The Ukraine War is an Era Defining Event

From uni-polar hegemony to a multi-polar world

Published: 2023-08-23

Updated 2023-08-25: Added a whole lot on Duma, OPCW, Gehlen, Gladio etc. as a window into US empire mafia methodology.

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Defining Times

I contend that the conflict in Ukraine is an end of era marker, the last of the major "forever" wars.

The "forever" wars were launched in response to the crimes of 9/11. They provided the justification for the US, sometimes with and sometimes without NATO support, to launch a series of overt and covert invasions and destabilization. The purpose of these, as with most neo-colonial/neo-imperialist action is to extend or maintain financial, resource and political control all the while providing profits to empire loyal businesses or career advancement to empire loyal stalwarts in whichever profession from lobbyist, to adviser, to policy analyst or journalist/publication.

Just over a decade after the dissolution of the USSR and the successful but "didn't quite go all the way" 1991 repulsion of Iraq's forces from Kuwait and then limited invasion of Iraq up the "highway of death", the USA ginned up a war against Saddam Hussein based on two packs of lies, the Weapons of Mass Destruction hogwash and the "Saddam was linked to 9/11" media narrative. For those who weren't around then, or not yet following international events, note that the USA had already invaded Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq has still not finished, though President Biden did withdraw overt USA forces from Afghanistan. There the USA was defeated by their former business partners (Unicol's pipeline) and erstwhile allies, the Taliban, who were essentially decedents of local forces branded the Mujaheddin which were armed and funded by the USA and Saudi Arabia, including one Osama bin Laden, 20 odd years earlier when the USA was giving the USSR "its own Vietnam".

The SIGAR (Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) audit reports detailed the extensive corruption in both the USA and Afghan governments. The US Government’s executive branch was washing money to the tune of billions of dollars through the Afghan. These reports should be required reading for every USA journalist and student of recent history. They are emblematic of what happens when the USA does "regime change" and then sticks around. The Libya intervention is a classic for what happens when the USA does regime change and does not stick around; massive immigration flows, unstable government, and regional destabilization.

From Afghanistan to Syria via Iraq and Libya and onwards to Ukraine

The dirty war in Syria is an example of primarily US funded destabilization with a UK FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) coordinated media campaign known primarily as the "White Helmets" which did not involve US "boots on the ground". Due to regional allies, Iran and Hezbollah in particular, and the invited intervention of Russia, the US government’s attempt at the toppling of the Syrian government failed. The White Helmets project was a new version of narrative control using a created and managed “human rights” group as the front to pluck the heartstrings of gullible populations to support the regime change operation which, had it worked, would have involved the money laundering which were still running in Afghanistan. For those who were new to the way in which massive corrupt funding of various empire loyalist industries via the installation of a regime changed government was justified by sophisticated emotional manipulation, the Syrian Dirty War was a training manual. It also enabled a clear eyed view of where real reporting occurs and does not.

The signature event which provides a window into the depths of both the corruption and amount of money involved was the “Duma incident” in which a staged use of chemical weapons was employed to justify the USA and empire loyalists France and UK to attack, without UN Security Council approval, sovereign Syria with missiles.

US President Obama had declared that Syria’s use of chemical weapons was a “red line” the crossing of which would magically allow the US to act unilaterally, ignoring any consultative body such as the UN. President Putin had assisted Obama from escaping the implications of his statement and being “mousetrapped” (to use Ray McGovern’s phase) by the warhawks/neocons through convicing Syrian President Assad to have his old chemical weapon stockpiles destroyed. This was done aboard a US ship fitted for the purpose. Post the media staged Duma event facilitated by the groups funded by the UK’s FCO, various independent groups verified that the accusations made regarding the use of chemical weapons at Duma were baseless. This combined with the fact that the use of chemical weapons would have been insane for Assad, permitting the USA to self-justify military intervention. The entire sham could have been publicly exposed by the UN Organization for the Prevention of the use of Chemical Weapons (the OPCW). To respond to the constructed event and media narrative Assad invited the OPCW to investigate the “crime” scene. This was done by an experienced team. So alarmed were the fact finding mission and the first director of the OPCW by the direct manipulation on behalf of the US of its report into the alleged attack, that the prelimintary, pre-doctored report was leaked to the media.

