Ukraine: The Truth
It's Becoming Apparent
Ukraine: The Truth
by GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch, APRIL 14, 2015
Reuters headline, April 9: “Ukraine sets sights on joining NATO.”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headline, April 9: “Far-Right Leader Names Ukrainian Military Adviser.”
Moscow’s official line on Ukraine—and it should not be dismissed just because that’s what it is—is that the U.S. has spent about $ 5 billion backing “regime change” in that sad, bankrupt country, ultimately resulting in a coup d’etat (or putsch) in Kiev in February 2014 in which neo-fascists played a key role. The coup occurred because the U.S. State Department and Pentagon hoped to replace the democratically elected administration with one that would push for Ukraine’s entry into NATO, a military alliance designed from its inception in 1949 to challenge Russia. The ultimate intent was to evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the bases it’s maintained on the Crimean Peninsula for over 230 years.
Personally, I believe this interpretation is basically true, and that any rational person should recognize that it’s true. Victoria Nuland, the neocon thug who serves as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is the key official shaping U.S. Ukraine policy, openly admitted to an “international business conference on Ukraine” in December 2013 that Washington had “invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine achieve [the development of democratic institutions] and other goals.”
She repeated this assertion in an CNN interview, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has proudly reiterated it as well on cable news. The unspoken goal was Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
(Imagine if a top-ranking official in the Russian Foreign Ministry were to boast of a $ 5 billion Russian investment in undermining the Mexican or Canadian government, with an aim towards incorporating one of those countries into an expanding military alliance. John McCain and Fox News would be demanding the immediate nuking of Moscow.)
SNIP...
The U.S. has military personnel stationed in about 130 countries in the world—that is, in two-thirds of the countries who are members of the UN. In contrast, Russia has military forces stationed in, by my count, ten foreign countries, eight of them on its borders. And yet the U.S. press and political class depict Russia and specifically its president Vladimir Putin, a threatening juggernaut. (Just as they once did Saddam Hussein, that lame creature demonized as—as the warmongers always do, before attacking and destroying him—“a new Hitler.”)
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/14/ukraine-the-truth/
= new reply since forum marked as read
How is he supposed to come to the "truth" if he leaves information out?
Would he have come to the same conclusion ("the US caused the crisis"
if he had had to take into account that Ukraine already was a politically divided country before the crisis?
And yes, if you hint that somebody is right because he's a professor, then that's an appeal to authority.
To be clear:
I don't like it how this mess full of holes that claims to be an article has the audacity to furthermore claim that it is able to put an end to the discussion.
The. Article. Left. Out. Critical. Information.
And exactly that makes the author's conclusion suspect. The author cannot claim that his conclusion is correct and yet he makes the claim that it's not only correct but wholesome.
Everybody lies, everybody lies... Except for the guys who present skewed viewpoints that support your position. No way they would lie, Nooooooooo. They tell the truth. No need to check on the author because he's a professor and he tells something you knew all along. No need to check his argument, Nooooooooo.
The CIA on the other hand, we should double-check everthing they say because they tell the opposite of your position.
He did, however, do a fantastic job of getting his country involved in invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.
Annals of Government - (How the US Armed Iraq)
In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission
By Murray Waas and Craig Unger
The New Yorker Magazine - Originally published November 2, 1992
Posted to the web November 14, 2002
Introduction
This article, originally published in New Yorker Magazine, provides a clear picture of the direct involvement of the United States in arming Iraq, providing Saddam Hussein with technology, weapons, intelligence and funding - even in contravention of American law - enabling Iraq to amass the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons that threaten the world. While the US does not openly acknowledge its role in arming Iraq, it now prepares to go to war against a monster of its own creation...
Since this article provides an excellent in-depth analysis of the US's dysfunctional Middle East policy dating back to the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush, it also provides the best perspective from which to view the Pollard case. As long as the US acknowledges no responsibility for its role in arming Iraq, Jonathan Pollard will continue to be buried alive in prison by successive American administrations fearing exposure and embarrassment.
***
In late July, 1986, William J. Casey, then the Director of Central Intelligence, sat down with George Bush, then the Vice-President of the United States, in an out-of-the-way study that Casey maintained on the third floor of the old Executive Office Building, the rococo structure adjoining the White House. Casey had something he wanted Bush to do.
For many years, both Bush and Casey had moved easily in the worlds of foreign policy and Republican politics, and Bush had once held Casey's job. But their relationship was never entirely comfortable. Casey, gruff and perpetually disheveled, was the product of public and parochial schools in Queens and on Long Island - his father was a Tammany Hall pension bureaucrat - and of Fordham. Bush, elaborately friendly in manner, was the offspring of Connecticut gentry. Like his father, an investment banker who served in the Senate, Bush attended Yale and was tapped for Skull and Bones. Casey made millions on his own as a stock speculator; Bush, with family help, grew moderately prosperous in the oil business before his political rise in Houston. Both men held high posts under Richard Nixon, but Nixon himself treated Casey as an equal and Bush condescendingly. It was under Gerald Ford that Bush was appointed to the job Casey now held.
