Posted on 09/25/2022 3:58:12 PM PDT by AndyJackson
What is Britain’s interest in Ukraine? Why are we shovelling weapons and equipment into that country, despite the fact that our national budget is stretched to bursting and our own armed forces have for many years been starved of money, men and kit?
If we were a proper open society, surely this question would be asked all the time. But it is not. So I am asking it now, as the Ukraine war threatens to ignite the whole of Europe and has already brought us closer to actual nuclear warfare than we have ever been.
I ask as a British patriot, whose main concern, above all things, is the ‘safety, honour and welfare of this realm’ (as the old Articles of War say).
I would not shirk a necessary fight, or desert an ally. But why are we stoking this war instead of trying to bring about peace?
This would once have been a perfectly normal British view. Margaret Thatcher was far from keen on Ukrainian nationalism.
On June 9 1990, Mrs Thatcher (still then in power) spoke to what was then the Ukrainian provincial assembly in Kiev.
She briskly batted away a question about opening a British embassy in that city. This, she explained, was as likely as Britain opening an embassy in California or Quebec.
‘I can see you are trying to get me involved in your politics!’ she scolded her questioner, adding: ‘Embassies are only for countries which have full national status.
'Therefore, we have ambassadorial diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, with the United States, with Canada, with Australia.
'We do not have embassies for California, for Quebec, for states in Australia.’
Once upon a time, the Americans, likewise, would have stayed out of it.
On August 1 1991, President George H W Bush delivered an oration which would later become known derisively (among American hawks) as ‘The Chicken Kiev Speech’.
Bush was not keen on an independent Ukraine. He told what was still Ukraine’s Soviet puppet parliament, ‘I come here to tell you: We support the struggle in this great country for democracy and economic reform.
'In Moscow, I outlined our approach. We will support those in the centre and the republics who pursue freedom, democracy and economic liberty.’
But when he used the phrase ‘this great country’ he was talking about the Soviet Union, not Ukraine.
He expected (and wanted) the USSR to continue to exist. During his visit he had refused to meet campaigners for Ukrainian independence.
After praising the reforms of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he warned against independence if it only changed a distant despot for a local one, suggesting that this was the outcome he feared.
What the Western democracies had wanted was a reformed, free version of the old Soviet Union.
They had never expected or calculated on an explosion of nationalism in the region and did not much like the look of it. It was only after the USSR fell to pieces in 1991 that the unthinkable became the unstoppable.
But some people in American politics wanted to push further. They feared that Russia would one day rise again and challenge American power.
Paul Wolfowitz, also one of the authors of the Iraq disaster, set out a policy of diminishing and humiliating Russia back in 1992, long before anyone had ever heard of Vladimir Putin.
While it found supporters in the Pentagon and elsewhere, many others, from the brilliant veteran Cold War diplomat George Kennan to the ultimate master of cynical diplomacy Henry Kissinger, opposed the resulting policy of Nato expansion.
Kennan prophetically said in 1998 (when Putin was an obscure politician) that ‘I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War’.
He warned: ‘I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.’
He said it was an insult to Russia’s then fledgling democrats, arguing: ‘We are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.’ And so it was.
Prominent Russian liberals, such as Yegor Gaidar, begged influential Western friends to challenge the Nato expansion policy.
But there is a lot of money in the making of weapons, and a lot of fame to be won in pursuing warlike policies, and so it went ahead, gathering speed and strengthening Russian nationalists and antidemocrats as it did so.
Then in 2008 George W Bush, a pathetic parody of his war veteran father, suggested Ukrainian Nato membership.
That was probably the moment at which conflict became inevitable. The prominent American neoconservative Robert Kagan has put the matter well: ‘While it would be obscene to blame the US for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading.’
The point of all this is that the current policy, of militant and indeed military support for Ukraine, is a very old one, and a very controversial one.
There is a serious case against it, made by serious patriotic people in the West. Yet it is seldom heard. Nearly as important, there simply is no direct British interest here, though the fact is never discussed.
