https://www.globalresearch.ca/biden-broken-promise-avoid-war-russia-may-kill-us-all/5796042
Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All
On March 11, 2022, President Biden reassured the American public and the world that the United States and its NATO allies were not at war with Russia. “We will not fight a war with Russia in Ukraine,” said Biden. “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”
It is widely acknowledged that U.S. and NATO officers are now fully involved in Ukraine’s operational war planning, aided by a broad range of U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis to exploit Russia’s military vulnerabilities, while Ukrainian forces are armed with U.S. and NATO weapons and trained up to the standards of other NATO countries.
On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.
It seems likely that, under that doctrine, Russia’s leaders would interpret losing a war to the United States and NATO on their own borders as meeting the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
President Biden acknowledged on October 6 that Putin is “not joking” and that it would be difficult for Russia to use a “tactical” nuclear weapon “and not end up with Armageddon.” Biden assessed the danger of a full-scale nuclear war as higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
Yet despite voicing the possibility of an existential threat to our survival, Biden was not issuing a public warning to the American people and the world, nor announcing any change in U.S. policy. Bizarrely, the president was instead discussing the prospect of nuclear war with his political party’s financial backers during an election fundraiser at the home of media mogul James Murdoch, with surprised corporate media reporters listening in.
In an NPR report about the danger of nuclear war over Ukraine, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear weapons expert at Harvard University, estimated the chance of Russia using a nuclear weapon at 10 to 20 percent.
How have we gone from ruling out direct U.S. and NATO involvement in the war to U.S. involvement in all aspects of the war except for the bleeding and dying, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent chance of nuclear war? Bunn made that estimate shortly before the sabotage of the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea. What odds will he project a few months from now if both sides keep matching each other’s escalations with further escalation?
The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat?
And yet that is what the intensifying Western role in Ukraine now explicitly aims to achieve. This leaves U.S. and NATO policy, and thus our very existence, hanging by a thin thread: the hope that Putin is bluffing, despite explicit warnings that he is not. CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and the director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, have all warned that we should not take this danger lightly.
The danger of relentless escalation toward Armageddon is what both sides faced throughout the Cold War, which is why, after the wake-up call of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, dangerous brinkmanship gave way to a framework of nuclear arms control agreements and safeguard mechanisms to prevent proxy wars and military alliances spiraling into a world-ending nuclear war. Even with those safeguards in place, there were still many close calls – but without them, we would probably not be here to write about it.
Today, the situation is made more dangerous by the dismantling of those nuclear arms treaties and safeguards. It is also exacerbated, whether either side intends it or not, by the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending, which leaves Russia with more limited conventional military options and a greater reliance on nuclear ones.
But there have always been alternatives to the relentless escalation of this war by both sides that has brought us to this pass. In April, Western officials took a fateful step when they persuaded President Zelenskyy to abandon Turkish- and Israeli-brokered negotiations with Russia that had produced a promising 15-point framework for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a neutral future for Ukraine.
That agreement would have required Western countries to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, but they refused to be party to it and instead promised Ukraine military support for a long war to try to decisively defeat Russia and recover all the territory Ukraine had lost since 2014.
U.S. Defense Secretary Austin declared that the West’s goal in the war was now to “weaken” Russia to the point that it would no longer have the military power to invade Ukraine again. But if the United States and its allies ever came close to achieving that goal, Russia would surely see such a total military defeat as putting “the very existence of the state under threat,” triggering the use of nuclear weapons under its publicly stated nuclear doctrine.
On May 23rd, the very day that Congress passed a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, including $24 billion in new military spending, the contradictions and dangers of the new U.S.-NATO war policy in Ukraine finally spurred a critical response from The New York Times Editorial Board. A Times editorial, titled “The Ukraine War is Getting Complicated, and America Is Not Ready,” asked serious, probing questions about the new U.S. policy:
“Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war…? Without clarity on these questions, the White House…jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent.”
The NYT editors went on to voice what many have thought but few have dared to say in such a politicized media environment, that the goal of recovering all the territory Ukraine has lost since 2014 is not realistic, and that a war to do so will “inflict untold destruction on Ukraine.” They called on Biden to talk honestly with Zelenskyy about “how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain” and the “limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia.”