The two men were different in more than background. Casey was part of the rising conservative movement, the historic antagonist of Bush and his ancestors within the Republican Party. In the Cold War, Casey believed not in containment but in what in the late forties and early fifties had been called rollback. He saw every stirring in every corner of the world through an unchanging ideological prism. Bush, by contrast, was a consummate pragmatist. As Casey knew, Bush was capable of rapidly adopting new positions if expediency or advancement seemed to demand it. He had done so on the issue of recognizing China under Nixon, and he had done so on abortion and on economic policy when he became Ronald Reagan's running mate. According to someone who knew both men, Casey had originally distrusted Bush's lack of conviction. Lately, however, he had begun to see Bush's pragmatism in a new light. Whatever vision the Vice-President might lack, he was a man of immense personal discipline, and he understood accommodation as a way to achieve goals. Moreover, during his service as permanent representative to the United Nations, as chief of the United States liaison office in China, and as director of the C.I.A., he had mastered the arts of compartmentalization and secrecy. "Casey knew there was nobody in government who could keep a secret better," a former high-level C.I.A. official who worked with Casey has told us. "He knew that Bush was someone who could keep his confidence and be trusted. Bush had the same capacity as Casey to receive a briefing and give no hint that he was in the know."
Now, in 1986, Casey, seventy-three years old and suffering from prostate cancer, said he needed Bush to run a covert errand. Iran was proving recalcitrant in secret negotiations to exchange arms for hostages who were being held in Beirut by terrorists with links to Iran, so Casey had dreamed up a scheme for forcing Iran's hand. It requires someone of authority to convey a message to Iran's enemy Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, indirectly and without leaving fingerprints. Vice-President Bush was the ideal courier. He was about to visit the capitals of countries in the Middle East in order to "advance the peace process" between Israelis and Arabs, as he told the New York Times. But if he accepted Casey's assignment he would also be there to advance the war process; that is, to heat up the war between Iran and Iraq, with an incendiary message from Washington to Baghdad - escalate the air war and escalate the bombing deep inside Iranian territory.
Casey's reasoning was that if Saddam Hussein could be induced to order his fastidiously cautious Air Force to attack Iran in strength, Iran would be forced to turn anew to the United States for missiles and other weapons of air defense. The United States would then use its enhanced leverage to get better terms from the Iranians for the release of the hostages. (Casey may have been particularly concerned about the plight of one of the hostages, the Lebanon C.I.A. station chief William A. Buckley.) And for Casey there was another enticement as well, according to two Reagan Administration officials whom he frequently confided in; by bringing off this scheme, he would be manipulating two rival policy factions in the Administration.
CONTINUED...
http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/111402.htm
Go Empire.
World War II along with countless Ukrianian Poles. Are you trying to argue that Stepan Bandera was not a pro-Nazi murderer?
The truth is that the word 'Holodomor' is a neologism, an invention of Ukrainian fascists after World War II who hoped after World War II to siphon Western sympathy for Jewish victims of the "Holocaust" by using a name with linguistic echoes to the latter and who piggy-backed on extant anti-Soviet sentiments in the West. When the REALITY is that those same Ukrainian fascists had killed a shit-load of Ukraine's Jews and Poles in the western parts of the country.
Let's let the Ukrainian Nazis speak for themselves, shall we?
which outlined the plans for activities at the onset of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the western territories of the Ukrainian SSR. Section G of that document –"Directives for organizing the life of the state during the first days" (Ukrainian: "Вказівки на перші дні організації державного життя" outline activity of the Bandera followers during summer 1941 In the subsection of "Minority Policy" the OUN-B ordered: "Moskali, Poles, and Jews that are hostile to us must be exterminated in this struggle, especially those who would resist our regime: deport them to their own lands, importantly: destroy their intelligentsia that may be in the positions of power ... Jews must be isolated, removed from governmental positions in order to prevent sabotage, those who are deemed necessary may only work with an overseer... Jewish assimilation is not possible."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera (Emphasis added)
It is you who needs to revisit the history of the region and of the 30s and World War II before accusing others of over-simplifying.
Oh, BTW, the NeoCon pet Yushcenko had Bandera declared a 'Hero of Ukraine' in January 2010, a move that met with near-universal condemnation from various groups representing Bandera's victims.
due to this latest "Red Scare."
Octafish, as always, point on. 
Neither of those are true.
the US, has over 700 military bases all over the world
"The Defense Department every year publishes a list of military facilities in the United States and around the world. As of Sept. 30, 2010, the DOD list shows a list of 611 military facilities around the world (not counting war zones), though only 20 are listed as “large sites,” which means a replacement value of more than $1.74 billion.
That's counting Marine guards and military attaches as part of U.S. military power around the globe.... only 11 countries actually house more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel, the United States has 20 major bases around the world, not counting the war in Afghanistan, with major concentrations of troops in 11 countries."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/ron-pauls-strange-claim-about-bases-and-troops-overseas/2012/02/08/gIQApZpqzQ_blog.html
and spends more on its war budget than the rest of the world combined.
"It won’t have anything to do with 'freedom,' any more than the last few U.S. wars have had anything to do with that abstraction. It will be about imperial expansion, which while it might serve the .01% that rules this country, is not in your interest at all." -- Gary Leupp
But don't let that stop you from re-iterating your sideshow.
