We are going through a period of moral clarity. Russia is uniquely bad. Ukraine is heroic.
In 2015 under President Obama, the U.S. began active support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition which had begun airstrikes against Yemen. We are the primary supplier of Saudi weapons and we provide intelligence and command-and-control operational support for their air campaign. Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, Amnesty International, and Médicines Sans Frontières all report intentional targeting of civilians, including hospitals and humanitarian aid facilities. They report the Saudi coalition uses cluster bombs in crowded civilian areas, a war crime.
My post yesterday drew Herb Rothschild's attention. He has been an advocate for Civil Rights, the environment, and peace for over five decades. Rothschild grew up in Louisiana and was a professor of English at LSU. He just published a book that describes his participation in the Civil Rights era in Louisiana, The Bad Old Days. He worked in the peace movement in Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, and now at his home in Southern Oregon.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
A day or two before you published yesterday’s blog about Tulsi Gabbard’s opposition to our nation’s foreign policy and particularly what she sees as our pushing Russia into invading Ukraine, there was an op ed in the New York Times about her by Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at The Newmark School of Journalism of the City University of New York (https://nyti.ms/37VYIme). Beinart faulted people on both the Left and the Right, including Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger, Keith Olbermann and Whoopi Goldberg, for calling her (and Tucker Carlson) a traitor.Beinart mentioned something about Gabbard you didn’t: she served on active duty in Iraq and her experience there made her a confirmed foe of U.S. militarism. He quoted her as saying that what she witnessed there “changed my life completely, as an individual as well as my perspective on the world.”I can resonate with that. Unlike Gabbard, I won’t give Putin a pass for invading Ukraine. War is a crime, and I regard anyone who chooses to start one—including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Donald Trump—as a war criminal. But like her and many others, including NYT columnist Thomas Friedman (see https://nyti.ms/3LP4Agy), I wrote in Ashland.news about deliberate U.S./NATO provocation. See, for example, Ashland News and again here.Beyond the immediate matter of whether we might have prevented the suffering of Ukrainians by acceding to Russia’s repeated requests that we pledge not to keep open the prospect of NATO membership for yet another country on Russia’s border, I resonate with Gabbard’s general denunciation of what you called “America’s military and foreign policy establishment” but which I would write as “military/foreign” policy establishment. The two are inextricably intertwined.
We go to war more than any other nation. Further, we promote war-making by selling weapons to other nations—for example, Saudi Arabia’s long-running war on Yemen, in which the casualties dwarf those in Ukraine. From 2017 through 2021, we sold over $52 billion of arms, more than twice what Russia, the #2 merchant of death, sold. Sales to the Saudis were 23% of our total.
The close nexus between the military-industrial complex and those who make our foreign policy isn’t hard to document. For example, a think tank named the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) lists its donors on its website. In FY2021, its two biggest donors (both >$500,000) were Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and the Dept. of Defense. I’ll conclude this piece by listing those associated with CNAS who’ve entered the Biden Administration:
· Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
· Ely Ratner, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense
· Susanna V. Blume, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense
· David Cohen, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
· Derek Chollet, Counselor of the U.S. Department of State
· Colin Kahl, Under Secretary for Defense
· Peter Harrell, Senior Director for International Economics and Competitiveness on the National Security Council staff
· Elizabeth Rosenberg, Counselor to the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury focused on international issues
· Kayla M. Williams, Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs
13 comments:
This administration, like most of them since WWII, is totally committed to maintaining the balance of terror. It’s called the “Pox Americana” – making the world safe for war profiteers.
Mr. Rothschild raises a good point. Expressing one’s views, even if they’re unpopular, is a first amendment right. Labeling someone a traitor for doing it is contrary to what America is supposed to be about. “Traitor” is an allegation that should be reserved for those who do something serious, like try to overturn a free and fair election.
Look at the heroic fight the Ukrainians are putting up against Russian aggression. They are choosing freedom over life under the tyrannical Russian boot. They deserve our support in their fight for the right to live their own lives on their own terms.
It was NATO and its implicit threat of using tactical nuclear weapons that kept all of Western Europe from falling under domination by the USSR during the (first) Cold War. We are now at the beginning of what looks like the second.