A week later, Biden replied to the Times in an Op-Ed titled “What America Will and Will Not Do in Ukraine.” He quoted Zelenskyy saying that the war “will only definitively end through diplomacy,” and wrote that the United States was sending weapons and ammunition so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
Biden wrote, “We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia.…the United States will not try to bring about [Putin’s] ouster in Moscow.” But he went on to pledge virtually unlimited U.S. support for Ukraine, and he did not answer the more difficult questions the Times asked about the U.S. endgame in Ukraine, the limits to U.S. involvement in the war or how much more devastation Ukraine could sustain.
As the war escalates and the danger of nuclear war increases, these questions remain unanswered. Calls for a speedy end to the war echoed around the UN General Assembly in New York in September, where 66 countries, representing most of the world’s population, urgently called on all sides to restart peace talks.
The greatest danger we face is that their calls will be ignored, and that the U.S. military-industrial complex’s overpaid minions will keep finding ways to incrementally turn up the pressure on Russia, calling its bluff and ignoring its “red lines” as they have since 1991, until they cross the most critical “red line” of all.
If the world’s calls for peace are heard before it is too late and we survive this crisis, the United States and Russia must renew their commitments to arms control and nuclear disarmament, and negotiate how they and other nuclear armed states will destroy their weapons of mass destruction and accede to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, so that we can finally lift this unthinkable and unacceptable danger hanging over our heads.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57282.htm
Terror on Crimea Bridge forces Russia to unleash Shock’n Awe
The western narrative of a 'losing Russia' has just been decimated by Moscow's blitzkrieg against Ukraine and its foreign-backed terror operations
The terror attack on Krymskiy Most – the Crimea Bridge – was the proverbial straw that broke the Eurasian camel’s back.
Russian President Vladimir Putin neatly summarized it: “This is a terrorist attack aimed at destroying the critical civilian infrastructure of the Russian Federation.”
The head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, confirmed face-to-face with Putin that Terror on the Bridge was carried out by the SBU – Ukrainian special services.
Bastrykin told Putin, “we have already established the route of the truck, where the explosion took place. Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, Krasnodar… The carriers have been identified. With the help of operatives of the FSB, we managed to identify suspects.”
Russian intel leaked crucial info to military correspondent Alexander Kots. The cargo was ordered by a Ukrainian citizen: explosives packed in 22 pallets, in rolls of film under plastic wrap, were shipped from Bulgaria to the Georgian port of Poti. Afterwards, the cargo was loaded onto a truck with foreign license plates and proceeded overland to Armenia.
Clearance at the Armenia-Russia border was smooth – according to the rules of the Eurasian Customs Union (both Russia and Armenia are members of the Eurasian Economic Union, or EAEU). The cargo evidently avoided detection through X-rays. This route is standard for truckers traveling to Russia.
The truck then re-entered Georgia and crossed the border into Russia again, but this time through the Upper Lars checkpoint. That’s the same one used by thousands of Russians fleeing partial mobilization. The truck ended up in Armavir, where the cargo was transferred to another truck, under the responsibility of Mahir Yusubov: the one that entered the Crimean bridge coming from the Russian mainland.
Very important: the transport from Armavir to a delivery address in Simferopol should have happened on October 6-7: that is, timed to the birthday of President Putin on Friday the 7th. For some unexplained reason, that was postponed for a day.
The driver of the first truck is already testifying. Yusubov, the driver of the second truck – which exploded on the bridge – was “blind:” he had no idea what he was carrying, and is dead.
At this stage, two conclusions are paramount.
First: This was not a standard ISIS-style truck suicide bombing – the preferred interpretation in the aftermath of the terror attack.
Second: The packaging most certainly took place in Bulgaria. That, as Russian intel has cryptically implied, indicates the involvement of “foreign special services.”
‘A mirage of cause and effect’
What has been revealed in public by Russian intelligence tells only part of the story. An incandescent assessment received by The Cradle from another Russian intel source is way more intriguing.
At least 450 kg of explosives were employed in the blast. Not on the truck, but mounted inside the Crimea Bridge span itself. The white truck was just a decoy by the terrorists “to create a mirage of cause and effect.” When the truck reached the point on the bridge where the explosives were mounted, the explosion took place.
