"NATO Wants a Ground-War in Ukraine"
by Mike Whitney
The Unz Review (March 24, 2022)
https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/nato-wants-a-ground-war-in-ukraine/

Why is NATO sending more lethal weaponry to Ukraine? Didn’t Putin say that poring arms into Ukraine would increase the likelihood of war?

Yes, he did, but the US and NATO continue send more shipments anyway. Why?

And why does Ukraine need more weapons?

Could it be that Ukraine’s 600,000-strong military is collapsing like a trailer park in a hurricane? Is that it? Is that why NATO had an emergency confab in Brussels on Thursday to restate their support for a NATO-trained army that has not successfully launched even one major counteroffensive against the Russian military?

The media insists that the Russian offensive “has stalled”. Is that what you call it when your opponent captures an area the size of the UK in less than 3 weeks or when all your air and naval assets have been obliterated or when your Command-and-Control centers have gone up in smoke or when most of your combat troops are either encircled by Russian forces or fleeing to locations west of the Dnieper River? Is that what “stalled” looks like?

Do you get the impression that the media is not being entirely straightforward in their coverage of the war in Ukraine? Do you think that maybe their WEF-linked owners might have a dog in this fight? Here’s how Archbishop Vigano summed it up recently in an article linking “Covid tyranny” to the war in Ukraine:

Truer words were never spoken. It’s all manipulation by globalist “stakeholders” pursuing their own narrow interests. As for the war, check out this analysis from a post at Larry Johnson’s new blog A Son of the New American Revolution. I can’t vouch for the author, but he sounds a lot more credible than CNN:

Yes, but can the author be trusted?

I don’t know but– let’s face it– when the media lies relentlessly for 4 years about “Russian collusion” followed by another 2 years of “Everyone’s going to die from the flu”; any critical thinking person is going to look for other sources of information, right? It’s a credibility issue, and, regrettably, “credibility” is a term that is never applied to the mainstream media.

So, where do we go from here?

Good question; and you can see from NATO’s statement that leaders in Washington and across Europe are determined to throw more gas on the fire. That’s the message they’re sending to the world; ‘We are united in our determination to defeat Russia whether we blow up the planet or not.’ Got it? Here’s a clip from their declaration on Thursday:

Are you surprised that NATO would openly boast about arming and training thousands of Ukrainian combatants since 2014? What if an enemy of the United States did the same thing in Mexico or Canada. How would the US react? Here’s how Noam Chomsky put it:

It looks to me like Chomsky thinks arming Ukraine was a deliberate provocation. Which it was. NATO stuffed the country full of weapons, trained its combat troops and paramilitaries, conducted military operations with NATO, ordered their army to the east so they could terrorize the ethnic Russian population, and then– to top it off– threatened to develop nuclear weapons. In short, they put a gun to Putin’s head and threatened to blow his brains out. If that’s not a provocation, then what is? Here’s more from an article at the WSWS:

Stoltenberg can hardly conceal his elation over the ‘courage and the professionalism” of his NWO army that is acting as cannon fodder in a US proxy-war with Russia. But do the brave Ukrainians that are fighting in this fiasco, know what they’re fighting for?

No, they don’t. They think they’re risking their lives for their country, but, actually, they’re fighting to preserve US global hegemony by annihilating Russia, encircling China and establishing America’s dominance over the world’s most populous and prosperous region of the next century. That’s what they’re fighting for, Washington’s “pivot to Asia”. As the author of the WSWS article admits:

Yes, that’s right, and Biden doesn’t even try to hide it. Here’s what he said just two days ago:

“New World Order”? You mean, this isn’t about “Ukraine’s borders”, after all?

Nope. That’s all patriotic claptrap dolled-up for the serfs. Here’s how Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov summed it up on Tuesday:

Indeed, that is the objective, and the US is not going to be timid in pursuing its interests. China and Russia are under the illusion that the emergence of various “power centers” will inevitably bring about change in the global order. But the world doesn’t work that way. The world leader will not willingly concede defeat or graciously abdicate the throne. He must be knocked from his pedestal much like the schoolyard bully must be subdued through force. Regrettably, Ukraine is shaping up to be the battleground where these matters are going to be resolved through force of arms.

In any event, we should try to go beyond the media’s propaganda and see if we can identify the real causes of the current conflict. Why, for example, is the US targeting Russia? In what way is Russia an “obstacle” that is blocking Washington’s strategic ambitions?

