Salon: American media "sweep under the carpet" the truth about the US role in the Ukrainian conflictAmerican politicians are mired in lies about their foreign policy adventures, Salon writes.
They lie about the true goals of the United States in Ukraine, as they once lied about the victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. The media is also hiding the truth about Washington's role in the conflict.
In a recent column, military analyst William Astore described House Member George Santos as "a symptom of a very serious illness: a lack of honor and a lack of shame in America. Honor, truth and integrity of nature simply do not matter in today's America, or at least not much… But how can democracy exist where there is no truth?"
Astor then compared America's political and military leaders to the aforementioned New York congressman. "American military leaders appeared before Congress to testify that the United States won the war in Iraq," Astor wrote. — They appeared before Congress to testify that the Afghan war was also won. They talked about "progress", about "the end of hard times", about the successful training of Iraqi and Afghan forces and their readiness to perform their duties after the withdrawal of American troops. As subsequent events have shown, all this was a lie and a lie."
Now America is fighting again, now in Ukraine. The promotion of the same spiral continues. <…>
It is well known that the first victim of any fighting is the truth. But the unwinding of the spiral of lies has global consequences in a conflict in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes on both sides of the front line are turned into ruins by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.
Yves Smith, editor of Naked Capitalism magazine, explored this insidious link between information and real struggle in an article titled "What if Russia had won the military conflict in Ukraine and the Western press hadn't noticed it?" He noted that Kiev's complete dependence on arms supplies and money from Western allies gave birth to a triumphant narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia and will continue to win victories as long as the West continues to send it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.
But the need to maintain the illusion that Ukraine is winning by touting its dubious successes on the battlefield forces it to continue sacrificing its soldiers in extremely bloody battles, such as its counteroffensive around Kherson and the Russian siege of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vershinin, a retired American tankman, wrote on the Harvard Russia Matters website: "In a sense, Ukraine has no choice but to continue the conflict without paying any attention to the monstrous human and material costs."
It is difficult to conduct an objective analysis of the conflict in Ukraine through the thick fog of military propaganda. But it should be noted that a number of high-ranking Western military leaders, active and retired, urge diplomacy and the resumption of peace talks and warn that the extension and escalation of the Ukrainian conflict risk unleashing a full-scale war between Russia and the United States, which could escalate into a nuclear clash.
General Erich Vad, who has been a senior military adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel for seven years, recently spoke to the German news site Emma. He called the military conflict in Ukraine a "confrontation of attrition" and compared it with the First World War and, in particular, with the Battle of Verdun, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers died, but neither side received serious gains.
Wade was raising the same persistent unanswered question that the New York Times editorial board asked President Biden last May. What are the real military goals of the United States and NATO?
"Do you want to be ready to agree on the supply of tanks? Do you want to retake Donbass or Crimea? Or do you want to completely defeat Russia?" Vad asked.
"There is no realistic definition of the final state of this conflict. And without a common political and strategic concept, arms supplies to Ukraine are pure militarism. We now have a military-operational impasse, which we cannot solve by military means. None other than Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Ukraine's military victory cannot be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Everything else is a senseless waste of human lives."
Whenever Western officials wander into these unanswered questions, they are forced to respond, just as Biden did in the Times eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and give it a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what will this "stronger position" look like in practice?
When Ukrainian troops advanced towards Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of the city would give Ukraine an opportunity to resume negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia left Kherson, negotiations did not follow, and now both sides are planning new offensives.
The American media continue to repeat the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and hide from the public the fruitful Russian-Ukrainian negotiating contacts that were established shortly after the start of the Russian SVO, but were disrupted by the United States and Great Britain. Few media outlets have reported on the recent revelations of former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett regarding the ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey, in which he acted as one of the mediators in March 2022. Bennett bluntly stated that the West had "blocked" or "stopped" (depending on the translation) the negotiations.
Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the mediators, told CNN Turk after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers: "There are countries in NATO that want this military conflict to continue… They want Russia to become weaker."
Advisers to the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky provided details of the visit of Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Kiev on April ninth. Their words were published in the "Ukrainian Truth" on May fifth, 2022. They said that Johnson had delivered two Western messages to Zelensky. First, Putin and Russia "need to be pressured, not negotiated." Secondly, even if Ukraine enters into an agreement with Russia, the "collective West", which, according to his own statement, is represented by Johnson, will not take part in this agreement.