Aaron Maté from the Grayzone did what a dedicated journalist does; smelling a rat, studied the leaked reported in fine detail, followed up with the OPCW and published a whole series of articles on the entire scandal. He provided his findings to the United Nations Security Council by invitation, twice! During an interview by Maté, José Bustani (the original OPCW director who entered the fray to support the protesting inspectors who were likely behind the leaking of the preliminary report) revealed that the ever present walrus, John Bolton, had threated in pure Mafia style to kill his children if he didn’t toe the line on various investigations, and that his office was bugged to the hilt. This story, which involves the subjugation of an international body whose purpose is to prevent the use of chemical weapons by the US, has been totally suppressed by the US media. Nobody will or has touched it despite the mountains of evidence including original documents and first hand witness testimony behind it. This tells you everything you need to know about modern “Western” media.

The meticulous Duma incident reporting, combined with the SIGAR reports are a direct window into the mafia style corruption which infested the US government executive agencies when the Straussian neo-con’s gained a grip on them during the Bush era. Armed with this understanding one can then wind back the clock and see the “modus operandi” stretching all the way back through the cold war to the “sheep dipping” of Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip into the US at the end of WWII, to the use of Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi counter-intelligence officer, by the US to run post-war West Germany’s military intelligence services. While we’re on Gehlen, this leads on to Operation Gladio, the staybehind armed intelligence operative staffed armies maintained in Europe post-WWII which were employed to prevent socialist governments emerging in Europe, with the Bologna massacre being a signature window into how terrorism was used as a political weapon by these western intelligence service controlled forces. One can re-visit one’s standard narrative understanding of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK and many, many other popular figures who stood in the way of the profiteers of the US empire during the post-war period to understand that there is nothing that these people will not do. While one’s at it, one can read Whitney Webb’s intricately detailed account of how senior US political figures are blackmailed by offering underage sex services to them and recording these crimes rather than prosecuting them.

Once armed with a detailed account of how power operates in the US, if one attempts to inform others who still have a conventional understanding of history, one receives the usual response that “well, but <empire enemy nation X> does this too” as though this somehow justified the lies, murder, blackmail, wars, corruption and media complicity.

Returning to Syria, it did produce refugee flows in the millions, hundreds of thousands of deaths, destroyed large parts of the nation and destabilized the region. This operation has not concluded. The US maintains its illegal occupation forces in the northeast on prime agricultural territory in which lie Syria's main oil fields (which President Trump overtly declared that they would take) and in the southeast at al Tanf which is the major transport interconnect between Iraq, Syria and from there onwards to the coastal nation of Lebanon and the Golan Heights which are still occupied by Israel from the 1967 "6 day war". That oil in the northeast of Syria in being stolen, trucked to Turkey and at least partially, sold to Israel.

The Ukraine project was begun just after the Syrian project was under way. It loosely fits the model, using extremists to destabilize a government with the hope of overthrowing it to secure funds to be doled out to various contractors, military and civilian, and to secure resources. The massive Syrian immigration flows into Europe, this time into the Balkans and onwards via Turkey, differed from Libya where the refugees flowed to Italy on boats. In both cases, refugees flowed on to nations like Germany and Sweden. In Germany, these changes in demographics caused by the US/NATO destablizations are being used by right wing nationalist forces to raise their political voices amongst a population whose financial security is being assaulted due the removal of the availability of cheap power from Russia by the US and its EU vassal states.

Much of Syria is in ruins. Its infrastructure needs rebuilding. This will be done, but the USA wont get the contracts. I've no idea which construction companies will get these monies, but expect various regional nations (Iran, Saudi, and others) and the new block players of Russia and China to get the spoils. If Erdogan plays his cards well, Türkiye may too. But, this is beside the point.

Due to the absolute lawlessness which has been clearly displayed by the west (both the old and recent imperialists) and its bankers, the rest of the world has looked upon the "Rules Based Order" and largely said "No, Thank You". Whether one is willing to believe the rhetoric of the new comers of Russia and China and their BRICS partners and SCO allies in their belief in international law and the conventions of the United Nations or not, it is abundantly clear that the West certainly does not. When you start impounding the assets of the central banks of other nations, central bankers get nervous, which explains why the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank both advised their government not to impound the billions of dollars of Russian Central Bank foreign reserves. The USA and their NATO allies have been at this repeatedly recently, from Venezuela's gold, to Afghanistan's assets and then these Russian foreign reserves. On top of this, bystanders have been alarmed as the EU delivered 11 sanctions packages against Russia. These have followed the same playbook of “war by other means” used against Venezuela, Iran, Libya (before invasion) and any other nations which actually utilize the independence which is rhetorically lauded by all and sundry at the United Nations. What is jaw-dropping is that Russia has not just withstood this economic war, but that the EU is suffering as a result of their headstrong belligerence.