We have very little in the way of trade, political or cultural links with Ukraine (or with Russia for that matter).
We have no territorial conflict with Russia. Not since the long-ago Crimean War, now recognised by most people as a futile folly which achieved nothing, have British armed forces been active in that region.
As long as the war was a distant battle, this perhaps did not matter so much. But even before the Putin invasion those, like me, who opposed goading Russia were defamed as ‘Putin apologists’ (I have for years referred to him as a sinister tyrant) and falsely accused of ‘parroting Russian propaganda’.
Aren’t we supposed to live in a free democracy in which both sides of a question can be discussed, without one side being accused of treachery?
Surely it is Putin who regards dissent as treason? Once Putin had invaded, I was constantly accused of ‘justifying’ the action, even though I clearly, and without hesitation, condemned the invasion as barbaric, lawless and stupid, and have never deviated from this view.
Yet not a day goes by without someone smearing me as a traitor of some sort. Actually, anyone who has Russia’s best interests at heart is grinding his teeth in fury at Putin’s idiotic crime, which has done limitless damage to the peace and security of that country for decades to come and perhaps forever.
And now it has brought us closer to nuclear war than ever before. Surely that development – and it would be extreme folly to dismiss Putin’s words as bluff – compels us all to be more thoughtful, not less.
I would just like to make a plea for us as a people and a nation to start discussing this in a grown-up fashion, rather than by assuming the present policy is the only right or patriotic one.
Perhaps it isn’t. In which case it has never been more important to approach the subject with an open mind.
Again with this nonsence. JOE MCCARTHY WAS AN AMERICAN HERO!
Those neighbors should be able to to defend themselves.They are no longer bo.bed flat smoldering ruins that they were at the end of WW2.
Let them defend themselves.
“So says the FR Poster who supports his position by posting and supporting Posts from Left-Wing, Pro-Ukrainian Propaganda News Outlets, all the while proclaiming how objectively he has is pointing out the propaganda failures of the same Pro-Ukrainian News Outlets.”
I post them as a parry and riposte to you guys. If you’ve read my posting history you’d see that I’ve said on many occasions that both sides employ propaganda, as that is the way the game is played. The difference between me and you and your ilk is that you won’t admit that your side, Russia, uses propaganda, or that it has employed propaganda more extensively than any country in the last 100 years.
Many of us who are not bots for the globalists have been asking why the United States keeps invading countries around the world when it does not know what it wants to accomplish and lacks a strategy to accomplish it. Since WWII we have had exactly ONE war where we had a strategy and a goal - GWI - evict Sadam from Kuwait and then get out. Everywhere else we have expended lives and treasure for nothing.
You’re tag line is “ulticulturalism is national suicide, and political correctness is the cyanide capsule” and yet you support the globalists.
“Those neighbors should be able to to defend themselves.They are no longer bo.bed flat smoldering ruins that they were at the end of WW2. Let them defend themselves.”
So, as an analogy, you’d be perfectly happy and content if some gangbangers, or BLM, or Antifa types attacked and broke into your home, and no one came to you aid, or provided you with assistance.
I mean, after all, you have a baseball bat, or maybe even a single-shot .22. Because if you want or expect help, you are a hypocrite.
He was right about communism, but his methods left a lot to be desired. Demonstrating the ways of the tyrant are universal, he cancelled people the way the left cancels people, and often for a lot less cause. Not everyone who ran afoul of him was a communist or a leftist. In fact most were not. Just some were. Kinda like sqirrel hunting with a 100kiloton nuke. Well, yeah you killed some squirrels. You also took out a major metropolitan area.
1/3
These occurred well before February 2022:
A.) Bush [a problem starting neocon, as usual]: Strong Support for Ukraine in NATO
B.) John McCain Addresses Ukranian Protesters in Ukraine [also a Neocon troublemaker who addressed the rabble standing beside Democrat Chris Murphy and the Obama regime’s Nuland]
You just know that the pathetically stupid hatefully ideological left would be supporting ‘Russia’ if they were still totalitarian Communists.
