The ‘hunter’ is fast becoming the ‘hunted’! US & EUROPE, TOGETHER, ON A ‘BEAR HUNT’ IN UKRAINE . . . by Selvam Canagaratna You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. – James Thurber, ‘The Owl Who Was God’ (1945) NATO, the current self-appointed ‘GlobalCop’ [in the words of Asia Times Online’s Pepe Escobar] having recently had its collective behind unceremoniously kicked by a bunch of mountain warriors with Kalashnikovs, is now fast ‘pivoting’ to Russia. What that meant in practical terms had already been made clear by Putin’s economic advisor, Sergei Glazyev; he revealed the massive militarization of Ukraine, adding: History shows that the United States has benefited politically and economically from wars in Europe. The huge outflow of capital from Europe following the First and Second World Wars, transformed the US into a superpower. . . Today, faced with economic decline, the US is trying to precipitate another European war to achieve the same objective. Wrote Escobar: Then there’s the sanctions game. Russia remains guilty – with no evidence – thus it must be punished. The EU abjectly followed His Master’s Voice and adopted all the hardcore sanctions against Russia they were discussing for weeks. Moscow will have reduced access to US dollar and euro markets. Russian state-owned banks are forbidden from selling shares or bonds in the West. Yet Sberbank, Russia’s largest, has not been sanctioned. So Russia in the short- and medium-term will have to finance itself. Well, Chinese banks could easily replace that kind of lending. Don’t forget the Russia-China strategic partnership. Cautions Escobar: But EU nations will suffer. Big time. BP has a 20% stake in Rosneft, and it’s already freaking out on the record. ExxonMobil, Norway’s Statoil and Shell will also be affected. Sanctions don’t touch the gas industry; now that would have propelled the EU’s counterproductive stupidity to galactic levels. Poland – hysterically blaming Moscow for everything under the sun – gets more than 80% of its gas from Russia. The no less strident Baltic states, as well as Finland, get 100%. In Escobar’s view, this leads to an inevitable conclusion: key sectors of Western plutocracy want a still ill-defined war with Russia. And journalism’s Holy Grail – ‘never trust anything until it’s officially denied’ – confirms it. Consider, for instance, the ‘proof’ provided by no less than British Prime Minister David Cameron, who said Britain was not going to launch a European war or send the fleet to the Black Sea over the Ukraine crisis, applying economic pressure instead. Mr. Cameron, addressing a Q&A session with staff at the headquarters of United Utilities in Warrington, said the West had to stand up to Russia. He alluded to the lessons the UK learnt dealing with Germany’s aggression in Europe before the first and second world wars, and noted: This year we are commemorating the 100th anniversary of the First World War and that war was about the right of a small country, Belgium, not to be trampled on by its neighbours. We had to learn that lesson all over again in the Second World War when the same thing happened to Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries. In a way this is what we are seeing today in Europe. NATO’s Plan A, according to Escobar, is to install missile batteries in Ukraine; it’s already being discussed in detail in the run-up to NATO’s summit in Wales in early September. Needless to say, if that happens, for Moscow, that’s way beyond a red line; it implies a first strike capability at Russia’s western borderlands. Washington’s short Plan A, meanwhile, is to organize a wedge between the federalists in Eastern Ukraine and Russia. This implies progressive, direct funding of Kiev in parallel to building up, via American advisers already on the ground, and vast weaponizing, a huge proxy army of nearly 500,000 by the end of the year – according to Glazyev’s projection. Endgame on the ground would be to seal the federalists off into a very small area. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshensko has been on the record saying this should happen by early September. If not, by the end of 2014. Wrote Escobar: In the US, and a great deal of the EU, a monstrous grotesquerie has developed, packaging Putin as the new Stalinist Osama bin Laden. So far, his strategy on Ukraine was to be patient – what I called Vlad Lao Tzu – watching the Kiev gang hang themselves while trying to sit down with the EU in a civilized manner working for a political solution. Now we may be facing a game changer, wrote Escobar, because the mounting evidence, which Glazyev and Russian intel relayed to Putin, points to Ukraine as a battlefield; a concerted drive for regime change in Moscow; a concerted drive aiming for a destabilized Russia; and even the possibility of a definitive provocation. Paul Craig Roberts, writing in CounterPunch magazine, said the latest Washington lie [coming via NATO] was that Russia had invaded Ukraine with 1,000 troops and self-propelled artillery. Pathological liars don’t suddenly start telling the truth, he noted, but there were even better reasons for Russia not having invaded Ukraine with 1,000 troops, the primary one being that Putin had invested heavily in diplomacy backed by unprovocative behaviour. The bottom line: He would not risk his bet on diplomacy by sending in troops too few in number to have a decisive effect on the outcome. Roberts, for good measure, recalled what Putin did in Georgia: when the American- and Israeli-trained Georgian army invaded South Ossetia, it was repulsed in a few hours by the Russian response. If you hear that 100,000 Russian troops accompanied by air cover have invaded Ukraine, it would be a more believable claim. Another good reason: the Russian military does not need to send troops into Ukraine in order to stop the bombing and artillery shelling of the Russian populations by Washington’s puppet government in Kiev. The Russian air force can easily and quickly destroy the Ukrainian air force and artillery and, thereby, stop the Ukrainian attacks on the secessionist provinces. Jason Hirthler, a veteran of the communications industry, opined that the US clearly owned the narrative on Ukraine. He summed up America’s shenanigans there in these words: The United States media machine is unequaled at producing and disseminating misinformation. It begins in the bowels of the State Department or White House or Pentagon and is filtered out through the government’s front organizations, otherwise known as the Mainstream Media. Hirthler went on to explain that, in 2014, the US had succeeded in precipitating a new Cold War that could well morph into a hot one. The evil empire is back. The White House has made proficient use of mass media propaganda to get the job done. First, they’ve controlled the narrative. This is critical for two reasons: one, because it permits the White House to sweep the February coup in Kiev into the dustbin of American memory, never to be seen again. Second, it has allowed it to swiftly assert its claim that Russia is a dangerously expansionist power on the edges of a serene and peace-loving Europe. In other words, the omission of one fact and commission of another. Washington’s only interest is in hegemony. That goal can only be achieved if the US can successfully break up Europe’s political and economic relations with Russia. Ukraine’s troubles began when the US State Department toppled the elected president in February and replaced him with a compliant stooge who agreed to follow Washington’s directives. The new ‘junta’ government quickly launched a full-blown war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east which split the civilian population and drove the country to ruin.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 00:06:11 +0000
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