According to the source, railroad employees told investigators that there was a form of electronic hijacking; the terror operators took control of the railway so the train carrying fuel received a command to stop because of a false signal that the road ahead was busy.
Bombs mounted on the bridge spans were a working hypothesis largely debated in Russian military channels over the weekend, as well as the use of underwater drones.
In the end, the quite sophisticated plan could not follow the necessarily rigid timing. There was no alignment by the millimeter between the mounted explosive charges, the passing truck and the fuel train stopped in its tracks. Damage was limited, and easily contained. The charges/truck combo exploded on the outer right lane of the road. Damage was only on two sections of the outer lane, and not much on the railway bridge.
In the end, Terror on the Bridge yielded a short, Pyrrhic PR victory – duly celebrated across the collective West – with negligible practical success: transfer of Russian military cargo by railway resumed in roughly 14 hours.
And that brings us to the key information in the Russian intel source assessment: the whodunnit.
It was a plan by the British MI6, says this source, without offering further details. Which, he elaborates, Russian intel, for a number of reasons, is shadow-playing as “foreign special services.”
It’s quite telling that the Americans rushed to establish plausible deniability. The proverbial “Ukrainian government official” told CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post that the SBU did it. That was a straight confirmation of an Ukrainska Pravda report based on an “unidentified law enforcement official.”
The perfect red line trifecta
Already, over the weekend, it was clear the ultimate red line had been crossed. Russian public opinion and media were furious. For all its status as an engineering marvel, Krymsky Most represents not only critical infrastructure; it is the visual symbol of the return of Crimea to Russia.
Moreover, this was a personal terror attack on Putin and the whole Russian security apparatus.
So we had, in sequence, Ukrainian terrorists blowing up Darya Dugina’s car in a Moscow suburb (they admitted it); US/UK special forces (partially) blowing Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 (they admitted and then retracted); and the terror attack on Krymsky Most (once again: admitted then retracted).
Not to mention the shelling of Russian villages in Belgorod, NATO supplying long-range weapons to Kiev, and the routine execution of Russian soldiers.
Darya Dugina, Nord Streams and Crimea Bridge make it an Act of War trifecta. So this time the response was inevitable – not even waiting for the first meeting since February of the Russian Security Council scheduled for the afternoon of 10 October.
Moscow launched the first wave of a Russian Shock’n Awe without even changing the status of the Special Military Operation (SMO) to Counter-Terrorist Operation (CTO), with all its serious military/legal implications.
After all, even before the UN Security Council meeting, Russian public opinion was massively behind taking the gloves off. Putin had not even scheduled bilateral meetings with any of the members. Diplomatic sources hint that the decision to let the hammer come down had already been taken over the weekend.
Shock’n Awe did not wait for the announcement of an ultimatum to Ukraine (that may come in a few days); an official declaration of war (not necessary); or even announcing which ‘”decision-making centers” in Ukraine would be hit.
The lightning strike de facto metastasizing of SMO into CTO means that the regime in Kiev and those supporting it are now considered as legitimate targets, just like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra during the Anti-Terror Operation (ATO) in Syria.
And the change of status – now this is a real war on terror – means that terminating all strands of terrorism, physical, cultural, ideological, are the absolute priority, and not the safety of Ukrainian civilians. During the SMO, safety of civilians was paramount. Even the UN has been forced to admit that in over seven months of SMO the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine has been relatively low.
Enter ‘Commander Armageddon’
The face of Russian Shock’n Awe is Russian Commander of the Aerospace Forces, Army General Sergey Surovikin: the new commander-in-chief of the now totally centralized SMO/CTO.
Questions were being asked non-stop: why didn’t Moscow take this decision way back in February? Well, better late than never. Kiev is now learning they messed with the wrong guy. Surovikin is widely respected – and feared: his nickname is “General Armageddon.” Others call him “Cannibal.” Legendary Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov – also a colonel general in the Russian military – lavishly praises Surovikin as “a real general and warrior, an experienced, strong-willed and far-sighted commander.”
Surovikin has been commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces since 2017; was awarded the title of Hero of Russia for his no-nonsense leadership of the military operation in Syria; and had on the ground experience in Chechnya in the 1990s.
