🚀 *THE MINORITY REPORT* 🚀
Jeff Childers
☕️ Coffee & Covid
🚀 The New York Times might just be coming around to our point of view. Yesterday, it published a guest essay titled, “The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame.”
Shut your mouth! My goodness! Don’t you know that you can’t question The War?
The essay begins by noting, correctly, that at bottom the conflict is Russia’s fault for sending its troops into Ukraine. But then it explains, “the United States has helped turn this tragic, local and ambiguous conflict into a potential world conflagration. By misunderstanding the war’s logic … the West, led by the Biden administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to stop.”
Indeed.
Notice that the author called it an “ambiguous conflict.” Like, it might not be as black-and-white as Ukraine Narrative 1.0 would have you believe. That’s a new idea for corporate media.
He then succinctly described the setup to war: In 2014, the US backed an uprising in Ukraine installing a new regime hostile to Russia and replacing the existing Russia-friendly government. Russia responded at that time by annexing the Russian-speaking Crimean peninsula, which most of Europe accepted due to Russia’s historic ties to the area.
The current conflict is rooted in a November 10, 2021 agreement, wherein the US and Ukraine signed a “charter on strategic partnership” calling for Ukraine to join NATO, condemning “ongoing Russian aggression” and affirming an “unwavering commitment” to restoring Crimea into Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Russia saw as the final capstone on a long-planned hostile strategic effort, because since 2018, NATO has been arming Ukraine “to the teeth” with U.S.-built Javelin antitank missiles, Czech artillery, Turkish Bayraktar drones, and lots of other NATO-interoperable weaponry.
That US-Ukraine charter caused Russia to legitimately fear that NATO was about to help Ukraine invade the Crimea. It’s not just me or the author saying it. The agreement “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked,” wrote Henri Guaino, a former top adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, in Le Figaro this month. “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its terrifying purity.”
What the political advisor meant by referring to the terrifyingly pure ineluctable process of 1914 was that the world — led by the catastrophically bad decisions of Joe Biden and the U.S. — was “sleepwalking into war” with Russia, borrowing a famous historic metaphor describing the catalysts of World War I.
Three months later, Russia was massing troops on the border preparing for war with Ukraine. Thanks, NATO. And if Ukraine was already prepping for war with Russia, to take back the Crimean peninsula, then the country looks a lot less like an innocent victim of a devilish surprise attack and a lot more like someone who knew exactly what it was getting into.
Like me, the Times’ guest essayist is skeptical of U.S. claims that we are just giving Ukraine a little remote support. “It is easy to cross the line from waging a proxy war to waging a secret war,” the article somberly noted. Calling U.S. claims of just providing material aid to Ukraine a “fiction,” the article noted that “the United States has provided intelligence used to kill Russian generals. It obtained targeting information that helped to sink the Russian Black Sea missile cruiser the Moskva, an incident in which about 40 seamen were killed.”
World wars have been started for fewer casualties. World War I began with the assassination of a single arch-duke.
Then the author made what I think is his key argument: if giving war-torn Ukraine bigger and bigger weapons ultimately fails to dissuade Russia, then those bigger weapons will instead just lead to a bigger and bigger conflict. It’s a huge gamble for Ukraine and for the entire world.
Desperate Ukrainians are understandably yearning for more effective and more dangerous weapons to use against Russia. But escalation could easily backfire, turning their previously peaceful country into a continuous conflagration where the world’s most modern and destructive military tools are tested on Ukraine’s people and property as well as the Russian invaders, playing chicken with Russia to either quit the field or respond with even stronger and more destructive countermeasures.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. It has always been so.
The author also noted, as have we, the calamitous effect of Biden’s moronic mumblings about taking out Putin or trying him for war crimes. “The charge is so serious that, once leveled, it discourages restraint; after all, a leader who commits one atrocity is no less a war criminal than one who commits a thousand. The effect, intended or not, is to foreclose any recourse to peace negotiations.”
Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger seems to agree, issuing a characteristically understated warning last week that “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.”
Sadly, neither Biden nor Ukraine seem inclined to take that advice. After his Afghanistan disaster, Biden politically cannot afford to lose. And President Zelensky warned citizens this month that the bloodiest days of the war are yet to come. So get ready.
The Times isn’t taking any official position by publishing this guest opinion essay, but it has ended the corporate media embargo on war criticism, which means SOMETHING. Is the Times’ decision to publish this essay a trial balloon for the administration to pivot on the war? Or possibly some gentle pushback from other powerful liberal constituencies who aren’t quite ready for World War III? Did the Deep State flex its muscle in service of world stability? Something else?
I’m not betting on sanity from the Biden Administration, but you never know. One can hope. In any case, this is good news: an intelligent and nuanced take on the war finally clawed its way into the heart of corporate media.
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https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-coffee-and-covid-wednesday-june?s=r