The former Undersecretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, answers that question in one short paragraph written more than two decades ago. It is as relevant today as it was then:

In short, Washington sees Russia as a “hostile power” because it sits atop an ocean of oil and gas reserves and because it “defiantly” conducts its own independent foreign policy. For these reasons, Russia is Uncle Sam’s mortal enemy.

Second, Russia’s has been gradually strengthening ties with Europe posing a serious challenge to US economic dominance. The building of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline– which would have greatly increased Europe’s dependency on Russian gas– meant that Washington’s influence would steadily erode while Europe and Asia would move closer to a common economic area in which neither the US Dollar nor NATO security would be necessary. This is why Washington went to such great lengths to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine. They needed to force the severing of economic ties to prevent further integration with EU markets.

The third reason why Russia has become Washington’s Enemy Number 1, is because the US is currently “rebalancing” assets and resources to the Asia-Pacific to take advantage of the anticipated growth-surge in the region. Hillary Clinton famously referred to this as “the pivot to Asia”, a term that was coined in a speech she delivered in 2011. Here’s what she said:

Those are the geopolitical imperatives driving the conflict:

These are the three strategic policies that are fueling the war. They only relate to Ukraine inasmuch as Ukraine is the unfortunate staging-ground for the “Great Power Conflict” which is steadily gaining momentum. Tuesday’s recommendation, by Polish political leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynsk, that he would recommend that peacekeepers be sent to Ukraine shows that NATO is planning a major escalation of the conflict in the very near future. According to Reuters, Kaczynsk, will propose that:

Think about that for a minute. Think about what it would mean. The peacekeeping mission:

Does anyone think this sounds like a good idea? Won’t this will force Russia to treat the NATO personnel as enemy belligerents that are interfering with their military operation?

Of course, it will. So, what are they trying to achieve; WW3? Is that the point? And what does this tell us about Washington’s strategy for Ukraine?

It also tells us that NATO is preparing to engage Russia militarily within Ukraine. That’s what it tells us. Until today, most people had assumed that NATO would not engage Russia militarily because they believed that would greatly increase the prospects of a nuclear exchange. But that is not how the foreign policy establishment sees things. After dealing with Putin for over 20 years, they see Putin as a rational actor who will not escalate unless Russia faces an imminent existence-threat. (A nuclear attack) In other words, the foreign policy mandarins have made the calculation that they can engage Putin in a bloody and protracted ground-war– that will drain Russia’s resources and destroy its economy– without Putin using his nuclear arsenal. It is a risky strategy but not entirely unreasonable given Putin’s behavior in the past. Putin has always been extremely cautious and never impulsive. The foreign policy wonks think they can use that against him. Like we said, it is a high-risk strategy.

Naturally, Russia is appalled by the ‘peacekeeper idea’ as it makes a clash between the two nuclear-armed superpowers almost unavoidable. Here’s what Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in response to the news:

Is Lavrov is being overly courteous?

Yes, he is. If the United States had issued the warning, they would have said something much more ominous, like this:

That’s how you deliver a warning. You don’t try to ingratiate yourself with the person who wants to kill your soldiers and erase your country from the map. That doesn’t make any sense at all. If there was ever a time for straight talk, this is it. Lives are at stake.

The “peacekeeper” incident suggests something I’ve suspected for quite a while; that Washington is itching for a land-war in Ukraine, and to some extent, it makes sense. It further polarizes and weakens Russia, it unites the allies around a common cause, and it reinforces NATO’s role as guarantor of regional security. The downside, of course, is that the conflict could quickly escalate leading to a full-blown nuclear war. I believe the neocons at the State Department do not see that as a plausible scenario, so they are pushing as hard as they can to intensify the fighting. Here’s a short clip from the piece by veteran Jacob Dreizin who appears to see things the same way:

I think Dreizin is onto something here. Brandon is not on board with the planned escalation, but it might not matter, because the State Department is a hotbed of neocons that are doing whatever they can to grease the skids for a scorched earth, no-holds-barred cage-match with their most-reviled rival, Vladimir Putin. It’s the State Department, the Intel agencies, the Congress and the media that are steering the ship of state now, not Biden. Perhaps, you wondered why the NY Times suddenly decided to ‘come clean’ on the Hunter Biden laptop story? You probably know that it’s not because the Times editors had a change-of-heart and wanted to inform the public or “speak truth to power”. Of course, not. The Times trotted out the laptop dossier to let Biden know that they “got him by the shorthairs” and if he doesn’t play ball, he’s toast.

Blackmail? Would the neocons really blackmail the President of the United States in order to escalate in Ukraine?

You bet, they would.

The neocons have their heart-set on a land-war war in Europe, and from the looks of things, they might just get one.