Surovikin is Dr. Shock’n Awe with full carte blanche. That even rendered idle speculations that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov were removed or forced to resign, as speculated by the Wagner group Telegram channel Grey Zone.
It is still possible that Shoigu – widely criticized for recent Russian military setbacks – could be eventually replaced by Tula Governor Alexei Dyumin, and Gerasimov by the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, Lieutenant General Alexander Matovnikov.
That’s almost irrevelant: all eyes are on Surovikin.
MI6 does have some well-placed moles in Moscow, relatively speaking. The Brits had warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the General Staff that the Russians would be launching a “warning strike” this Monday.
What
happened was no “warning strike,” but a
massive offensive of over 100 cruise
missiles launched “from the air, sea and
land,” as Putin noted, against Ukrainian
“energy, military command and
communications facilities.”
MI6 also noted “the next step” will be
the complete destruction of Ukraine’s
energy infrastructure. That’s not a
“next step:” it’s already happening.
Power supply is completely gone in five
regions, including Lviv and Kharkov, and
there are serious interruptions in other
five, including Kiev.
Over 60 percent of Ukrainian power grids are already knocked out. Over 75 percent of internet traffic is gone. Elon Musk’s Starlink netcentric warfare has been “disconnected” by the Ministry of Defense.
Shock’n Awe will likely progress in three stages.
First: Overload of the Ukrainian air defense system (already on).
Second: Plunging Ukraine into the Dark Ages (already in progress).
Third: Destruction of all major military installations (the next wave).
Ukraine is about to embrace nearly total darkness in the next few days. Politically, that opens a completely new ball game. Considering Moscow’s trademark “strategic ambiguity,” this could be a sort of Desert Storm remixed (massive air strikes preparing a ground offensive); or, more likely, an ‘incentive’ to force NATO to negotiate; or just a relentless, systematic missile offensive mixed with Electronic Warfare (EW) to shatter for good Kiev’s capacity to wage war.
Or it could be all of the above.
How a humiliated western Empire can possibly raise the stakes now, short of going nuclear, remains a key question. Moscow has shown admirable restraint for too long. No one should ever forget that in the real Great Game – how to coordinate the emergence of the multipolar world – Ukraine is just a mere sideshow. But now the sideshow runners better run for cover, because General Armageddon is on the loose.
....
https://www.globalresearch.ca/tulsi-gabbard-finally-departs-democrat-war-party/5796081
Tulsi Gabbard Finally Departs Democrat War Party
Invites other Democrats opposed to war and wokeness to join her.
Gabbard should have done this years ago, but it is better late than never.
Thank you for speaking the truth, Tulsi.
Now, let’s take a look at a Newsweek write-up on Gabbard’s decision.
Gabbard, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 2020 election, made the announcement in a video posted on Twitter, in which she accused the Democrats of stoking “anti-white racism,” and “dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”
The upper echelon of the ruling Democrats is not for or against an individual based solely on his or her skin color. The only thing that matters is class and how much money and power an individual has. There is no real support for Black Lives Matter or less radical groups. It is simply a tool for diversion and control.
The same principle applies to Republicans, including so-called MAGA Republicans. Each group or rather faction of the ruling political class has its own social, political, and economic schtick to attract different elements of a culturally diverse nation. Overall effectiveness hinges on slightly different approaches pushing the same basic neoliberal doctrine.
The vast majority of Congress and the political class can be said to be almost exclusively upper middle class to mega-wealthy.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of America has slipped into the lower middle class, what used to be called the working class. Millions more are living in poverty where there is growing childhood malnutrition and widespread violence. The Democrat elite lies when they say they are champions of the poor and downtrodden. Both Democrats and Republicans—essentially a uni-party representing corporate and banking interests—pay lip service and deliver crumbs to the vast majority of America as it is pushed deeper into poverty.
On the topic of war, Democrats have shown, especially in regard to Ukraine, they are quite frankly dangerously insane.
Historians and high school history teachers say liberal Democrats are traditionally antiwar, citing the countercultural values of the 1960s resistance to the Vietnam War.
All of that is nonsense. Democrat Truman used two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians. Democrat Kennedy sent advisers to Vietnam (following the failures of French colonialism in SE Asia). Johnson escalated Vietnam. Carter set the stage for Afghanistan and the Mujahideen that would splinter into al-Qaeda. All these Democrats were staunch “anti-communists,” especially JFK.
