish official added.

On 9 March, the Iver Huitfeldt’s air defense systems failed for 30 minutes while engaging Yemeni attacks launched in support of the resistance in Gaza, according to a leaked document written by the ship’s commanding officer and reviewed by Olfi. The document also reported issues with the ship’s ammunition system, which caused half of its rounds to detonate before they hit their target.

“Our clear understanding is that the issue has been known for years without the necessary sense of urgency to resolve the problem,” the frigate’s commanding officer reported.

The Iver Huitfeldt eventually fended off the attack, shooting down four drones over the Red Sea in what – at the time – was presented as a success story.

Lentfer’s firing is the latest in a string of recent public embarrassments from NATO member states, particularly in the Red Sea, where a months-long campaign of US and UK airstrikes inside Yemen has failed to deter attacks against Israeli-linked vessels.

“We favor a diplomatic solution; we know that there is no military solution,” US Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking said on Wednesday from Oman, candidly acknowledging the failure of what US military commanders called Washington’s largest naval battle since WWII.

Other recent mishaps for NATO include Germany’s use of obsolete communications systems and unsecured lines to discuss providing Ukraine with cruise missiles and Britain’s failure twice in a row to test its nuclear missiles after having two of its flagship aircraft carriers break down ahead of drills in Norway.

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Russia and NATO already in ‘direct confrontation’ – Kremlin

RT | April 4, 2024

The current state of relations between Russia and NATO can be described as a “direct confrontation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. He claimed that the US-led military bloc has been a destabilizing force in Europe rather than ensuring the continent’s security.

He made his comment on Thursday, as the bloc marked 75 years since the signing of its founding document, the North Atlantic Treaty.

Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, NATO has provided Kiev with billions worth of military aid and weaponry, as well as sharing intelligence and helping to train Ukrainian troops.

“The bloc itself is already involved in the Ukraine conflict. NATO continues to move towards our borders, expanding its military infrastructure towards our borders… In fact, our relations have now descended to the level of direct confrontation,” Peskov said at a press-briefing.

He stated that the organization had been created as an “instrument of confrontation” in Europe, and is fulfilling its purpose to the detriment of the entire continent.

“NATO continues to fulfill its purpose, which currently, however, in no way contributes to security, predictability and stability on the continent, but on the contrary is a destabilizing factor,” Peskov explained.

Multiple Western leaders have warned that Russia may attack NATO once the Ukraine conflict is over. Moscow has repeatedly dismissed those claims.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that talk of a potential Russian attack on NATO countries is simply propaganda by their governments aimed at scaring their own population to “beat the money out of them.”

Moscow has for years voiced concerns about NATO’s expansion toward its borders, viewing the US-led military bloc’s policies as an existential threat. However, it has also warned that NATO’s more pronounced involvement in the Ukraine conflict, in particular, the possibility of a troop deployment to the front lines, would be seen as an intervention. This, according to an earlier statement by Putin, would take the conflict “one step shy of a full-scale World War III.”

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

75th Anniversary: NATO Exists to Respond to Conflicts It Caused

NATO military exercise ‘Iron Wolf 2022-II’ at a training range in Pabrade, north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania.
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 04.04.2024

Over the last 30 years, NATO has lost its veneer of a “defensive” alliance, turning into an overtly expansionist and interventionist military bloc, Sputnik’s interlocutors say.

Exactly 75 years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded by the US, Canada, and several Western European nations, with the main aim of deterring and confronting the USSR, their former Second World War ally.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in December 1991, the conditions for a new inclusive security architecture in Europe and beyond emerged, according to Glenn Diesen, professor of international relations at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

“After the Cold War, we developed the format for a new inclusive security system,” Diesen told Sputnik. “The Charter of Paris for a New Europe in 1990 and the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 1994 were both based on the [1975] Helsinki Accords, and embraced the principles of sovereign equality, indivisible security, and ending the dividing lines in Europe.”

The Helsinki Accords, signed during the Cold War by the US, Soviet Union, and several European countries, led to greater cooperation between Eastern and Western Europe. Even though the agreements weren’t binding, they significantly contributed to the détente between the East and West.

Instead of building on that momentum, the US saw the end of the Cold War as the beginning of its unipolar moment, according to the professor: in 1992, George H.W. Bush proudly declared that the US had “won” the Cold War during his State of the Union address.

“The US also developed a security strategy based on hegemony, which required expanding NATO and thus cancelling the pan-European security architecture,” Diesen said. “NATO therefore transitioned from a status quo power to a revisionist power. NATO required a new purpose, which became ‘out-of-area’ military interventionism and expansionism.”

Overtly Aggressive Military Bloc

The next 30 years saw a string of NATO overseas military campaigns, neither of which has seen a comprehensive resolution, resulting in the creation of hotbeds of instability instead.

“During the 1990s, NATO turned from a conceptually defensive organization into an openly aggressive organization when it entered the Yugoslav wars and waged a massive bombing campaign there,” Gilbert Doctorow, an international relations and Russian affairs analyst, told Sputnik.

“More generally, the United States was at this time preparing NATO to move out of its core geography in Europe and to assist US plans for global domination in the Middle East in the succession of regime change operations and open invasions that the United States planned and led.”

Doctorow highlighted that these “out-of-region NATO operations were one disaster after another, ending in the withdrawal from Afghanistan after participation in a 20-year-long war directed by Washington.”

NATO’s Expansionism Led to Ukraine Conflict

Meanwhile, the alliance’s seven waves of post-Cold War eastward expansion accelerated tensions in Europe, according to Diesen.

“Reviving the bloc approach to security and competing over where to draw the new dividing lines has been the primary source of conflicts in Europe for the past three decades and eventually resulted in the Ukraine war,” Diesen said.

The academic pointed out that “by going along with NATO expansionism, the Europeans allowed their continent to be re-divided and remilitarized, which has predictably doomed Europe to greater irrelevance.” He projected that Europe “will undergo systemic economic decline and become painfully subordinated to the US.”

