I’ve expressed skepticism about MSM reports of Russian war crimes. Not because I put anything past Vladimir Putin, the butcher of Chechnya. But because I equally put nothing past The Secret Committee Formerly Known as Joe Biden.
I put nothing past the globalist micromanagers who didn’t skip a beat between locking Germans and Australians in their homes via COVID panic, and proclaiming a jihad for “freedom” now in Ukraine.
Or the utterly cynical strategists at the Brookings Institution and other think tanks underwritten by military contractors, who call for a bloody “quagmire” in Ukraine as a strategy. Indeed, the New York Times has admitted that such a quagmire (not peace) is the Biden Administration’s objective in Ukraine. Here’s General Mark Milley admitting that such a nightmare for Ukrainians is America’s current plan.
Biden and Putin: Birds of a Feather
They are all equally liars, with zero respect for human life. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Biden’s partial birth abortions and Putin’s attacks on civilians. Both men are criminals. At least Putin’s not killing Americans, at the moment.
The Western warmongers want a quagmire in Ukraine that wrecks the country and kills hundreds of thousands, if that’s the price of bringing down Vladimir Putin. And we’re supposed to help enforce that price on Ukraine’s people. Tragically for them, the TV comedian they elected as president, the smarmy, air-brushed spokesmodel Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has now used alleged Russian atrocities as a pretext for ending peace talks. In other words, he’s putting his people’s interests last, and our oligarchs’ interests first.
You and I can’t control that. That’s another in the long list of heavy crosses the Ukrainian people have carried, since the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. First the victims of the Tsars, then they suffered from the Bolsheviks, then the Nazis, then Stalin again. When they finally had a chance at guaranteed independence in 1992, Bill Clinton flew over there and conned the Ukrainians into trading their nuclear arsenal for a cocktail napkin with his signature. (That’s the legal weight of the presidential guarantee he offered them without consulting Congress.)
Another Iraq War?
But we can decide whether we as Americans will be fooled into another pointless war led by globalists who loathe soldiers, which bankrupts our country, destroys the nation we’re told we’re supposed to save, and leaves thousands of U.S. veterans dead or crippled. We do get a say in that, so long as we’re ready to take the heat from the FBI when we dare to dissent.
Let’s stipulate that the worst alleged Russian war crimes are all too real. So were Saddam Hussein’s atrocities against Kurds and political dissidents. Are we glad we invaded Iraq, on the pretext of elusive WMDs that inspectors said didn’t exist? Were the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives we spent worth it to America?
How about to Iraq, which lost 500,000 to 700,000 civilians, then got raped and tortured by ISIS, and is now a puppet of Iran? Who benefited from that adventure, apart from military contractors, a few Republican hacks, and Barack Obama—who got into the White House in part as a result of our war fatigue? You can thank George Bush’s lazy fabrications for Supreme Court justices like Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. And hence, for same-sex marriage and the loss of religious freedom.
Another Afghanistan Catastrophe?
Again, let’s agree that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. So were the leaders of the Taliban. Are we glad we invaded and occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, instead of just punishing its leaders for harboring Osama bin Laden? Was it worth the generational effort to bomb that country until it transformed into Switzerland? Are the Afghans any better off now than they were in 2001? Are we?
Another Vietnam Quagmire?
Let’s say that Putin is secretly still a communist. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were openly communists. Are we glad we lost more than 50,000 Americans, and killed countless hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, trying to hold back that tide for a decade? That we spread radical leftism across all our campuses, under the guise of a movement to help young men escape the draft? What’s our legacy in South Vietnam and Cambodia? Abandoned land mines and anonymous mass graves. Was that worth tens of billions of dollars and thousands of deaths?
This Time Will Be Different
Oh, but this war won’t be like those, our masters tell us. And maybe it won’t, because this time the enemy we’re called to fight has nuclear weapons. And we are backing him into a corner, calling him a war criminal who is unworthy even of negotiation. In other words, we plan to try him and hang him, or imprison him and bankrupt his family. But that won’t lead him to try anything desperate, will it?
We’re all perfectly safe here.
The same geniuses who led our contemptible surrender in Afghanistan, who leave our southern border open, who designate angry parents at school board meetings as “domestic terror threats” promise us that. And we believe them.
Don’t we?
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published at The Stream.