The “pathetically stupid hatefully ideological left” IS supporting Russia to the tune of billions of euros in direct cash payments to Russia’s war economy these past six months. Please pay attention.
2/3
C.) Obama Openly Admits ‘Brokering Power Transition’ in Ukraine
D) Salon
3/10/22
“Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and its founders, Oleh Tyahnybok and Andriy Parubiy, played leading roles in the U.S-backed coup in February 2014. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt mentioned Tyahnybok as one of the leaders they were working with in their infamous leaked phone call before the coup, even as they tried to exclude him from an official position in the post-coup government.
...it was Yarosh who took to the stage in the Maidan and rejected the Feb. 21, 2014 agreement negotiated by the French, German and Polish foreign ministers, under which President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition political leaders agreed to hold new elections later that year. Instead, Yarosh and Right Sector refused to disarm and led the climactic march on Parliament that overthrew the government.
... 2014, Nuland and the State Department got their favorite, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, installed as prime minister of the post-coup government.”
3/3
E.) WION
Gravitas Plus: Did NATO Push Ukraine Into War?
“...Palki Sharma tells you how western arrogance and NATO expansionism are also to blame, how their actions precipitated the crisis in Ukraine”
So now if, like President Trump, you want to kick Russian corruption and influence out of Europe you are a “McCarthyite”? We truly live in Orwellian times. I plead guilty here on both accounts. Happily. McCarthy was right and so is President Trump.
When “we” are on the side of the EU, Klaus Schwab, Soros and that ilk, maybe we should actually be questioning - like Hitchens does - where our interests really lie. You know like - uh there is a China over the other way we need to deal with, a border down south across which is a thugocracy trafficking girls and boys, fentanyl and genuine terrorists, oh and a national debt that is exploding as high inflation, with a portending economic collapse if you believe the Austrian school of economics.
I would not expect the Dallas police to keep a rapid reaction force in Houston.
Houston, where I live, should take care of its own crime.
Yet, NATO is a treaty that analogously puts the DPD on Houston streets.
Let Houston deal with its own gang bangers.
“You’re tag line is “ulticulturalism is national suicide, and political correctness is the cyanide capsule” and yet you support the globalists.”
You guys are so tiresome. But, really, that is your shtick. It is straight out of the leftist playbook.
I support the globalists as much as you support pedophiles (see: Putin lapping up some kid’s chest). See how stupid your comment is? Your rush to judgment is akin to declaring that anyone who supported the US in WWII supported the socialism that was the FDR platform and agenda.
You guys ALWAYS assume facts not in evidence. That’s because you can’t support your own positions with any credible arguments.
You are just an unthinking hypocrit who wraps himself in the flag of patriotism while fighting for whatever the eff you believe in at the expense of other people who serve, which quite apparently you did not, or you wouldn’t be so quick to get stuck in other people’s wars.
Nice try. Not surprisingly, you ignored my analogy. My analogy specifically said you could NOT rely on or accept help from any outside source; that you would be on your own; which is what you alluded to in your original post vis-a-vis the former “bombed out” countries that would have to face aggression on their own.
So, don’t bring the Houston PD into the equation. Per your original premise, you are on your own.
“You are just an unthinking hypocrit who wraps himself in the flag of patriotism while fighting for whatever the eff you believe in at the expense of other people who serve, which quite apparently you did not, or you wouldn’t be so quick to get stuck in other people’s wars.”
Hey, son; I served in the USAF, probably before you were even born. I was in the USAFSS (that was Air Force Intelligence back in the day). There was a little unpleasantness called Vietnam.
So STFU.
I had no idea you even existed until you stared calling names. What is sad is that you worked for AF intelligence and still are utterly ignorant of geo stratgy and geopolitics.
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