Letter to Democrats: Rein in the U.S. War Machine (Part Two)
Click here for Part One, which covered the history of U.S. militarism before the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. provoked the war in Ukraine by aggressively expanding NATO, contrary to verbal promises given to Soviet leaders, and against the warnings by senior U.S. diplomats that such expansion would provoke a war.
The RAND Corporation study Overextending an Unbalancing Russia recommended arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken Russia and predicted that it would provoke a war. The U.S. undermined peace deals both before (as Angela Merkel admitted) and after (as reported by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and The Wall Street Journal) the Russian invasion.
The U.S. poured billions of dollars into regime change operations in Eastern Europe, even though Russia had repeatedly asked to be integrated into the Western alliance. The U.S. aided Chechen rebels that Russia regarded as terrorists. The U.S. withdrew from multiple nuclear arms treaties. The U.S. allied with far-right Ukrainian militias that were attacking Russian speakers in the east and that had been widely condemned by U.S. media and by Congress prior to 2022. Likewise, the U.S. allied with Muslim extremists to overthrow pro-Russian governments in Kosovo, Syria, and Libya.
Nicolas Davies reports in Key US Ally Indicted for Organ Trade Murder Scheme
In 2008 an international prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, accused U.S.-backed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo of using the US bombing campaign as cover to murder hundreds of people to sell their internal organs on the international transplant market. Del Ponte’s charges seemed almost too ghoulish to be true. But on June 24th, Thaci, now President of Kosovo, and nine other former leaders of the CIA-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA,) were finally indicted for these 20-year-old crimes by a special war crimes court at The Hague.
From 1996 on, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies covertly worked with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to instigate and fuel violence and chaos in Kosovo....
I strongly urge you to read that article. You'll be shocked at the viciousness and dishonesty of the U.S. government. The U.S. intervention in Serbia was far from noble.
Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine voted overwhelmingly to ally with Russia, and the post-2014 Ukrainian government suppressed official uses of the Russian language. Far-right groups such as the Azov Battalion and Svoboda integrated into the Ukrainian army and continue to bully politicians.
As reported in the New Yorker, the NSA and CIA went to great lengths to hide information about Ukraine, but it is clear that the U.S. aided the 2014 coup. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape choosing the new prime minister. According to Chas W. Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council, the U.S. engineered the coup.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED, a CIA offshoot), the USAID, George Soros' International Renassiance Foundation, and various U.S.-funded NGOs played direct roles in starting the Madain protests. But the day after the Russian invasion, the NED "deleted all records of funding projects in Ukraine from their searchable ‘Awarded Grants Search’ database." (source)
Since the dissolution of the USSR, NATO doubled the number of member states, expanding to Russia's borders. The LA Times’ Russia feels threatened by NATO. There’s history behind that says: “some of Russia’s security concerns are real. Offering to discuss them doesn’t qualify as appeasement… Thirty years ago, Russia had a buffer zone of satellite states to its west. Now it has only the unimpressive presence of Belarus.” The essay quotes Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine: “There are some concerns on the Russian side that are legitimate.”
Even the New York Times has come out and admitted that "For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.... As the partnership deepened after 2016, the Ukrainians became impatient with what they considered Washington’s undue caution, and began staging assassinations and other lethal operations, which violated the terms the White House thought the Ukrainians had agreed to. Infuriated, officials in Washington threatened to cut off support, but they never did."
Yet Russia is now on the offensive in Ukraine, and despite American sanctions, the Russian economy is booming. It grew faster than all G7 economies in 2023; Russia even overtook Germany as Europe’s largest economy. More and more countries are dumping the U.S. dollar as the international currency. The European economy is suffering from the sanctions, which caused inflation. The U.S. is $34 trillion in debt but has already sent over $100 billion to Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in Europe.
But now there are reports that President Biden, in response to Russian gains, is planning to send longer range missiles to Ukraine -- an act that may provoke Russia to respond with a direct attack on NATO forces, possibly resulting in nuclear war.
Indeed, in 2015 the New York Times reported that President Obama opposed sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, saying “arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow.” And then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed: "Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia."