“We could exit this tragedy by reaching out to Russia to negotiate a new inclusive European security architecture devoted to reducing security competition instead of imposing hegemony,” the professor emphasized.

Is NATO Sustainable?

“NATO exists to respond to the conflicts caused by its own existence,” Diesen explained. “The problem now is that NATO is returning to great power conflicts with the same disastrous approach to security, based on hegemony rather than mitigating security competition.”

Despite the Western mainstream media claims that the North Atlantic Alliance is united like never before amid the Ukrainian conflict, it is in fact not true, according to the professor.

“There are great tensions within NATO that simmer below the surface, and I do not think the hatred of Russia is enough to ensure unity after the war is over,” he said.

“NATO victory in Ukraine is imperative as it had the stated objective of permanently weakening Russia and thus knocking it out from the ranks of great powers. This would revive the unipolar moment and collective hegemony of the West. Once NATO’s defeat is evident the cracks will emerge in the military bloc,” Diesen pointed out.

Doctorow believes that despite all its declared, might the North Atlantic Alliance is on thin ice.

“NATO is in treading water, waiting for the tsunami that will send it to the bottom. That tsunami will either take the shape of a [US presidential candidate Donald] Trump victory in November or it will take the shape of an imminent collapse of the Ukrainian army or both phenomena simultaneously,” the international relations analyst concluded.

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

World War III Isn’t Preordained (No Matter What They Say)

By Brad Pearce | The Libertarian Institute | April 4, 2024

A recent survey from YouGov found that 61% of Americans think a world war within the next five to ten years is “very likely” or “somewhat likely,” while only 21% say that such a scenario is “not very likely” or “not likely at all.”

It’s notable that Democrats, who are much more likely to view Russia as the source of the world’s evils, are less likely than Republicans to believe a world war is coming by a strong margin; although it is still only 28% of Democrats in the two “unlikely” categories. At the same time, Republicans who may want rapprochement with Russia mostly see this as a way to free up resources to fight China. The reality is that our ruling class has decided that a global conflict is inevitable and as such are doing nothing to stop it. Further, they are actively hostile to anything which could reduce hostilities with Russia while also proactively antagonizing China.

Our ruling class is far along in creating a simplistic good vs evil narrative which they hope to get into the history books—should anyone survive to write them—but for those of us living through it, it’s obvious the only cause would be the madness of today’s rulers. The most devastating of wars do not commonly arise out of unsolvable problems, but from rulers who refuse to solve them. Further, the drive towards oblivion is usually obvious to many observers, even if the rulers and much of the public are caught in a jingoistic mania. Things are just the same today.

There is a modern perception that World War I took the powers of Europe by surprise and that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a spark which made war inevitable. Perhaps this is believed because of the human need to understand the degree of devastation from a war which more than others lacks a clear meaning. However, author Rebecca West, in her landmark text Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which was written in the 1930s, tells a different story. West explains that all of Europe expected that the Central Powers were preparing for an aggressive war, writing, “It is said that both France and Russia were for some reason convinced that Germany and Austria would not make war until 1916, and certainly that alone would explain the freedom with which Russia announced to various interested parties in the early months of 1914 that she herself was not ready to fight.”1

According to West’s account, Austria then worked quite hard to make the assassination their pretext although the plot had almost no connection to the Kingdom of Serbia. This isn’t a perfect parallel to our moment, but it’s notable that no one was trying to stop the war; they simply wanted time to arm themselves. Similarly, Germany and other countries in Europe have not hidden their current lack of preparedness, but made it clear their interest isn’t avoiding war, but fighting one. In the classic satirical antiwar novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Havec, the author repeatedly includes the line “an empire this stupid shouldn’t exist” in regards to the Austro-Hungarian ruling class; because of the war they, launched it soon wouldn’t.

The closest parallel to the dangers arising from the war in Ukraine comes from the first book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The most immediate cause of the war was civil dissension within a colony leading to conflict with the mother city, and ultimately seeking the protection of that city’s enemy. However, what has gotten more notice recently about this text is one passage that is applied to China, which is now known as the Thucydides Trap. Thucydides wrote, “The real cause however, I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” For all that people have commented on this, it is not that incisive to say that one country’s power growing would alarm another country. What is more commonly missed is that no one forced Athens to expand recklessly to the extent that it caused war with Sparta. It was an unforced error which caused them the briefest moment of greatness followed by utter devastation. On the other side, no one forced Sparta to respond with war, and Sparta’s post-war supremacy was also short-lived. Unfortunately the leaders on both sides chose conflict over co-existence, and in many ways Greece never recovered from that war and the ones which followed.

In America it is part of our founding mythology that War of Independence against the United Kingdom was inevitable because of conflicting interests between the Americans and the British. However, if one reads key British authors of the time, it is clear that the wiser men of the era knew that the British government was barreling towards a devastating and pointless war for no good reason. The reality is that the volume of trade in the British American colonies was growing so rapidly that peaceful reconciliation at any cost was in Britain’s self-interest; The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 and contains some incredible statistics in this regard. Directly taxing the American public instead of levying taxes from their colonial governments was in no way a point worth proving, especially given the profitability of peace and trade.

Edmund Burke was a leader of the peace faction in the British Parliament and his timeless words about avoiding war should be remembered. Burke wrote, in March 1775, “The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of War; not Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negociations; not Peace to arise out of universal discord…not Peace to depend on the Juridical Determination of perplexing questions… it is simply Peace; sought in its natural course… laid in principles purely pacific”2 It is obvious in our current times that peace could be preserved with Russia and China if it was approached with this principle, but that is considered out of the question by our rulers.

The world is currently a tinderbox and every day we watch our rulers pour on more gasoline and throw out extinguishers. I have to wonder what our descendants will think of us and the war which seems to be coming. There is certainly no chance that they can create a clear World War II sort of narrative about this. I often think of the European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying, “Ukrainians are ready to die for the European perspective,” a statement which should only exist as a parody of the vapid state of Western “values.” They want us to believe Vladimir Putin is obsessed with rolling his tanks across Europe, but that makes no sense and clearly isn’t possible. They certainly can’t admit the lengths they went to in order to provoke Russia into war in Ukraine.

There is absolutely no justification for not doing the work necessary for a lasting and equitable peace with Russia and China. When all is said and done, if there are people left to comment on the causes of the Third World War that so many think we are about to experience, perhaps people will say the same as the famous character Captain Edmund Blackadder said of World War I, “the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war.” The majority of the American public thinks countless millions will die in a new world war, and if that comes to pass, it will be because our rulers found going to war easier than making peace.

April 4, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The West hates Serbia almost as much as Russia

By Timofey Bordachev | RT | April 3, 2024

Modern international politics, as practiced by Western countries, sometimes take on a completely absurd character. Recently, the Political Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) approved the membership of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo in the Council of Europe. Let us remember that we are talking about a territory that is not a state recognized by all members of the international community, including many of PACE’s own participants. Additionally, its leaders are rightly suspected of cross-border criminal activity of the worst kind.

But should we be surprised?

It has long been no secret that all the so-called pan-European organizations have effectively become instruments of the United States and the European Union, whose sole purpose is to promote some of their policies towards the rest of the world. It can be security, in which case the OSCE is involved, or human rights, for which the Council of Europe is used. Even environmental policy is in the hands of the West – that, too, is a purely political story.

In other words, absolutely everything is used to create endless pressure on those with whom the US and the EU are currently facing off against. We recall, for example, a case in which one of the European Parliament’s resolutions on the elections in Russia included a reference to the need for Moscow to lift sanitary restrictions on vegetable products from an EU country.

It is not surprising that all institutions and agreements in which the West has a dominant position lose their original meaning over time. No-one in Washington, Brussels, Berlin or Paris really remembers why the OSCE or the Council of Europe were created. This may seem like a joke, and an exaggeration. However, many years of experience in dealing with our American and Western European colleagues have make it abundantly clear that they have such a distorted perception.

This is partly due to the almost total impunity with which the West has operated since the Cold War. It is also due to the fact that all these institutions were created to serve the very specific selfish goals of the US and EU. We in Russia, like many others, once genuinely believed that international politics could develop along the lines of new principles after the Cold War. But it turned out that this was not the case.

Where the West is aware of its irresponsibility, it acts as if we are not even in the 19th century, but in the 17th or 18th century. Moreover, the Balkans are indeed a very special topic for Brussels and Washington. If the West was cynical about its post-Cold War “legacy”, it was doubly so about the former Yugoslavia.

In relations with Russia, and even with the rest of the former Soviet Union, the US and Western Europe still tried, or pretended to try, to maintain a certain ceremonialism, to make a show of the relative equality of their partners. At one stage, Russia was even invited to participate in the G8, the main body for coordinating Western policy towards the outside world. Of course, we are well aware that all these ritualistic actions meant very little in practice. In the mid-1990s, for example, no one in the West hid the fact that the activities of the Council of Europe were nothing more than a nice backdrop for putting pressure on Russia and other “post-Soviet” countries. From the point of view of formalities and ritual declarations, however, everything looked civilized for a long time. Russia was even able to use certain instruments of the Council of Europe – very limitedly, of course, and where it did not interfere with the US, EU or the nationalist regimes in the Baltic republics under their tutelage.

We should hardly be surprised that a gang of organ traffickers has been admitted to the Council of Europe. This is quite natural, after all the support the Baltic regimes have received from Brussels and Washington. Their policies towards minorities and freedom are basically similar to the most radical examples of 100 years ago.

Serbia’s prime minister responded by saying that his country might withdraw from PACE. But there are serious doubts that Belgrade will ultimately decide to do so.

First, if a Serbian politician openly opposes Western dictates, he puts the lives of his citizens directly at risk from the same Kosovar militants and religious fanatics. We have already seen time and time again how even minor manifestations of Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo have been met with an immediate armed response. This was followed by the strongest warnings from Brussels and Washington. Secondly, a formal expression of discontent with the EU by Belgrade would likely immediately lead to open or undeclared sanctions against Serbia. We do not know the structure of the country’s foreign trade well enough, but even the obstruction of transport and logistics routes would probably cause irreparable damage to it.

So with the republic surrounded on all sides by NATO countries, the consequences for the Serbian economy and population would be very dramatic. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Serbs believe that Kosovo is part of their sovereign territory, the ruling party would be doomed to lose the next elections. This is for two reasons: first, because of the worsening economic situation, and then because of the new concessions to the West that it would have to make in order to achieve a softening of the pressure from Washington and Brussels. In the same case, if Belgrade decided to do what it wants, everything would end very tragically for it.

After all, past experience tells us that the US and EU are unlikely to mind if another failed state appears in Europe.

For all the mistakes and ambiguities of Prime Minister Alexander Vucic government’s position on Russia, it has so far done relatively well at the only task it can really control – which is prolonging the uncertain state of affairs. Moreover, it has generally been quite neighborly in its dealings with us, especially given Belgrade’s geopolitical position.

The state of Western attitudes towards Serbia and its people is really interesting, because it reflects an irrational hatred that is not easy to explain. Perhaps it is a matter of psychology and perception – Americans and Western Europeans may see the Serbs as “Russians” who are weaker and can be defeated. They are much smaller than Russia, disproportionately weaker, and surrounded by zones of total NATO influence.

In this case, what is happening in the Balkans is a very pertinent, if tragic, example for Russia of what would happen to us if we were forced to surrender. The decades that have passed since NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia, not to mention Belgrade’s constant declarations about moving towards “European” integration, cannot cure the complex of triumph over a defeated enemy.

Serbia, of course, is not likely to join the EU or NATO. But it is very possible that it will survive the pressure from these extremely aggressive blocs. That is what we will have to see in the next decade.

Timofey Bordachev is the Program Director of the Valdai Club.