Dictators can only be deterred by strength, which means military strength. Ask the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians whether they are happy to have weapons produced by the US’ “military/industrial complex.“ Ask the Ukrainians about the Javelins and Stingers.
Finally, Russia was not “provoked“ to invade Ukraine. NATO is a defensive alliance that does not attack its neighbors. Instead, Putin was “provoked“ to invade Ukraine by his delusional attachment to notions of a mythical Russian Empire. I hope that somehow Putin gets put on trial for his war crimes and hung. I hope his hanging is broadcast worldwide when it happens. I hope Shi Jinping watches and takes note.
Michael, you put your views forward with a certainty that the evidence doesn't warrant. I don't know how much of the history of U.S._Russia relations you know beginning with verbal guarantees to Gorbachev that if he disbanded the Warsaw pact, the US and NATO would respect Russia's security concerns. The history is complex, and none of it justifies Putin's invasion of Ukraine, as I wrote above. But this isn't a simple good guys vs. bad guys history.
I have noted over time that the confidence of your assertions exceeds your knowledge.
Herbert, I know some things about the history. I have read that those “verbal guarantees“ to Gorbachev were made by a lower level official who had no standing to make them, and those guarantees were specifically rescinded within days.
To my knowledge, NATO has never had the kind of force structure that would support any possibility of invading Russia. Am I wrong about that?
What would you say Russia ever had to fear from NATO?
I just looked it up, and according to Brookings, no such promises were ever made to Gorbachev.
Michael first said he was familiar with the promises, then said they had never been made. According to the National Security Archive, however, they had been:
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
It seems probable to me that promises made about NATO expansion are an area where scholars disagree. None of us around here are experts in this field.
Actually, since we have the documents, it's a matter of public record.
We have all kinds of things, including what Gorbachev himself said. I’ll leave it to the experts.
Good idea. Herbert Rothschild is an expert and as he said, we gave "verbal guarantees to Gorbachev that if he disbanded the Warsaw pact, the US and NATO would respect Russia's security concerns."
I also agree with what else he had to say.
I said, “the experts.” Not just one.
Michael, you are correct that there is scholarly disagreement about what guarantees were made. My only point was to suggest that you should put forward your assertions with less certainty than you're accustomed to. It pleased me to see that, after several back-and-forths, you did step back from certainty on this one point.
Regarding your conviction that Russia should know that it has nothing to fear from NATO, you should try to put yourself in someone else's shoes. The U.S.S.R. was brutally invaded by German in 1941 and suffered terrible losses. Several of the eastern European nations currently in NATO joined the Nazis in that invasion. But long before that, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Western powers, including the U.S., sent expeditionary forces to Russia to crush the revolution. And during the entire Cold War period, the U.S. indicated unceasingly that it considered the U.S.S.R. a threat.
Given U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, why would the Russians think that we are only interested in a defensive military posture.
As an exercise in extending one's thinking beyond one's own accustomed vantage point, let me encourage you to imagine that Mexico signed a mutual defense treaty with China, that Chinese weapons began to flood into Mexico, and that Mexican and Chinese troops staged joint military exercises. And when the U.S. asked Mexico why it was doing that, Mexico cited a long history of U.S. invasions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it was just trying to prevent future U.S. military aggression.
How do you think people in this country would react, Michael?
Herb,
You make some very good points. I can see what you’re saying.
I suspect, though, that if the United States responded with a brutal invasion of Mexico and targeted civilians with artillery barrages, you would oppose it and consider it to be a war crime, as I do.
Also, the United States never occupied Mexico, put it behind an iron curtain, and imposed a tyrannical repressive regime on it, like the USSR did to Ukraine. So the analogy, while useful and relevant, isn’t perfect.
It may be correct that expanding NATO to the east was a mistake. It may also be the case that expanding NATO to the east was the only thing that kept Putin from moving against the Baltics and Poland for as long as he has. Figuring that out is way above my pay grade.
The people whose lives were on the line in these decisions, the ones in those countries, chose NATO membership. They were the ones with the most skin in the game. They are the ones who will die if they were wrong. This is how I, at my pay grade, can figure something like this out. I choose to support their decision.
I think that in the end, a lot of how people react to these events comes down to basic emotional nature. We can most likely come to agreement the facts of the situation, but our interpretations of those facts, and the decisions we make, include more than just those facts.
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