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USA and NATO pursuing a ”winnable war” to the ultimate end – World War 3

Ukraine is a pawn in this conflict, and its population is cannon fodder.

The Guns of April, WSWS Editorial Board 27 April 2022

The United States and the NATO powers of Europe have set into motion a chain of events that is leading to World War III. 

In her famed work on the outbreak of World War I, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman detailed how miscalculations, the ubiquitous belief in a brief and winnable conflict, and irreversible tactical maneuvers—the “ifs, errors, and commitments”—accumulated as the imperialist powers dragged the workers of Europe into the snarl of the trenches and the slaughter of the Great War.

A similar dynamic is unfolding in the US-NATO conflict with Russia. The US-supplied howitzers and massive deployment of weapons into Ukraine are sounding the Guns of April. 

In mid-March, US President Joe Biden repeatedly stated that he would not allow direct conflict between the United States and Russia, because “that would mean World War III.” A month later, this is precisely what the Biden administration is doing.

On Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin presided over a meeting of the representatives of forty nations in a council of war assembled by Washington on its Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe and the NATO Air Command. 

Austin, fresh from a visit to war-torn Kiev, confirmed that the war in Ukraine is a war between US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. He announced that Washington would be assembling every month going forward a comparable international gathering of high-ranking military figures—which he termed the Ukrainian Contact Group—to “focus on winning” the conflict with Russia.

The aims of the war are now clear. The bloodshed in Ukraine was not provoked to defend its technical right to join NATO, but rather was prepared, instigated and massively escalated in order to destroy Russia as a significant military force and to overthrow its government. Ukraine is a pawn in this conflict, and its population is cannon fodder.

The Ramstein war council was organized to plot the next stage in this scheme. Prior to and in the aftermath of the meeting, the US and other NATO powers announced the deployment of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, tanks and tactical drones. 

The Contact Group, Austin declared, must “move at the speed of war.” In accordance with this direction, Germany announced Tuesday that it would deliver an unspecified number of Flakpanzer Gepard “anti-aircraft cannon tanks,” while Canada reported that it would be sending M777 howitzers, anti-tank munitions and armored vehicles. “The distinction limiting escalatory weapons,” which existed in the first weeks of the war, Air Force Magazine noted, “appears to have melted away.”

The pretense that the US and NATO are not at war with Russia has also “melted away.” Former US Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges stated on Sunday that the US aim in the conflict was “breaking the back” of Russia. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded, accusing the United States of pressuring the Ukrainian government to sabotage peace talks and of conducting a proxy war in Ukraine. He warned that there was a “serious, real” danger of nuclear war. Austin dismissed Lavrov’s warning as “dangerous and unhelpful.” 

What nonsense! Washington assembles a war camp and states that it aims to “break the back” of Russia. When Russia responds that such language and goals raise the danger of nuclear war, Washington declares this to be … unhelpful. 

The United States has made clear that it aims to crush Russia and topple its government. Faced with such an existential threat, the use of nuclear weapons becomes a tactic the Russian ruling class will weigh. Washington is determined to win the war, the Putin government is determined to prevent that from happening. There is no way out for either side but escalation. Lavrov is in fact correct: nuclear war is a real and serious danger.

The real driving forces behind the war have emerged in the course of the conflict. The US and NATO powers goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, refusing to negotiate over Russia’s demand that Ukraine not be made a member of NATO. Russia termed its invasion a special operation, signaling that it intended a contained, tactical maneuver to stabilize its position in the region.

The US, however, would not allow such a rearrangement and sought either to sink Russia in the quagmire of a “grinding occupation,” or to organize its defeat. To this end, Washington worked to undermine all efforts at a negotiated settlement. The rhetoric of Washington justifying this policy has deepened the conflict. Biden accused Putin of war crimes, then of genocide, and called for regime change in Moscow. Each new formulation had an irreversible, escalatory character, a click in the ratchet of war.  

Despite the massive and mounting infusion of military equipment into Ukraine—Washington has shipped more than $3.7 billion worth of weaponry since the beginning of the war—the regime in Kiev has not been able to orchestrate the decisive defeat of Russia. The danger, seen from the standpoint of the US and NATO, is that Russia will be able to consolidate its control over Eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast. If the Ukrainian forces do not drive forward, then the advantage, at least from a military standpoint, shifts to Russia.

The development of the conflict, set in motion in the Oval Office and deliberated in the Kremlin, is increasingly in the hands of military men and it is reaching a point of no return. A decisive defeat of Russia in the conflict requires the ever more direct involvement of the NATO powers themselves, up to and including the deployment of troops.

With its arms shipments, sweeping declarations and councils of war, the United States has staked its entire credibility on the defeat of Russia in this conflict. “The stakes reach beyond Ukraine and even beyond Europe,” Austin declared on Tuesday. The fate of American hegemony, including the credibility of its threats against China, hangs in the balance. The reckless decisions made by Washington have thus become the major premise in the logic of further escalation. 