April 3, 2024 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Samantha Power and the Power of a Word

BY DIANA JOHNSTONE • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 3, 2024

Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

NATO’s air attacks on the Balkan nation were the practical application of a new post-Cold War doctrine. To succeed, this doctrine relied on Western media to report on crisis areas with the appropriate mixture of exaggerations, omissions and outright lies to justify NATO’s virtuous interventions. The military industrial complex could breathe easy and a new generation of journalists began successful careers eagerly spinning their reports to serve the new humanitarian war ideology.

None was more successful than Dublin-born Samantha Power, whose novice reports from Bosnia in the mid-1990s provided the basis for her 2002 book on “genocide” which “quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine.” She has gone on from one top governmental post to another, a Washington star, urging the United States to intervene on moral grounds.

Samantha Power owes her remarkable success to her talent as a writer, her ambition, her striking presence, but not least to the man at the origins of the whole humanitarian war policy.

That was none other than Morton Isaac Abramowitz, a highly influential member of the foreign policy establishment and the main inventor of what would become the “R2P” (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine. The crucial policy contribution of Abramowitz is explained at the start of my 2002 book, Fools’ Crusade, as follows:[1]

As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of U.S. “ideals”.

Theory and Practice

At the Carnegie Endowment in 1992, Abramowitz published the theory of the new U.S. “humanitarian intervention” policy as Self-Determination in the New World Order.

“The vision of a ‘new world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower – the United States – in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.”

That sounds very nice. But put into practice, “collective resistance” means NATO, and “all people are treated justly” depends on Washington’s preferences. The new rules-based order was not to be confused with traditional international law, based on national sovereignty. Globalization was making national sovereignty outdated (except for the United States). “Ideals” make rules more flexible.

The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, “groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination”. […] In the future, the authors announced, “humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable”. The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene.

Abramowitz subsequently helped put his theory into practice in crumbling Yugoslavia. He was the eminence grise behind U.S. diplomats, steering the events leading to the “Kosovo war” that split the province of Kosovo off from Serbia. He was advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the imitation “peace negotiations” staged at Rambouillet to provide an excuse for the bombing of Serbia. The moderate Albanian Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova was replaced by the armed gangster, Hashim Thaci. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set terms no Serbian leader could accept, demanding the right to station NATO troops over the entire country, with full impunity. The Serb side was then blamed for the failure, and NATO began to bomb on March 24, 1999.

Samantha Steals her Way into Bosnia

Back in 1992, fresh out of Yale, 22-year-old Samantha Power was given a position as intern in the office of Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. As a proofreader, she quickly absorbed the new official doctrine. At that time, her boss was obsessed with the conflicts in Bosnia as implicating the future of NATO. Determined to get to Bosnia where the action was, Samantha stole stationery from the neighboring office of Foreign Policy magazine and forged a letter from the editor to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide her, as Foreign Policy’s “Balkan correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”[2]

From that time on, her work functioned precisely to advance the new “humanitarian intervention” policy of her mentor, Morton Abramowitz. She recalls that his influence helped her get increasingly important assignments – most crucially, writing about the Srebrenica massacre for The Washington Post.

With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.

The Western press corps based in Sarajevo tended to become emotionally involved with the Muslim side which was its principal news source. Missing from their dispatches were reports on Muslim massacres of Serbs villages or on the well-armed Islamic fighters who joined the Muslim side from Afghanistan and Arab countries, some of them settling permanently in Bosnia.

When Bosnian Serb forces captured the Muslim base at Srebrenica in July 1995, they evacuated women, children and the aged to safety, while men fled, fearing retaliation. Many were killed in unclear circumstances.

Without reference to such context, Western media focused on reports of a massacre of 8,000 male prisoners as a unique event which branded the Serbs as the guilty party in the three-sided civil war. With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.

Calling Srebrenica “genocide” provided the argument for NATO bombing: if Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia, it implied that Serbs were genocidal and risked committing genocide in Kosovo unless NATO intervened. This theory was supported by wildly inaccurate accusations voiced by leading Western politicians during the bombing campaign.

That was the story that was sold to the public by politicians and the media. From the start, the Serb majority in Yugoslavia had been portrayed as invaders in their own country, with everyone else as victims. Thus was destroyed the last semi-socialist, nonaligned country in Europe.

The Kosovo war indeed combined U.S. “interests and ideals”. The ideals were preventing a genocide that never would have taken place (and also, incidentally, preventing a negotiation that could have settled the whole conflict as well). The interests included the immediate construction by the Americans of a giant U.S. military base on the territory of Kosovo, once Serbian forces were obliged to leave.

Genocide and R2P

Samantha Power’s 2002 book was subtitled “America in the Age of Genocide”. To speak of the present as an “age of genocide” is wildly melodramatic, but the purpose is to place virtuous America in the center of drastic moral demands. America must save the world from its genocidal self. “Genocide” was thereby promoted as the most potent pretext for U.S. military intervention – precisely by deploring its absence, both in Bosnia and more convincingly, in Rwanda. The Clinton administration was certainly not going to intervene in Rwanda, because the bloody chaos was in fact favoring the conquest of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and his army, which had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Kagame was a favored client of the United States. There was no reason for Washington to interfere with Kagame’s victory.

But the “failure to stop genocide” was an appeal to the liberal conscience to intervene later on, whenever the U.S. was in need a powerful argument to get rid of a someone it wanted to get rid of. Moammer Gaddafi had been on the U.S.-UK hit list for decades, but had made concessions to gain reconciliation. But when Gaddafi’s usual fundamentalist Islamic opponents in Tripoli used the 2011 “Arab spring” to raise protests, the “threat of genocide” alarm was raised on their behalf. In Washington, action to stop Gaddafi from “committing genocide” was urged by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, while Bernard Henri Lévy raised the alarm in Paris. NATO rose to the challenge, destroyed the most economically successful country on the African continent and murdered its leader, creating a flood of refugees to Europe and other disasters. Most of the liberal left cheered.

