Washington’s Arrogance, Hubris, and Evil Have Set the Stage for War
 
By Paul Craig Roberts
 
...The ignorance, absence of integrity, and lack of independence of the US media greatly enhances the prospect for war. The picture being drawn for insouciant Americans is totally false. 

An informed people would have burst out laughing when US Secretary of State John Kerry denounced Russia for “invading Ukraine” in “violation of international law.” 

Kerry is the foreign minister of a country that has illegally invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, organized the overthrow of the government in Libya, tried to overthrow the government in Syria, attacks the civilian populations of Pakistan and Yemen with drones and missiles, constantly threatens Iran with attack, unleashed the US and Israeli trained Georgian army on the Russian population of South Ossetia, and now threatens Russia with sanctions for standing up for Russians and Russian strategic interests. 

The Russian government noted that Kerry has raised hypocrisy to a new level...

Kerry, as is always the case, is lying through his teeth.

 Russia hasn’t invaded Ukraine. Russia sent a few more troops to join those at its Black Sea base in view of the violent anti-Russian statements and actions emanating from Kiev...

 Everyone needs to understand that Washington is lying about Ukraine just as Washington lied about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just as Washington lied about Iranian nukes, just as Washington lied about Syrian president Assad using chemical weapons, just as Washington lied about Afghanistan, Libya, NSA spying, torture. 

What hasn’t Washington lied about?

Washington is comprised of three elements: Arrogance, Hubris, and Evil. 
There is nothing else there.


Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the U.S.Treasury for Economic Policy, and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest books are, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and How America Was Lost. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/ 

Ukraine: This Isn’t A Revolution – It’s Regime Change
By Brendan O’Neill
 
...The word ‘meddling’ is used to describe Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine, but never to describe Angela Merkel’s or John Kerry’s cultivation of the oppositional forces – that is ‘mediation’...

The Western debate and coverage of Ukraine has cast a massive political fog over events there. It may not have quite made ‘murder seem respectable’, but it has certainly made externally generated regime change seem revolutionary, and the Western-assisted anti-democratic removal of an elected leader seem like an act of people’s democracy. It has exposed a severe dearth of independent critical thinking among the Western commentariat...   Continue

The Ukraine Crisis: John Kerry and Nato Must Calm Down and Back Off
By Jonathan Steele 
 
...At the back of Pentagon minds, no doubt, is the dream that a US navy will one day replace the Russian Black Sea fleet in the Crimean ports of Sevastopol and Balaclava. 

Since independence, every poll in Ukraine has shown a majority against Nato membership, yet one after another the elites who ran the country until 2010, and who are now back in charge, ignored the popular will. Seduced by Nato's largesse and the feeling of being part of a hi-tech global club, they took part in joint military exercises and even sent Ukrainian troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The deposed Viktor Yanukovych...was the first president to oppose Nato membership in his election campaign, and then persuade parliament to make non-alignment the cornerstone of the country's security strategy, on the pattern of Finland, Ireland and Sweden. Nato refused to accept it...   Continue

Heard the One About Obama Denouncing a Breach of International Law?

By Norman Solomon

...Unfortunately, during the last five years, no world leader has done more to undermine international law than Barack Obama...

Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the side of international law even while functioning as the world’s biggest outlaw. Rather than striving for an evenhanded assessment of how “international law” has become so much coin of the hypocrisy realm, mainline U.S. media are now transfixed with Kremlin villainy.

...the same standards are not applied to President Obama, whose continuation of the Bush “war on terror” under revamped rhetoric has bypassed international law as well as “civilized behavior.”

In these circumstances, major U.S. media coverage rarely extends to delving into deviational irony or spotlighting White House hypocrisy. Yet it’s not as if large media outlets have entirely excluded key information and tough criticism.

For instance, last October the McClatchy news service reported that “the Obama administration violated international law with top-secret targeted-killing operations that claimed dozens of civilian lives in Yemen and Pakistan,” according to reports released by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Last week, just before Obama leapt to high dudgeon with condemnation of Putin for his “breach of international law,” the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed piece that provided illuminating context for such presidential righteousness.

“Despite the president's insistence on placing limits on war, and on the defense budget, his brand of warfare has helped lay the basis for a permanent state of global warfare via ‘low footprint’ drone campaigns and special forces operations aimed at an ever-morphing enemy usually identified as some form of Al Qaeda,” wrote Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s law school.