Clinton and NATO bombed an Eastern European country for over seventy days. Clinton also killed civilians with cruise missiles in Iraq and bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Obama and Clinton’s wife along with NATO bombed Libya, where 30,000 died, and fueled horrific violence in Syria in an attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
Now comes the Democrat Biden and the war in Ukraine.
This is not to say political class Republicans are peaceniks. Nixon escalated Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam and spread the bloodshed and horror into Laos and Cambodia, the latter so destabilized it ended up with Pol Pot and around a third of the population butchered.
Reagan illegally supported a terrorist group in violation of the Bolan Act. He sent warships to flatten villages in the mountains of Lebanon. His warplanes killed the adopted daughter of Moammar Gadaffi, a fate Moammar would later suffer himself for the mistake of taking the USG at its word.
And, finally, the George Bushes, father, and son, instigators of two wars on one country, Iraq, with a long and inhumanely punishing sanctions regime in between, enforced by Clinton.
The corporate media is rife with lies about Russia and nuclear war. Russia has said it will resort to nuclear weapons if its existence is threatened. Vladimir Putin did not say he will use nukes in what’s left of Ukraine.
Now that Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk have voted to join the Russian Federation, any attacks on the Donbas will be considered an attack on Russia proper.
It really was the only way to stop the mass murder of ethnic Russians in Ukraine committed by Nazi-leaning ultranationalists. They have bombed and attacked fellow Ukrainians of Russian ethnicity since 2014 and the illegal USG coup that deposed the elected leader of the country. The people of Donetsk have pleaded for help for years, only to be ignored by the “democratic” “international community” of neoliberal captured governments.
Yes, Democrats should be outraged about war. Short of self-defense, it is never acceptable. But the problem here is that they are only selectively outraged, as directed by the elders of the Democrat faction of the USG Uniparty. Loyal Democrats did not complain when their hero Obama ramped up the illegal drone war (extrajudicially killing Americans, in addition to foreigners) and put together the unwarranted war that turned Libya from the most advanced country in Africa into a violent slave market.
As you may have noticed, I am not linking anything here. I have done that hundreds of times since nine eleven.
Most of what I said above is historical fact. It can be researched. If you believe I am a “conspiracy theorist,” I dare you to check out the facts, that is if you can get an accurate read with the new search engine ranking algorithms that require a deep drill, extra work, creative search criteria, and often dead ends where there was not before. I count the loss of a stellar research database, the History Commons, in the “misinformation” reshuffle of reality.
It is difficult not to be cynical. There is literally next to no opposition to this war, only angry rhetoric and cartoonish representations of Putin, and half-ass prayers for the victims of Ukraine on social media where the most outrageous and transparent lies become memes with grade school level insults hurled about, thus keeping the division alive as the world economy begins to take on water and a nuclear WWIII seems all but inevitable.
Newsweek knows there are murderous Nazi goons in Ukraine. It has reported as much. The liberal alternative press has posted a long list of articles on the Nazi problem in Ukraine. Do you hear about that now? How it just might have something to do with what is now going on?
No, you hear crickets.
Tulsi:
I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, hostile to people of faith & spirituality, demonize the police & protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.
All very true—and will get her forever marked as a “conservative Republican,” and thus easily tossed around in the divisive political game that has gone into hyperspace since covid.
Finally, Gabbard is calling for Democrats with any shred of human dignity left—there are sadly few—to leave the party. This can be ignored—especially if it does not pick up any traction.
It just might. I hope it does.
I think the German psychologist and socialist Wilhelm Reich was correct when he observed in his largely unknown little book, “Listen, Little Man,” that the average person would rather leave the dirty work to the political psychopaths and remain blissfully unaware of the crimes committed in their names.
“I believe in a government that is of, by, and for the people,” she said. “Unfortunately, today’s Democratic Party does not. Instead, it stands for a government of, by, and for the powerful elite. I’m calling on my fellow common sense independent-minded Democrats to join me in leaving the Democratic Party.”
I hope you can, Tulsi. But again, I am by nature a cynic, especially in regard to the state and war.
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