Today it is widely recognized that the Irak war was based on deceit and ended in disaster. Other U.S. wars are mostly conceded to have been unfortunate mistakes. There are doubts about Libya, due mainly to the refugee flow. But the destruction of Yugoslavia, and in particular the 1999 “Kosovo war”, is still widely accepted in the West as what it was arranged to appear: NATO’s generous humanitarian intervention to prevent “genocide” by racist Serbs against the oppressed Albanian minority.

The distortions of the Bosnia conflict and the Kosovo war were precisely the practical application of the Abramowitz policy: promote minority rebellions to break down national sovereignty and change governments the U.S. doesn’t like, while supplying NATO with a new geographically unlimited mission of “humanitarian intervention”. Yugoslavia was the starting point of the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order, using the idealistic pretexts set out by Abramowitz. Young Samantha Power, who was very smart, got the point and ambitiously cheated her way into a supporting role as reporter in the Bosnia spectacle, which she eventually transformed into an astonishingly successful career.

I was in Kosovo on my own in months prior to the NATO bombardment and saw quite clearly that in that small province, the Serbs were a frightened minority while Albanians were already tasting their future triumph. There was absolutely no danger of a Serbian “genocide” of Albanians. But Western editors kept sending in ignorant young aspiring journalists, on the lookout for some “Serb atrocity” that could advance their budding career. Editors rejected any report that went in a different direction. It was at that time just plain impossible to publish an unbiased report. I know from experience.

Above all, breaking up Yugoslavia was an exercise in subsequent efforts to undermine the Russian Federation, by inciting the Federation’s ethnic minorities against the Russians. Ukraine was the crucial battering ram. I always used to think of Ukraine when studying the conflicts in the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia, as both words have the same root (border land) and suffered from similar conflicts, notably in World War II. Western powers had revived the Nazi-supported Croatian nationalism against the Serbs to break up Yugoslavia. They would revive much more virulent Nazi-supported Ukrainian nationalism against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, in an effort to weaken and eventually even break up the Russian Federation.

And for the United States, the humanitarian “ideals” of supporting minorities would be compensated by the major strategic “interest” of eventually gaining control of Crimea, and with it, Russia’s main naval base in Sebastopol. Putin did what any Russian leader not brain-dead would have done: he headed off this disaster by mobilizing the Russian inhabitants of Crimea to vote to return to Russia, which they had never chosen to leave. This obvious act of self-determination is denounced in the West as an invasion.

The Ideological Backlash

Unfortunately, the blatantly tragic misuse of the “humanitarian intervention” or R2P doctrine in Libya has not managed to achieve its discredit. It is threatened now by the danger that it is changing sides in the very global conflicts it has stimulated.

The referendum in Crimea was a democratic measure of self-determination that fit the Abramowitz standards. The Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in 2022 was partially motivated by the sort of consideration featured in the Abramowitz doctrine: defense of the population of Donbas, under attack from an ultranationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, Western governments and media have simply totally ignored any Russia appeal to the ideals of human rights and self-determination, which they consider their own private property as self-declared unique “democracies”. Russia is classed as an “autocracy” whose interests must be malevolent and thus don’t count.

A greater threat to the West’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. Most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full Western backing, committing Genocide – the real thing this time, out in the open, blatant and unrelenting.

The NATO war machine may have to conjure up a new set of moralizing pretexts for its aggressions.

Notes

[1] See Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, pp 9-10; Monthly Review 2003

[2] Here, with William Burns, Samantha Power discusses her new autobiography The Education of an Idealist and recalls her short term working for Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/13/samantha-power-on-education-of-idealist-event-7178

April 3, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO ‘de facto’ part of Ukraine conflict – Moscow

RT | April 2, 2024

NATO is aiming to retain control over Ukraine and turn it into an “anti-Russian” proxy, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, claimed in an interview published on Tuesday.

The US-led military bloc has long been a “de facto” party to the conflict between Kiev and Moscow, as it controls Ukrainian arms supplies and helps to plan attacks on Russia, Patrushev told the Russian newspaper AiF.

Washington and its allies have been actively militarizing Ukraine ever since the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, the official said in an interview covering the US-led military bloc, ahead of its 75th anniversary. NATO now seeks to “keep Ukraine or at least a part of it, as a fully controlled anti-Russian territory,” he stated.

NATO collectively decides on the quantity and types of weapons its members provide to Ukrainian troops, the Russian official noted, adding that the range and technical characteristics of those arms are constantly increasing.

The bloc’s instructors also “train mercenaries and sabotage units on several nations’ territories to be used in anti-Russian operations,” Patrushev told the paper. Under such circumstances, the Kremlin’s goal of bringing about Ukraine’s “demilitarization” remains a priority, the Security Council secretary said.

Stirring up Russophobia and whipping up the perceived “Russian threat” has also turned into a “major policy” for the West, the official said, arguing that such tactics allow the US and its allies to draw public attention away from internal economic issues.

Anti-Russian hysteria ultimately benefits the US military industrial complex, Patrushev stated.

“The US is gaining profits through… dictating very specific arms purchasing conditions to its allies,” the official told AiF, adding that those arms are then produced by American manufacturers, and such contracts can become economic shackles for other NATO members.

Patrushev’s remarks come amid a historic low in Russia-NATO relations. The situation is now worse than during the Cold War, the head of Moscow’s delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, Konstantin Gavrilov, acknowledged on Monday.

Gavrilov stated that constant talk from Western politicians about Russia’s alleged plans to attack NATO after defeating Ukraine are aimed at diverting public attention from their own governments “pumping … money into the Ukrainian ‘corruption black hole’.”

Moscow has repeatedly stated that it has no plans to engage in a military confrontation with NATO or any of its members. President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that Russia “has no interest … geopolitically, economically or militarily… in waging war against NATO.”

April 2, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Russia-NATO relations worse than during Cold War – Moscow

RT | April 1, 2024

The current state of relations between Russia and NATO can be described as “something more than a Cold War,” the head of Moscow’s delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, Konstantin Gavrilov, has said.