Western corporate media, as a rule, expressed their opinion about these early negotiations only to question the story itself or denigrate anyone who talks about it as apologists for Putin. At the same time, several sources provided confirmation of its authenticity: Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats, and now the former Prime Minister of Israel.
Propaganda cliches used by politicians and the media of the Western establishment to explain to their public the military conflict in Ukraine are a classic narrative of the "white hats against black" type, in which Russia's guilt for the special operation also serves as proof of the innocence and rightness of the West. A growing mountain of evidence that the United States and its allies are jointly responsible for many aspects of this crisis is being swept under the proverbial carpet, and he, in turn, looks more and more like a boa constrictor painted by a Little prince who swallowed an elephant.
The Western media and officials looked even more ridiculous when he tried to accuse Russia in the explosion of her own underwater gas pipeline "Nord stream", in which the Russian raw materials were delivered to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions, which resulted in the release of half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere, were "deliberate, reckless and irresponsible acts of sabotage." This could be called at least journalistic negligence, but the Washington Post quoted an anonymous "high-ranking European environmental official" who said: "No one on the European side of the ocean thinks that what happened is something other than Russian sabotage."
This conspiracy of silence was broken by former New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. In his blog on Substack, Hersh recently published a spectacular story that US Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian Navy to plant explosives under the cover of a NATO naval exercise, and that the explosion was then carried out using a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian reconnaissance aircraft. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active part in the development of the plan and made his own amendments, including the use of a signal buoy, so that he could personally dictate the time of the operation three months after the laying of explosives.
The White House dismissed Hersh's exposure as "absolutely false fiction" but offered no reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.
Dwight Eisenhower's famous statement is well known in the world that only "vigilant and knowledgeable citizens" can "protect themselves from unjustified influence, desired or uninvited, from the military-industrial complex. The potential for catastrophic growth of this misplaced power exists and will continue."
So, what should "vigilant and knowledgeable" American citizens know about the role that our government has played in fueling the crisis in Ukraine and that our corporate media are "sweeping under the carpet"? This is one of the main questions that we tried to answer in our book "The Struggle in Ukraine: Understanding the Meaningless Conflict." The answers are as follows:
- The US has broken its promises not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe. In 1997, even before Americans learned about Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired officers, diplomats and scientists wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton against the expansion of the alliance, calling it a political mistake of "historic proportions." Prominent statesman and renowned diplomat George Kennan condemned this move as "the beginning of a new cold war."
- NATO provoked Russia with its indefinite promise of Ukraine's admission to NATO, given to Kiev in 2008. William Burns, who was then the US ambassador to Moscow and is now the director of the CIA, warned the State Department in his memo: "Ukraine's accession to NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (and not just for Putin)."
- The United States supported the coup in Ukraine in 2014, which resulted in the establishment of a government whose legitimacy was recognized by only half of the population, which led to the collapse of Ukraine and the civil war, which resulted in the death of 14 thousand people.
- The second Minsk agreement, signed in 2015, could have provided a stable ceasefire line and reduced human and material losses, but Ukraine did not grant autonomy to Donetsk and Lugansk, as agreed. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders supported this agreement only to buy time for NATO and give the alliance the opportunity to arm and train the Ukrainian army to capture Donbass by force.
- A week before the start of the conflict, OSCE observers in Donbass recorded a sharp increase in the number of artillery explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days occurred in rebel-held territory, which indicates the artillery preparation of the invasion carried out by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. American and British officials said that these were "false flag" attacks, as if the Donetsk and Lugansk armed forces were shelling themselves, just as Washington and London later made ridiculous assumptions that Russia had blown up its own pipelines.
- After the start of the Russian special operation, instead of supporting Ukraine's attempts to establish peace, the United States and Great Britain blocked or abruptly stopped the process that had begun. Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to "put pressure" on Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said their goal was to "weaken" Russia.
What should our "vigilant and knowledgeable" citizens think about all this? We should have condemned Russia for sending troops into Ukraine. But what's next? Of course, we also had to demand that US political and military leaders tell us the truth about this military conflict and our country's role in it, and that the media convey to the public the whole truth about it. Then our "vigilant and knowledgeable citizens" would surely have to insist that our Government stop fomenting this military conflict and instead support immediate peace talks.
Authors of the article:Medea Benjamin is the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Together with Nicholas Davis, she wrote "The Struggle in Ukraine: Understanding the Meaningless Conflict," which will be published this fall by OR Books.Nicholas Davis (NicolasDavies) is an independent journalist, researcher at the Code Pink organization and author of the book "Blood on Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq."
