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.
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