As maverick U.S. Arms Inspector Scott Rutter pointed out — and a few other sharp folks — the ones like Ron Paul and Prof. John Mearsheimer, Jimmy Dore with Matt Tiabbi , and a few others who managed to duck being disappeared, censored and otherwise cancelled — and still got published excplained, the really stupid Russian invasion of Ukraine could have easily been completely avoided.
And watching the current negotiations, it looks as if that same easy solution may still (March16, 2022) clear up the situation.
You see, as the folks above explain it, the problem has been caused by “we” in the West. Now that may sound batshit crazy if you’ve been victimized by U.S. warmongering propaganda, but stick with me here.
Weapons Inspector Ritter put it something like this: “To avoid the whole Ukraine Fiasco, all Ukraine had to do was to agree not to join NATO.”
That’s exactly what Putin and the Russians have been saying, quite patiently, loudly, and persistently, for the past several months. In fact, ever since U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III etc., with the equivalent of a gentleman’s hand-shake, promised Mikhail Gorbachov in 1990 pretty much that “NATO would not take even one step closer to Russia’s western border.”
At that 1990 A.D. point in history, NATO’s eastern border was about 1,000 miles from Russia’s largest city, St. Petersburg. That gentleman’s hand-shake agreement greatly facilitated the breakup of the old USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.)
NATO’s Eastern border is now only about 100 miles from St. Petersburg. It’s clear that one party to that hand-shake agreement wasn’t a gentleman.
Ok, fine, but what’s the big deal with NATO 100 miles from Russia? And what’s with Ukraine??
The first thing you might want to think about is “launch on warn.”
During the “Cold War,” with both the U.S. and USSR all nuked-up — over 60,000 warheads between them — they developed a vocabulary. Door-to-door U.S. to Russia — and vice-versa — for an ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) was about 20 minutes.
Since both sides had more than enough nukes to completely fry the entire ecosystem and wipe out all life on earth, they accurately called this situation “Mutually Assured Destruction,” acronym appropriately “M.A.D.”
The instruments and techniques for detecting and warning of an “enemy” launch got quite sophisticated so they had nearly the whole door-to-door 20 minutes to figure out if what they were detecting and warning about was an instrumental glitch, a harmless satellite launch, a nuclear attack — or something else.
Was this a first strike, designed to take out the “enemy’s” retaliatory nukes, because if you wanted to “get even” you’d have to launch before they arrived.
“Launch on Warn” meant that door-to-door travel time was so short if you wanted to “get even,” you’d have to launch when you got the first warning the “enemy” had launched something questionable. No time to sort things out. That situation was called “launch on warn.”
Putin kept pointing out that missile travel time from Ukraine to Moscow was about 5 minutes, making anything launched from Ukraine automatically “launch on warn.”
Now, before the D.C. censor squad took RT off the air, I was watching Mr. Putin and his right-hand man Sergey Lavrov very closely. I have to admit, they have two of the best poker faces I’ve seen, but if I’d been in a poker game with ’em about two weeks before the invasion, I would have thought, ah-oh, these guys have lost it. They’re about to go all-in.
S. Lavrov’s hair, what there is of it, began to morph ever-so-slightly into something UK’s Prime Minister Boris “The Clown” Johnson might recognize when he looks in a mirror.
Sure enough, shortly after they pulled the invasion trigger, Russia put their nuclear forces on standby. Draw your own conclusions.
And maybe Mr. Putin was thinking about all the so-called wars and invasions Uncle Scam — ah Uncle Sam — has pulled off. For example, the Vietnam “War” which as usual the U.S. Government never legally declared and for which the casus belli — the second attack on the Maddox — according to Secretary of War at the time Robert S. McNamara “didn’t happen“ – – –
Or perhaps the second Iraq so-called “war,” where despite U.S. Government claims, unlike Uncle Scam, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Further, despite U.S. claims, they had no connections to Al Qaeda and not only weren’t harboring Ossama bin Laden but didn’t like him.
And then there was the literally unbelievable scam that bamboozled Congress into not blocking so-called “Desert Storm.” The Kuwait ambassador’s 15-year-old daughter, posing as hospital volunteer Nayira, lied to the U.S. Congress, testifying that Iraqi soldiers were ripping premature babies from their incubators and leaving them “on the cold floor to die” so they could haul the incubators back to Iraq with them.
I told Chrissy, “That’s just too stupid. Those six Congress folks they need will never buy that.” She said, “Yes they will.” She was right.
Things like that — and the following — may best explain why Mr. Putin might be paranoid when dealing with Uncle, NATO, and their wars – – –
And then maybe Mr. Putin glanced at that thing that currently lives in Washington D.C.. He could hardly miss that it rarely pays any attention at all to it’s founding documents except maybe around election time, hence has never legally declared war since the end of WWII.
And then there’s the U.S. record of not keeping it’s treaties. Just recently the START Treaty, the ICBM treaty, the Iraq nuclear deal, and looking back in history, most of it’s treaties with our native Americans.
And, while it’s completely anti-libertarian, not to mention extremely bad manners, there’s the very solid precedent of disrespecting another country’s sovereignty created by the U.S. Government itself in October 1962. That precedent was called “The Cuban Missile Crisis.”
The U.S.S.R. was in the process of installing ICBMs on the island nation of Cuba, about 90 nautical miles away from Florida. They would easily be able to target Washington D.C.
With absolutely no legal or moral right to do so, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy demanded the USSR return the missiles from whence they came or the U.S. would invade Cuba and take care of the problem itself.
NATO ICBMs — even just strategic nuclear weapons — located in Ukraine would be less than 5 minutes flight time, meaning “Launch on Warn” from Moscow.
It’s not like Putin didn’t try to solve his dilemme peacefully — he did just about everything but jump up and down and stand on his head — he sent documents multiple times to U.S., UK, UN, Ukraine and NATO.
They all ignored him as if he wasn’t there and then insulted him and Russia with childish tricks like refusing to issue the identity cards necessary for Russian astronauts to board the ISS (International Space Station).
Given he’s dealing with the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in war, both of them on civilian populations — Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, leaving no time for the Japanese hierarchy to even figure out what happened in Hiroshima.
And maybe he noticed bureaucrat Groves explaining that it was a bureaucratic necessity that caused the U.S. to drop both bombs. The bureaucrats had to justify the two separate extremely expensive government programs that had produced two different types of nuke: Little Boy produced from uranium, assembled at Los Alamos, and tested on Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945 and Fat Man, a plutonium bomb from Hanford, Washington demonstrated on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. One suggestion was that both were designed to warn the Soviet Union not to mess with America.
So do I approve of how Putin reacted? Absolutely not! Is he paranoid? What do you think? What would you do in his place?
P.S. With peace talks proceeding well and Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy catching on to peace in exchange for no “Launch on Warn” from Ukraine, why is the U.S. still war-mongering as hard as it can??
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