In the “is still unbelievable despite 60 years of evidence” category of economic abuse lies Cuba, still punished and rebuked by the USA and its partner Israel every year, in response to which, at the UN all of the other nations in the world register their rejection of this behaviour, and quietly hope they are not next.

Recall that the justification for all of these "forever profiting" wars was 9/11. I can reliably inform you that, if you think that the three buildings in Manhattan which were leveled on the day were destroyed by two airplanes, you have some things to learn. Pure Newtonian physics discounts the "official story". Just watching the buildings being destroyed one can see the explosions flinging massive multi-tens of tonne steel girders flying UP and outwards, in the cases of the twin towers. There is nothing “gravitational” about the desctructions of the twin towers. Building 7 is a textbook controlled demolition, and the multi-year long detailed study by Professor Leroy Hulsey and his Ph.D students from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, demonstrated irrefutably that fire had nothing to do with the destruction of the 57 story steel-framed high-rise. I side with the objectives of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. What is still needed for 9/11 is a criminal investigation with subpoena power. This, of course, will never happen because it will open so many cans of worms that it is politically impossible. We don’t, however, need to know who was responsible, merely that it was a crime first and foremost, rather than an act of war.

It was presented as an act of war in order to justify all of the above corruption and flagrant violations of international law which continue to this day.

The USA could get away with all this while it and its allies controlled international trade, had a dominant military and tightly controlled Western media narratives through a compliant press and the three, aligned, international wire services (AFP, AP, Reuters). These three conditions are no longer the case, which has been demonstrated during the Ukraine conflict, if you start the clock back in 2014 at the Maidan coup.

International Trade and Hypersonic Missiles

BRICS is now a stronger trading block than the G7. The G7 was the G8 before the USA and its European NATO vassals kicked Russia out of it. Aircraft carriers are sitting ducks for the hypersonic missiles which Russia has developed and everyone else is desperately trying to develop.

Since the beginning of Russia's Special Military Operation, some of which is legitimate and some of which is blatantly illegal under international law, the USA and NATO have been funneling into Ukraine all of their old weapons to assist Ukraine's Nazi infested Military, and paying the bills and issuing unrepayable loans for the 'more corrupt than a meeting of the Mafia dons' government of Ukraine. The result of this is a mountain of unrepayable debt, an upcoming cash bonanza for the US Military Industrial Complex (if anyone is still going to buy their overpriced, disproven on the battlefield weaponry), another destroyed country now bereft of half of its population and without a generation of young men. It is a tragedy of incalculable horror pursued for the interests of people who have no loyalty to anything but a sick ideology and filthy lucre.

The US is in desperate need of some sane heads from the school of Realpolitik, like John Mearsheimer who understood what would happen if this generated conflict got underway, namely that yet another nation would be destroyed. The current head of the CIA, fittingly named Mr. Burns, relayed Russia's concerns about this inevitable outcome while he was the USA’s ambassador to Russia back in 2008 when Bush Jr. floated the idea of inviting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.

Now, as opposed to then, the USA doesn't have the money or the firepower to get away with this.

The Disinformation Industry

The cracks in their psyops, more calmly known as narrative management and publicly known as the Mainstream Media are showing. The outrageous irony is that those cracks are appearing via the Internet, a redundant network designed by academia from funding from the US Department of Defense during the Cold War.

The most obvious cracks are that to prevent people from holding insane ideas (like that's never happened before) the US Government had to threaten the new media gatekeepers (Facebook/Meta, Google/Alphabet, Twitter/X, etc.) with the scraping of Section 210 of the Communications and Decency Act from back in the 1990's which gives them immunity from prosecution for people saying daft or dangerous things on their platforms. To protect their dominant market position the newly powerful gatekeepers quietly colluded with the government to subvert the first amendment of the US constitution. There is no crime for this for them, but there is for the government — Congress shall make no law …

The censorship being hidden behind pseudonyms like "shadowbanning" or "algorithmic suppression" has unveiled itself again and again and again, and they're not stopping. The censorship will both continue and continue to be exposed. This destabilizes the last powerful tool which the West has been using to hoodwink its own people. Its not yet broken. The MSM still have huge sway, but not amongst the young. They, of course, are being shuffled into various new variants like TikTok or Instagram (yet another Facebook/Meta property). But, there is a market and young people can be quite fickle in their allegiances, so its a sort of censorship resistance whack-a-mole game being played to somehow maintain the psyop narrative control.