From 2018, in Medium: American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian Front Line "Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it will allow the sale of some lethal weapons to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank missile....Butusov identified the [Nazi] Azov Battalion as a recipient of the PSRL-1 [grenade launcher] systems. "
A New York Times exposé The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, dated February 25, 2024, revealed that the CIA had been coordinating with the Ukrainian intelligence since at least 2014 and that the Ukrainians had been launching assasinations and other kinetic actions in Crimea and Russia. As Mark Episkopos writes in Responsibile Statecraft, CIA in Ukraine: Why is this not seen as provocation?: "An explosive new NYT report shows how Washington needlessly fed into Russia’s worst fears and precipitated the invasion, justified or not."
James W. Carden, former advisor on U.S.-Russian affairs for the Obama State Department wrote:
If we are being lied to about the progress of the war—and we are—what do you suppose are the odds we are also being lied to about the causes of the war?
The war, we are serenely and repeatedly informed, was neither caused by NATO expansion nor by Ukraine’s post-Maidan ethno-nationalist agenda, nor by its refusal to implement the Minsk Accords, nor by Zelensky’s threat, made in Munich in February 2022, to acquire nuclear weapons—but by Putin’s revanchism.
The United States invaded, occupied and bombed countries worldwide (e.g., Iraq) for far less provocation than Russia’s invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The U.S. is currently occupying one third of Syria (the parts with oil), with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces. In fact, the U.S. allied with al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Syria to try to overthrow a Russian ally, as reported here, here and here.
And the U.S. still has troops in Iraq (making them easy targets for enemies) and has over 750 military bases in about 80 countries.
In short, as Dennis Kucinich and others have said, the U.S. used Ukrainians as disposable pawns in a nasty geopolitical chess game with Russia.
Furthermore, the U.S. is aiding Israel's destruction of Gaza and bombing Iranian-linked militants in Yemen and Iraq, risking war with Iran. And the U.S. is actively preparing for war with China.
The bipartisan military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower and Martin Luther King warned against has been fleecing the public and causing death and destruction worldwide for decades. The military budget is over a $1 trillion a year, but the Pentagon is unable to pass an audit and can’t account for trillions of dollars in assets. Multiple weapons programs, such as the $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet, are low-functioning boondoggles. For a fraction of the money the U.S. spends on the corrupt and destructive military, we could feed the poor, house the homeless, convert to green energy, and implement universal health care.
For more information see
and the links therein.
By the way, the resolution passed by the Washington State Democratic Central Committee in Bellingham omitted the fourth WHEREAS, which reads:
WHEREAS, aggressive NATO expansion was a contributing cause [5] of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as even NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg and various senior U.S. diplomats and Secretaries of Defense admitted [6]; the U.S. armed the Saudis in their brutal war against Yemen and continues to support Israel in its oppression and (since Oct 7, 2023) genocide of the Palestinian people; and the U.S. arms buildup and aggressive economic and diplomatic actions towards China seem designed to provoke yet another war, this one over Taiwan;
After the Washington State Democrats's Progressive Caucus unanimously passed the resolution with the fourth WHEREAS, the resolution was sent to the state Resolution Committee, which gave the resolution a "Do Pass As Amended" recommendation after removing the fourth WHEREAS. Sharon Abreu (one of the co-authors) says that when the resolution came up for a vote by the Central Committee, she dared not call for reconsideration of the fourth WHEREAS, since she knew debate would be contentious and since she knew it would still be a big win for the state committee to pass even the pared-down resolution. In fact, I am surprised they passed it at all, since I know that some people in the Democratic Party vehemently disagree with my views on the war in Ukraine, and since their passing the resolution even without the fourth WHEREAS gives legitimacy to these antiwar views.
More and more, the truth is coming out: the U.S. lied about another disastrous war, which was totally avoidable had the U.S. had a more restrained and sane foreign policy. Let's hope Democrats jump on the bandwagon of telling the truth about Ukraine before the MAGA and libertarian right do.
The Democratic Party needs to return to its progressive, pacifist roots and stop supporting the war machine that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy warned against.
Do we really want war with both Russia and China?
Peace is possible, pragmatic, and patriotic
