That Other War - Yemen, Ukraine and Forever War

 A quick comparison:

On May 3, 2023 the U.N. human rights agency says it has confirmed 23,375 casualties in Ukraine — including 8,709 civilians killed ...

At the same time, according to the UN, over 150,000 people have been killed in the fighting in Yemen, as well as an estimate of more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war. The vast majority of the dead are civilians.

And the prospects for an end to the conflicts? In Yemen, “everybody directly or indirectly involved — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Houthis, China, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, etc. — appears to want to put the war behind them. A ceasefire has held for more than a year, and peace talks are advancing with real momentum, including prisoner exchanges and other positive expressions of diplomacy. Yet the U.S. appears very much not to want the war to end.”

“The U.S. seems to be attempting to slow-walk and blow up the peace talks. Triggering a resumption of hostilities would unleash yet another Saudi-led bombing campaign that could win U.S. proxies better terms when it comes to control of the strategically positioned Yemeni coastline. (The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden link the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean at the southwestern corner of Yemen, an area so geopolitically important to the flow of oil and international traffic that the U.S. has one of its largest bases, in Djibouti, across the strait.)”

Continuing the blockade of humanitarian aid to Yemen until the US conditions for peace are met will result in thousands more civilian deaths.

Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said the U.S. rhetoric makes him nervous. “I’m very concerned that the administration is adding all these conditions to a full U.S. military exit and a Saudi-Houthi deal… The U.S. has no business dictating terms of what peace should look like. ‘Yemenis should be allowed to chart their own future. It increasingly seems like the Biden administration would rather slow down diplomatic progress instead of finally just ending the Saudi-Houthi conflict.” (All quotes are from The Intercept)

 

Back to the “unprovoked” War in Ukraine

I have previously written about the back story of the war, which should make it very, very clear that this war was NOT unprovoked. This doesn’t justify the brutal Russian invasion, but should provide some understanding of what the US should do to facilitate negotiations between the Ukrainians and the Russians to end the war. That is, of course, if the US really wants to end the war.

Add in what’s happening in the Middle East with regard to the war in Yemen and with US/Israeli actions with regard to Iran, the ongoing US/NATO provocations of China in the Pacific (more about that later), and the massive increases in the Pentagon war budget, one can only conclude that the bipartisan political leadership in the US is resorting to a strategy of “forever war” in its efforts to maintain US hegemony around the world.

In light of that, I’m posting an article by noted economist, Jeffery Sachs, which unveils the back story of the war in more detail and with more background that I had available in my original piece.

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace, Jeffery Sachs, from Common Dreams

“George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

“Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, 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. 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; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralized Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

May 23, 2023  Common Dreams

A Final Note

It is important to remember when looking at a particular event, that everything is interconnected. Isolating the war in Ukraine and denying its back story keeps us from find the way out of this quagmire. That is, if we really want to find a way out, or if forever war(s) will continue to exacerbate the policrisis in today’s world.

Them and Us - Short notes on the class struggle

 

US

After recently reading “Poverty, By America” (Matthew Desmond), I ran across the following from the Poor Peoples’ Campaign. To put it bluntly, poverty kills and it is the direct result of public policy! I quote

“Last year, we released A Poor People’s Pandemic Report: Mapping the Intersections of Race, Poverty, and COVID-19, which collected data on poverty, income, and occupation as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that poor and low-income communities experienced higher death rates and infections of COVID-19 as a result of public policy failure to protect and support those experiencing interlocking injustices stemming from … public policy. 

“And just a few weeks ago, researchers at the University of California, Riverside identified poverty as the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States. That means in 2019, poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as homicides. Poverty is lethal. ‘Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes,’ said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside of the study.”  - Bishop William J. Barber, II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

To add to the misery, we are seeing a surge in illegal child labor. Since 2015, child labor violations have risen nearly 300%. And those are just the violations government investigators have managed to uncover and document. Companies like General Mills, Walmart and Ford have been implicated. Many of these children being exploited are undocumented immigrants and their families can’t risk speaking out. They need the money, which makes them easily exploited.

In response to this, some Republican controlled state governments are working to lower the legal age to work, even in dangerous jobs. After all, too much government regulation hurts the economy and the bottom line. As far as business is concerned, the problem is solved.

At the same time funds for public education are being slashed. Poor children, particularly Brown and Black children, obviously don’t need an education to work in the jobs waiting for them. Charles Dickens & Jacob Riis, where are you when we need you, again?