Washington drags behind it the major powers of Europe, as it assembles, with the hubris of empire, a war camp on the continent. Britain has been deeply complicit in every escalatory step, and Germany and France are taking up their assigned roles. Washington gathers the military conspirators on a US airbase in Germany, the country which once launched Operation Barbarossa, holds the Germans as virtual bystanders, and plots its war with Russia…………. more https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/27/pszn-a27.html

April 30, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Is a long, bloody war between Russia and Ukraine really in our national interest?

 https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-us-nuclear-war/ By David Bromwich,   22 Apr 22

Russia invaded Ukraine in violation of international law, and now we stand on a precipice. Advocates of war are saying that World War III has already begun, and the United States should therefore plunge in. How can they say that? People may finally hurl themselves into an abyss from the sheer terror of falling.

I learned something about this mood from a retired Foreign Service veteran. On October 27, 1962, he was sitting in the next room, listening on an intercom with second-echelon State Department officials while President Kennedy and his advisers discussed the appropriate response to Russian missiles in Cuba. As we now know, Kennedy barely held off an almost unanimous recommendation to bomb. What my informant vividly recalled was the mood of decision. They all recognized that a nuclear war would be a catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions; but at a certain point, the momentum seemed irresistible. “I thought to myself,” he said, “OK, let’s just do this.”

That state of mind—of blank acceptance (because they had already come so far)—“lasted,” he continued, “for about 20 minutes. Then, somehow, I came to my senses. But I’ve thought of that moment ever since. I was willing to ‘live with’ the end of the world. It showed me what we are capable of—what I was capable of.”

Joe Biden has long been a man given to sentimental avowals and reckless denunciations. He was indulged for half a century; the slips were easily exposed and of no large consequence. His rhetorical effervescence took on a graver aspect in mid and late March, when he called Vladimir Putin a war criminal, broke with the US renunciation of chemical weapons by saying we would use them in retaliation if Russia used them, told members of the 82nd Airborne Division that they would soon be deployed in Ukraine, and signaled a wartime goal of regime change in Russia: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

When a leader speaks of an international rival with unbounded contempt, it renders negotiation impossible. Yet the president’s advisers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, have done little to blunt his message. Congress, too, is full of members who yesterday could not have found Ukraine on a map but today want US missiles to shoot down Russian planes. The US/NATO plan looks forward to a long and bloody war, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians killed,  Ukraine vindicated and the Russian economy destroyed.

Is this a probable result? Is it desirable?

There is a broader allegorical battle in which many Americans now imagine us playing a part. We—along with our surrogate, Ukraine—stand for democracy, civilization, and enlightenment. Russia is tyranny, barbarism, darkness and dirt and gas.

The push for a bigger war draws enormous strength from the weapons lobby, of course, but another influence is the daily inundation of headlines. Consider The New York Times, April 10: “Russia Resets Military Command as Western Arms Pour In.” April 15: “Russian Flagship Sinks in Black Sea; E.U. Could Ban Oil” It has been permanent Ukraine, all day and every day, with a drumbeat that exceeds any comparable string of headlines during Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a foreign war that the Times and The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and all the old networks cover as if it were being fought on American soil.

The columnists have followed close behind. On April 13, the Times’ Bret Stephens asked: “What Do We Do if Putin Uses Chemical Weapons?” His answers, fluent and brash, led off with approval of cyberwarfare against Russian pipelines, and proceeded to a series of excited subheads: “Tear apart Russia’s supply chains,” “Arm Ukraine with offensive weapons,” “Plan for a long war.” Writers of humbler strategic ambitions have written accusingly of American faintheartedness. A recent George Packer column in The Atlantic was listed in the magazine’s online “ideas archive” as “Can We Be Worthy of Ukraine?” while the article itself was titled “I Worry We’ll Soon Forget About Ukraine.”

This posture of sorrow and humility, the prayer We are not worthy in homage to people living a higher moral reality, owes much to an undeserved nostalgia for the Cold War. More insistently, our opinion-masters look to the example of World War II. The zealots want another good war like that one; and Volodymyr Zelensky has breathed new life into their yearning. He is courageous, and his appeals are convincing; but 

the truth is that Zelensky is a target from more than one direction: the Russian Army facing him and, at his back, the Azov Battalion and the neofascist militias, who fear him as little as they love the Russians, and whose actions many months ago nullified his election promise to negotiate peace in the Donbas. Even now, Zelensky could save most of his country and many lives if the United States strongly backed negotiations; but our leaders and munitions-makers agree that Ukraine must go on fighting.

What still seems barely possible, at press time, is a solution that Zelensky has come halfway to suggesting, with no encouragement from the US or its European dependents: namely, a neutral Ukraine, part of the Western European community in most respects but not a member of NATO; autonomous status for the Donbas, the details to be decided perhaps by referendum; and Russian troops withdrawn, never to return. Admittedly, this would disappoint believers in a worldwide struggle-to-the-death from which either tyranny or democracy must emerge the final victor.

Words are going to matter more than usual in the next few weeks. The let’s just do this mood is as deranged now as it was in 1962. Trap the invader in a tight enough corner, choke off all the exits, make him feel he has nothing to lose, and he will drive the world off a cliff as surely as our generals and think-tank adepts, our senators and columnists. “I am,” says Macbeth, “in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” We had better step back before we step any further.  AT TOP   https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-us-nuclear-war/

April 23, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment