Ukraine: Chronicle of a War Foretold By Chris Hedges, February 24, 2022

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Robert Cook

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Ukraine: Chronicle of a War Foretold

By Chris Hedges, February 24, 2022

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia.

▪︎ How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.

The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.

The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers.

Yet the US/NATO did it anyway.

It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.

In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads.

“Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene.

Keith Mcmaugh, FEB 24, 2022

▪︎ Chris Hedges is the most insightful writer for geopolitics regarding the actions of the Yankee Empire.

He is absolutely correct about American war economy and war culture.

More, https://scheerpost.com/.../hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war.../

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• Robert Cook

  Obama ousted the Presidents of Libya and Ukraine. The U.S. spent $5 Billion to back the March 2014 right-wing (nazi) coup of Ukraine's democratically elected President. The U.S. immediately picked the interim president -- who met Obama in Wash DC the next day.

  Since them the U.S. sent munitions and military trainers to Ukraine. The Kiev government had been shelling the Donbas heavily, and the separatists begged Russia to help them.

  Now Ukraine cannot join NATO, and the U.S. cannot put anti-Russia missiles along the 1300 mile Ukraine-Russian border.

  Preventing that U.S. encroachment on Russia is a positive step.