During his interview with RIA Novosti on Monday, Gavrilov was asked to comment on French President Emmanuel Macron’s February statement that he “cannot exclude” the possibility of troops from NATO countries being sent to Ukraine to aid Kiev amid the conflict with Moscow.

“The military strategists in Washington and Brussels should realize: if by lifting the taboo on the potential deployment of the bloc’s servicemen to Ukraine they are trying to test our country’s strength, then we are ready for any turn of events,” he replied.

According to the diplomat, the warnings from US President Joe Biden and some other Western politicians, that if Russia defeats Ukraine it is going to take on NATO states next, are actually aimed “to divert the attention of taxpayers from the senseless pumping of their money into the Ukrainian ‘corruption black hole’ as well as to warm up the public opinion in favor of reviving defense industries in their countries.”

His comment echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement last week that “the claims that we are going to attack Europe after Ukraine – it is utter nonsense and intimidation of their own population just to beat the money out of them.”

Gavrilov said that during the Cold War, almost all NATO statements began with the evaluation of the possibility of a sudden large-scale attack on the bloc by the USSR and its Eastern European allies. Similar rhetoric is prevalent within the US-led military alliance today, he added.

The diplomat recalled that Russia has been labeled “the most significant and direct threat” in NATO’s Strategic Concept, which was adopted in 2022. “Apparently, now their ideal vision of European security is the borders with our country being wrapped in barbed wire,” he said.

“As a result, Russia-NATO relations can now be characterized as something more than a Cold War,” Gavrilov stressed.

Since fighting between Russia and Ukraine began in February 2022, Moscow has said repeatedly that the US and its NATO allies have become de-facto parties to the conflict through the provision of arms, including advanced weaponry, intelligence-sharing, and the training of Ukrainian troops.

April 1, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Finland supports open war against Russia

By Lucas Leiroz | April 1, 2024

Apparently, Emmanuel Macron’s stance on the Ukrainian conflict is gaining supporters among European warmongers. In a recent statement, Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen supported the plan to send troops to Ukraine in the future, if Kiev proves unable to continue fighting. The case is further evidence of how anti-Russian paranoia is reaching worrying levels among European states, leading them to almost engage in open war with Moscow.

According to Valtonen, Macron is assuming a position of “strategic ambiguity” necessary for the current stage of the conflict. This “ambiguity” consists of not making it clear whether or not NATO troops will be sent to Ukraine. The precise time of the possible deployment also remains unknown. Valtonen sees this position as correct, since, according to her, Western countries must deliberate on such a strategic decision, choosing the moment to openly engage in the conflict.

Her view is that the West should avoid self-imposing red lines. She praises Macron for not ruling out direct intervention as this gives the West freedom to decide how and when to act. In an interview to the Financial Times, Valtonen stated that she does not see any need for Western intervention in the conflict for now, but supported the plan to send troops in the near future, if “necessary”. For her, the most important thing is that there are no strategic limits for the West, with NATO countries having maximum freedom to make any decision regarding the conflict.

“Now’s not the time to send boots on the ground, and we are not even willing to discuss it at this stage. But, for the long term, of course we shouldn’t be ruling anything out (…) Why would we, especially not knowing where this war will go and what happens in the future, disclose all our cards? I really wouldn’t know (…) What I liked about two recent announcements of President Macron is that he said that actually why should we impose ourselves red lines when Putin basically has no red lines?”, she told journalists.

As we can see, the Finnish official considers the direct deployment of troops as a Western “card”. She seems not to care – or simply not to understand – the catastrophic consequences of an open conflict between NATO and Russia. This shows, in addition to high bellicosity, a true diplomatic inability, which is particularly worrying since she is the head of Finnish diplomacy.

It is interesting to note how fallacious Valtonen’s speech is. She states that Europeans should not rule out direct intervention because “Putin basically has no red lines.” However, since the beginning of the special military operation, it is Russia, not the West, that has self-imposed strict limits on how to act in Ukraine. Moscow deliberately moderates its military intensity to avoid side effects and civilian casualties. Instead of launching a high-intensity operation for a prolonged period, the Russians prefer a tactic focused on attrition and slow territorial gain, thus reducing damage to the Ukrainian civilian population.

Bombings against Ukrainian critical infrastructure happen rarely, almost always in retaliation for previous terrorist attacks carried out by Kiev on the border. If Russia really didn’t self-impose red lines, there would no longer be any infrastructure in Ukraine and Kiev would have collapsed a long time ago. Moscow clearly sees the conflict as a tragedy and strives to prevent its consequences from being even more serious for innocent people.

On the other hand, the West clearly has no limits when it comes to acting in Ukraine. In the first weeks of the special military operation, NATO countries promised to limit their support to sending money and humanitarian aid. Before long, weapons began to be sent, and then long-range missiles were arriving in Kiev some months later. NATO simply engaged in a proxy all-out war through the neo-Nazi regime – but was quickly defeated.

With the Ukrainians becoming unable to continue fighting and the Western military-industrial complex collapsing in the face of its inability to produce more weapons for Kiev, the West can only choose between retreating or moving towards direct war. Macron, trying to improve his domestic and international image, launched a “PR stunt” talking about sending troops to Ukraine, but showing no real capacity or willingness to take this dangerous step.

The problem is that among Macron’s audience there are European leaders enraged by the anti-Russian paranoia spread by NATO. These leaders have been deceived by the propaganda of their own “allies” and now truly believe that if they do not make “hard decisions” they will be “invaded by Russia” in the future. Finally, it seems that the lack of rationality and strategic sense is leading European countries to make a serious mistake.

You can follow Lucas on X (former Twitter) and Telegram.

April 1, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Europe: soldiers and young people flee armies

By Pierre Duval – Continental Observer – 26.03.2024

The populations from immigration are not interested in the military uniform to lead the wars of the Occident, nor are the other young people of these countries. Most migrants support Russia. Calls by NATO leaders to recruit soldiers in a crusade against Russia are shunned by recruits who have begun to flee.