Greenberg went on to indicate the scope of the U.S. government’s ongoing contempt for international law: 

“According to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the Obama administration has killed 4,700 individuals in numerous countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Obama has successfully embedded the process of drone killings into the executive branch in such a way that any future president will inherit it, along with the White House ‘kill list’ and its ‘terror Tuesday’ meetings. Unbounded global war is now part of what it means to be president.”

But especially in times of crisis, as with the current Ukraine situation, such inconvenient contradictions go out the mass-media window. What remains is an Orwellian baseline, melding conformist ideology and nationalism into red-white-and-blue doublethink.

 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information about the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
   
  Continue

Pres. Obama's One Option: Put Up or Shut Up

By Pat LaMarche

...While President Obama believes President Putin should be sanctioned for his and his Federation's actions, he sees no need to demand payment from Vice President Cheney or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld...

If President Obama would like to lecture President Putin...then he must direct Attorney General Holder to issue arrest warrants for his invading predecessors. If President Obama lacks the stomach to seek justice at home, he's ill-equipped to wag his overly powerful finger in anyone else's direction. 

Because when you ignore the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the lies told to the American people to wage a war of invasion, the crippling of the U.S. economy and the death and devastation of your own military personnel, you don't stand qualified to criticize aggression in others, you set precedence for it.  Continue

Obama's Far Right Foreign Policy
By Shamus Cooke 

...There has been a virtual U.S. media blackout as to the leadership of the movements in Ukraine, Syria, and Venezuela, and for good reason... The American public would give zero support to these groups if they knew the truth, which is why the level of U.S. media misinformation about these groups is as Orwellian as the workings of Obama's NSA...

  Why does the Obama administration choose this type of foreign policy? The main reason is that the above-targeted countries had slid out of the U.S. orbit of control, and only these far-right groups are interested in getting their country back into the U.S. orbit. 

Ultimately, U.S. capitalists gain mountains of profit when a country is dependent on U.S. loans, U.S.-made weapons, manufactured goods, foodstuffs, etc.  

This is why the U.S. establishment — now represented by the Obama administration — will not simply leave Latin America, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe to be independent or fall into the orbit of a competing regional power like Russia. There is simply too much profit at stake.  Peace is not an option.  

In order to stop the never-ending warmongering of U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. government itself must be fundamentally transformed. The U.S. establishment that favors the capitalist economic system will endlessly provoke wars for profit, while an economic system without a profit-motive will have no need for foreign wars.   

 
Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Compass ( www.workerscompass.org )  He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

   Continue

The Crisis in Ukraine

Statement by Stop the War Coalition

Stop the War Coalition 03 March 2014.

The highly dangerous situation in Ukraine has brought into focus the threat of a new cold war, and the possibility of military conflict. It is in the interests of no one for such military conflict to take place. The British and US governments are placing the blame for any escalation on Russia, which has sent troops into Crimea.

We oppose all foreign military intervention. But we should be clear that this is not the only intervention. In fact, the EU and the US have been very directly intervening in the affairs of Ukraine, and have played a major role in the changing of the government there, and in the composition of the new government, which contains within it far right and fascist elements.

We should also take no lessons from those who have supported intervention in the past in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and who proposed major air strikes in Syria as recently as last August. Nor should we believe concerns about national sovereignty from countries which have launched drone attacks on Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

There are many political differences in Ukraine that can only be resolved politically and by respecting the language and civil rights of all concerned. But the background to this lies far beyond the borders of the Ukraine in terms of conflict between major powers.

At the end of the Cold War, as agreed with the western powers, Russia disbanded the Warsaw Pact, its military alliance. But the United States and NATO broke their word to Russia, by adding most of Eastern Europe and the Balkan states to their own military alliance, and by building military bases along Russia's southern border.

The expansion of the EU and Nato eastwards has led to the growth of a neoliberal and militarised agenda in the region.

In addition the experience of the war on terror and previous interventions has built up a legacy of conflict between major powers. The defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and over Syria have led to a desire from the US neocons in particular for a settling of scores, especially with Russia. ‘At the same time the Russian and Chinese governments have been alarmed by the range of Nato interventions from Serbia in 1999 to the bombing of Libya in 2011’

It is these tensions which are really fuelling the new cold war, a war which is against the interests of the people of the world, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.

http://stopwar.org.uk/statements/the-crisis-in-ukraine-and-crimea-statement-by-stop-the-war-coalition