Freedom Rider: NATO Loses Ukraine

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Peace is the last thing that the Nobel Peace Prize winning president wants to see.”

The United States and NATO attack on the Russian Federation has failed. The Ukrainians who refused to accept the legitimacy of the West’s puppet government emerged victorious on the battlefield. If there is any doubt on that point, Ukraine’s decision to sign the Minsk Protocol cease fire agreement is proof. President Poroshenko seemed like a man in the cat bird seat when western nations chose sides in a civil war and kicked out his predecessor. The road to hell was paved with very bad intentions.

One wouldn’t know it from reading and viewing the corporate media, but the western gambit has been disastrous. More than 1 million people have been displaced (most fled to Russia), the economies of many countries have been damaged by sanctions, and atrocities such as the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 would have been avoided if there had been any grown ups at work in the western capitals.

The talking heads should be telling us about the failing effort to prop up the empire, but instead they parrot the words of the losing side. After destroying Libya and killing president Gaddafi the evil empire concluded that they had found a winning formula. Fortunately for humankind, Bashir al Assad hangs on in Syria and all that NATO has to show for its misadventures is ISIS, which grows stronger by the day, beheads American journalists on video, and attacks the legitimacy of Saudi Arabia and the other gulf monarchies who worked hand in hand on the imperial project.

“After destroying Libya and killing president Gaddafi the evil empire concluded that they had found a winning formula.”

Assad is still in power and Putin’s nemesis Poroshenko waved a flag of surrender but the United States and its allies won’t give up the failing strategy because they have no other plan for keeping the leaking ship afloat. Aggression is the only weapon they have and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is the order of the day. Putin is the winner by any standard but the United States won’t admit what is obvious to the rest of the world. Instead they dredge up phony claims of Russian treaty violations and behave as if Putin hasn’t pulled off a coup of his own.

Obama and his partners in crime would do well to remember the events of September 2013, just one year ago. The United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons as a casus belli. The American people didn’t buy what their president was selling and the no vote in the British parliament crushed the effort to start a hot war.

The signs of desperation in the capitalist West are obvious. Their “rebels” in Syria can’t defeat Assad, they can’t get support among their own people for war and yet they still used Ukraine’s political crisis to take on Putin and failed. The United States is committed to making war on the rest of the planet and uses its military and economic muscle to get its way. Peace is the last thing that the Nobel Peace Prize winning president wants to see.

In light of reality in Ukraine, the recently concluded NATO summit in Wales was a truly surreal event. Even as NATO’s major undertaking crumbled, Barack Obama pretended as though nothing happened at all. The lies and aggressions make American presidents sound like delusional psychiatric patients who don’t know hallucination from reality. Just as George W. Bush made bizarre claims about aluminum tubes being a reason for an invasion of Iraq, Obama tells Estonians that they are about to be attacked by Putin.

“Putin is the winner by any standard but the United States won’t admit what is obvious.”

Ukraine acknowledged that its country would be broken up among the groups it had been fighting, with special status for the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Rather than rethink its strategy, NATO announced that it was sending troops in a Rapid Response Force to Russia’s border. It seems that NATO’s motto is “nothing succeeds like failure.”

The horrible truth is that for the United States and its allies, war is peace. They will continue fanning the flames until they crush the rest of the world or ignite a war they don’t really want. The latter is more likely to happen because they actively create conflict and stand in the way of peaceful resolutions. Ukraine has been trying to sign a ceasefire for several months but always succumbed to American pressure to hang on a little longer.

Unfortunately there is more reason to fear than to rejoice at this juncture because of the insanity emanating from Washington. No one knows what our government will do next or where it will attack. We can only be certain of the uncertainty of events and that means the evil doers will not always get their way. Just ask Ukrainian president Poroshenko, the poster child of unintended consequences.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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