French Army Minister Sebastien Lecornu, unveiled his plan to end the increase in departures in the French army. «It is no longer a question of recruiting new soldiers so much as of persuading existing troops not to resign», states Politico. «These conversations now exist in all capitals, in all democracies that have professional armies without conscription», emphasizes the English-speaking media. Western armies can no longer recruit and lack soldiers.

Even  Germany is affected. A recent annual report submitted to the German Parliament showed in 2023, some 1,537 soldiers left the Bundeswehr, reducing it to 181,514 troops. Europeans do not want to die for a war their elites want. This reflects the resistance of the populations in Europe against the WAR of the EU against Russia.

In France, according to official data, the military recruit remains in the armed forces for a year on average, less than before the outbreak of the military conflict in Ukraine. In the UK, the annual shortage of personnel is 1,100 men, equivalent to two infantry battalions. The British government signed a recruitment contract with a private company Capita, but this did not succeed.

«The problem is not in being recruited, but in the retention of soldiers, we must also preserve their families’, chief of naval operations of the US Navy, admiral Lisa Franchetti announced at a conference in Paris. It appears that the wives of military personnel have begun asking for divorce more often.

«To train and retain the right people once they have been recruited has become the great challenge of an army without conscription, stressed the Minister at a seminar of those responsible for all military services. In 2023, the French military finished with 3,000 unfilled posts.

The French plan provides assistance to military personnel in finding housing, access to health care and childcare services’. Married couples in which the husband and wife both work in the Defence Ministry, even if one of them is a civilian, will be able to change their position, i.e., by mutual consent.

One of the main measures of the French plan aims to increase the attractiveness of military service is to increase pensions and wages. «But the problem is that the conditions of employment are simply not so attractive, with chronic overtime, absences of several months from home and missed recovery periods», adds Politico.

The new Polish government recently announced a 20% increase in military salaries, seeking to maintain at least the current level of troops. The minimum monthly salary of the soldier will increase from 1,150 euros to 1,394 euros.

By the end of the year, the number of the Polish military is expected to increase to 220,000 people, as reported par Rzeczy Do in reference to the statement by Polish defence minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz. Thus, the overall objective is to increase the number of the Polish military to 300,000 people. But even the wage increase is not motivating the average Pole to shed his blood on the fields of Ukraine.

In Germany, the Scholz government wants to increase the number of its armed forces to 203,000 by the early 2030s, but recruitment is increasing very slowly, warns Politico. Eva Hogl, Bundestag Military Commissioner, stated that it was necessary to restore conscription to military service, and that it is better to attract more women to the military  Last year’s legislation aims to make military conditions more attractive for women, especially with regard to the increase in support for children.

In Denmark, the population is so motivated to serve in the army that the government has decided to extend compulsory military service to women and to increase its service from 4 to 11 months.

The UK has also recently admitted that it is having difficulty finding recruits. The UK Defense Journal reports that the British army has not met its recruitment targets every year since 2010. According to a recent YouGov survey, 38% of Britons under the age of 40 say that they will refuse to serve in the armed forces in the event of a new world war, and 30% say they will not serve even if their country is threatened with an imminent invasion.

«The problem is common to all European countries, including France, Italy and Spain», stated Vincenzo Bove to Euronews, professor of political science at University of Warwick in the UK. «I do not think only one country is spared by this situation». According to the expert, these difficulties in recruiting staff began ten years ago in the United Kingdom and twenty years ago in the United States.  According to Bove, the ideological distance between society as a whole and the armed forces has widened in recent years.

Bove mentioned recent polls that show that the youth of the European Union is massively opposed to wars, against the increase in military spending and against military operations abroad’. They are also more individualistic and less patriotic than ten years ago. And the population in Europe is aging and shrinking. The armies of NATO have also decreased to adapt to these changes: the British, Italian and French armies are now almost half of what they were 10 or 20 years ago.

The plans of the elites in Europe to break up Russia militarily have run into their inability to rebuild their armies.

March 31, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine is ‘tip of the iceberg’ – Lavrov

RT March 29, 2024

The Ukraine conflict is only one part of a wider stand-off between Russia and the West, which seeks to contain Moscow at all costs, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

In an interview with Izvestia published on Friday, Lavrov stated that after the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, the new Ukrainian authorities unleashed “a war… against their own people” in Donbass.

The hostilities, the minister said, were only stopped by the now-defunct Minsk agreements, which were designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state.

The ensuing governments of both ex-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky cracked down on the Russian language and culture, introducing stringent restrictions targeting its use in all aspects of life, according to Lavrov.

Moscow repeatedly urged Kiev’s backers in the West to condemn and halt the discriminatory policies, which also violate Ukraine’s constitution, but “not one of the Western countries that are now shielding Ukraine from all accusations has ever publicly condemned these absolutely illegal actions,” he insisted.

“The only explanation is that Ukraine is the tip of the iceberg. And that the declared goal of the West is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.”

Lavrov added that in practice this implies that those who do the West’s bidding when it comes to this mission, “are allowed to do anything, including direct support for… Nazism. It is sad”.

On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Ukraine conflict could have been easily avoided if the West had taken Moscow’s security interests into account. However, those interests “were completely ignored” as NATO moved closer to Russia’s borders by incorporating Eastern European states and former Soviet republics, Putin added.

The Russian president has also repeatedly said that the main goals of Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine are to “denazify” and “demilitarize” the neighboring state, as well as protecting the population of Donbass from Kiev’s attacks. The two Donbass republics, along with two other former Ukrainian regions, overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in the autumn of 2022.

March 29, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Why is NATO’s cover-up for terrorist attacks in Russia so sloppy?