 

THEM

BlackRock Investment Management & Financial Services is the planet’s biggest investor, with $9 trillion in assets under management and an army of tech-savvy analysts trained on the scent of easy money. The corporation is second only to the U.S. and China in terms of the financial power it wields.

In search of that easy money, BlackRock is a (the?) major investor in ITA (iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF). Among the dozens of companies represented in ITA are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing—companies that profit directly from huge Pentagon spending. Lockheed Martin developed the bombs Saudi Arabia used on a Yemeni school bus full of children in 2018, and Raytheon is the contractor behind the expansion of the U.S.’ nuclear arsenal. Reason enough to divest in these “masters of war”, but moral calculation isn’t what BlackRock is about. Note: ITA shares have seen a more that 500% increase in price since 2012.

BlackRock is also the planet’s second-biggest funder of fossil fuels. The significant climate impact of these companies often goes unmentioned. By providing ballistic missiles and aerospace tech to the Pentagon, these companies fuel the latter’s carbon emissions—making the U.S. military the planet’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, and thus a leading cause of our present climate crisis. While BlackRock’s continues to pay lip service to the severity of the climate crisis its actions are at serious odds with its “concern given the investment platforms it sells. 

In the Gilded Age of US history, when the Robber Barons ruled the economy, Populist leaders used to say that the people needed to own the banks or the banks would own the people. In today’s economy, it’s private equity (in combination with the rest of the financial sector) that is well on its way to fulfilling the later. We need to revive the call for the people to take control, since “regulation” seems to have accomplished little over the past 100+ years.

 

An Empire in Decline? – Bits and pieces of the polycrisis

 

Feeding the military/industrial complex - Ben Freeman & William D. Hartung and at TomDispatch

In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy”

This is most definitely NOT “defense spending”. Massive spending on a war machine does not make Americans less vulnerable to the threats of pandemics, global warming, gun violence, deaths of despair, nuclear annihilation and runaway inequality. Its purpose is NOT to defend us from real threats. To the contrary, it makes our citizens more likely to suffer from all of these other crises.

Add to this the rising demands for ”law and order” at home (except, of course, for laws on gun control) and you get a picture of a society out of control. And, with some exceptions, both political parties seem to be united behind the military approach, both home and abroad.

 

The decline of the humanities (when we need them the most) – Nick Anderson, WAPO, May 20, 2023

The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022, to about 573,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The English-major head count fell 23 percent in that time, to about 113,000. History fell 12 percent, to about 77,000.

In 2010, arts and humanities majors of all kinds outnumbered the computer science total at U-Md. more than 4 to 1. Now the university counts about 2,400 students majoring in arts and humanities — a collection of disciplines that fill an entire college — and about 3,300 in computer science.

Some schools have taken radical steps. Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Northern Virginia, decided in February to phase out history and English majors, citing low enrollment and a responsibility to prepare students “for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future.”

Technology is where the money is. The humanities and particularly teaching is where the money isn’t. Is this the kind of society we want for our children? Are we prepping for a future where AI is in control? Where algorithms that maximize, say profits, make all the decisions for us?

They call it the humanities for a reason.

 

“Danger, Will Robinson, Danger” – Adam Roberts, The Economist, May 20, 2023

“Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and philosopher, in a recent By Invitation essay. Religion, human rights, money—these things are not inscribed in our DNA, and require language to make sense. In his essay, Mr. Harari poses the question: “What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures?” The answer, he believes, casts a dark cloud over the future of human civilisation.

One more crisis to add to the cascading crises we face? Is language the only thing that makes us human? Can AI learn empathy, humility and love? Will this technology turn out to be even more threatening to human existence than our dependence on fossil fuels to produce the energy necessary for industrialization? What safeguards need to be put into place, or are we willing to let unbridled capitalism make the decisions about proceeding with the further development of AI, guided only by the profit motive?

 

The polycrisis of capitalism

The evidence just keeps pouring in. When empires are in decline, they become very, very dangerous. Has the American Dream or, as Thomas Jefferson called it, the Empire of Liberty, become a nightmare for us and the rest of the world? Can those of us who are coming to understand the nature of the polycrisis of capital in the twenty-first century, bend the arc of history back toward justice? Is there any other alternative? 

To paraphrase Langston Hughes, what happens to a dream run amok? Does it dry up from a warming climate? Or fester with pandemic after pandemic? Or does it explode in a nuclear holocaust?

We need to be ringing "the fire bell in the night" - every bell, everywhere, all at once!