By Drago Bosnic | March 27, 2024

The diabolical massacre of over 300 people (nearly half of whom are dead now) at the Crocus City Hall is the worst terrorist attack in Russia in the last 20 years and one of the worst in the world in the last half a decade. And yet, many in the mainstream propaganda machine called it a “shooting”, possibly a “mass shooting” or simply an “attack” and similar terms that show just how little empathy there is for Russian civilians. The terrorist attack in and of itself was horrible enough, but the monstrous glee that was coming from the Neo-Nazi junta and its supporters made things far worse. What’s more, Russian intelligence found disturbing evidence pointing to the political West, particularly the United States, as the true organizer of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack.

On the other hand, Washington DC insists that it has “undeniable evidence” that ISIS is behind it. Rather interesting how the US could claim this mere hours after the terrorist attack, when not even Russian services who were on the ground had all the details, but it “doesn’t really know” who destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, except that it was a “mysterious deep-diving Ukrainian group”. Even worse, Washington DC is yet to conclude the 9/11 investigation 23 years after the attacks that were a defining moment of America’s 21st-century history. It’s “almost as if” the political elites are hiding something. But, for some reason, they “immediately know” who’s behind a terrorist attack 10,000 km away and insist their favorite puppet regime “most certainly had nothing to do with it”.

What’s more, the US started defending the Neo-Nazi junta before Russia came out with any official statements about its involvement. And while the troubled Biden administration, including vice president Kamala Harris, is fighting tooth and nail to “prove” the Kiev regime’s “innocence”, the latter’s on the brink of throwing parties to celebrate the brutal massacre of hundreds of unarmed Russian civilians. There are at least two such disturbing cases, one where a Ukrainian restaurant included something called “the Crocus City set” in its menu and another where Ukrainian gamers created a map of the Crocus City Hall concert hall in the globally popular Counter Strike FPS game, where they can shoot and set fire to virtual hostages or even plant explosives to blow them up.

However, while dealing with such behavior should be left to psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, the reactions of the Neo-Nazi junta’s top-ranking officials clearly demonstrate who’s really behind the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. Apart from the (now former) Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov, who not only praised the terrorist attack, but also mocked the victims and Russia as a whole and threatened with more such massacres, there’s also the SBU head Vasyl Malyuk who openly boasted about organizing terrorist attacks that killed a number of Russian public figures, including Darya Dugina and Maxim Fomin (aka Vladlen Tatarsky), clearly implying that he’s also involved in the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack.

Earlier this year, GUR (Kiev regime’s military intelligence) head Kyrylo Budanov also threatened to go “deeper and deeper” with terrorist attacks in Russia. When top-ranking officials of the Neo-Nazi junta’s two most important intelligence services (SBU and GUR) say such things, it instantly incriminates the entire NATO-backed puppet regime. However, as it’s rather dangerous for Volodymyr Zelensky to fire either Malyuk or Budanov, the Neo-Nazi junta frontman is forced to cover his tracks by dismissing lower-ranking officials such as Danilov. One of Zelensky’s closest associates, Danilov has been extremely hawkish since day one and has openly insisted on launching as many sabotage and terrorist attacks as possible, all coordinated with the US-led NATO.

This brings us to another similar episode that happened in the US when the infamous neocon warmonger Victoria Nuland used the opportunity to threaten Russia on the second anniversary of its special military operation (SMO). Namely, she said that the so-called “military aid” provided by Washington DC to the Kiev regime will ensure that “Putin faces some nasty surprises on the battlefield this year”. Days later, she left the State Department. It seems the Neo-Nazi junta isn’t the only one trying to cover their tracks, although Nuland appears to have been a bit more cunning by leaving before the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. But Nuland is not the only one. Last year, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, made similar threats.

“There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night,” Washington Post quoted Milley, who also added: “You gotta get back there, and create a campaign behind the lines.”

What happened with Milley soon after this? You guessed it – he retired. But terrorist attacks across Russia keep escalating. In the meantime, the political West is further exposing its monstrous hypocrisy by condemning the treatment of the terrorists who committed the Crocus City Hall massacre. American journalist Julia Davis is “worried” about their well-being, while the former chief of the CIA’s Russia ops Steve Hall stated that this demonstrates the supposed “difference in values between what is happening in Russia and what is happening in the West”. Yes, there’s a clear difference, because Russia didn’t run the infamous Abu Ghraib prison where American occupation forces tortured countless Iraqi soldiers and civilians.

Russia also doesn’t run the brutal Guantanamo Bay detention camp where hundreds (if not thousands) have been illegally incarcerated, some of whom have been in solitary confinement for decades without ever being charged with a crime. Thus, while Russia is punishing actual terrorists, the US is “worried” about these mass murderers who killed and wounded over 300 people. At the same time, the belligerent thalassocracy is torturing and imprisoning people who were fighting a foreign invader, or worse, those who haven’t done anything. In that regard, Mr Hall is certainly right, there’s a gaping difference between values held in Moscow and Washington DC. All this clearly indicates that the political West and its Neo-Nazi puppets are engaged in a cover-up.

However, the question is – why is it all so sloppy and too obvious? If analysts and journalists noticed all this so easily, Russian intelligence and state services certainly know far more. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently pointed out this hypocrisy, referring to the offer by so-called “international institutions” to supposedly “help” with the investigation regarding the latest terrorist attack, but ignored similar Russian requests regarding the Nord Stream sabotage. It should be noted that this terrorist attack was also previously announced by the US, which pledged to ensure that the pipeline becomes “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea”. In other words, the true terrorists aren’t even bothering to hide anymore (and haven’t been for quite some time now).

All this clearly indicates that NATO wants war with Russia. It recently sent French President Emmanuel Macron to test this with pompous announcements of direct involvement. However, as most of Europe said it won’t take part in this madness, NATO now needs a way to push Russia to attack first. The only way to do so is to provoke a reaction, which is why the world’s most aggressive military cartel organized the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall. In that way, NATO is pushing Russia to retaliate and then present it as the “aggressor”, giving the political West a perfect pretext to wage a “defensive war”. That’s the only way to ensure the participation of the entire (or at least most of) NATO. However, once the Pandora’s Box is opened, there won’t be any going back.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

March 27, 2024 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

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