To these three serious problems for the Western "power elite" (lack of financial dominance, military dominance or narrative dominance) should be added that they don't have two brain cells to rub together. The collective wisdom seems to be to continue doing the old tricks and see if nobody notices, even when they're failing. This mind-boggling stupidity is quite astounding.

Reality

To demonstrate this "cant see the forest for the trees" approach, see Sy Hersh's recent piece on what happened at the Rest of the World Versus Russia Peace Summit ™. The big revelation is that this event was meant to be an off-ramp. It was meant to be a celebration of victory, the beginning of the "negotiating from a position of strength" rubbish which those who are the face of leadership have been spouting for months. I repeat. They thought that the Ukrainian military was going to have some reasonable success against Russia, probably in Zaporozhye. No serious military analyst had this confidence, just the zealots of the old neo-con fantasy of "we create reality".

People far more informed than I (Col Macgregor, Dima from Military Summary, Brian Berletic, Scott Ritter etc.) have been telling us all for many, many months that Ukraine does not stand a chance. It doesn't really require that much military intelligence, just to stay up to date with what has been happening since the last northern autumn. Ukraine has no airforce of any consequence and next to no air defence either (thanks for the US intel leaks, whoever that was). Russia is right there, a neighbor. It has artillery rounds coming out of its nether regions, more artillery pieces than you can poke a stick at, an effective airforce using their glide bomb adaptations, hypersonic missiles, a three layer deep defensive setup, and about 300 000 troops sitting there twiddling their thumbs. Oh, and tanks. Lots of tanks. And these US/NATO clever-dick foreign policy geniuses planned for this summit to be their victorious exit strategy. They are that far removed from reality.

So, you've got the above three serious problems and a collection of advisers who couldn't achieve a draw in tic-tac-toe. The problem here is that these ideological idiots have nuclear weapons, especially the "small" ones, the tactical nukes. Small means the level of power used on Nagasaki or Hiroshima, you know, small. We desperately need to put in place an upgraded version of the INF which Bush Jr. in his infantile mind thought was unneeded because "Russia had been defeated", which meant "The Chicago Boys are plundering the whole thing".

Putin got anointed by the drunken puppet Yeltsin and ten years later he'd got Russia back on its feet, and ten years after that Russia a force with which to be reckoned. One might consider Putin a gangster, but he's a smart gangster with good advisers and he has saved his country. He does not have an 80% support rating because he looks cool riding a horse without a shirt. He is a strong leader, which is appealing to Russian culture. Actually, any political leader who can save his (or her) country and continues to speak informatively about their nation’s place in the world and what their government is doing to help its people is going to be popular, irrespective of culture.

In Xi Jinping is a Chinese variant, with Russia having the diplomatic and technical skills and China the business and organizational skills. Kissinger and Brzezinski were right to advise the US government to avoid an alliance between Russia and China at least as much as an alliance between Russia and Germany. In this the US failed due to ineptitude and greed. The price for that failure is the loss of their uni-polar hegemony.

The business arm of the US Imperium made quite a bit of money shifting production from the expensive wage economy of the US to the pittance they pay in southeast Asia. In the process they gave southeast Asian nations both the means of production and the technical knowledge of how to manufacture. This is all according to an outdated plan. They are showing that they intend to wage a war against China so they can destroy it all, profit from reconstruction and do it all again somewhere else. Its a crazy “Afghanistan all over again” idea. Its crazy because nobody is going to defeat China.

Shifting Sands

The Ukraine conflict will mark on history's page the end of this hegemonic uni-polarity. The US cannot wage war after war now. The same is true for NATO. They dont have the stuff. They'll have to spend years and hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding this capacity while the world realigns into patterns partially or significantly outside of their control.

Due to the economic crisis which has been visited upon Europe by the US (Nordstream) and their own technocrats' incompetence (sanctions), NATO is weak.

Niger will be a very nice test case. The US is already decommissioning its drone base in Agadez. This is not because "Russia is strong" or "China is strong" it is because the US/NATO alliance is weak.

The BRICS/Chinese versions of the US "investment" banks are stepping in and offering not unreasonable deals. The New Development Bank and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank are investing in infrastructure; roads, rail, ports and communications networks. Its China. Its about business. This is what they do. Niger is sick of being a French colonial chattel, as are other countries in West Africa. Whether choosing a new set of banks will be a good choice or not, history will tell. But, the BRICS/SCO organizations would need to be astoundingly stupid to outdo the harm wreaked on Africa by its previous European overlords.

It will be easy to see if this prediction is correct, if the investments in developing economies will come more from the new block than the old. Just watch the amount of investments issued to developing nations by the IMF/World Bank vs the New Development Bank/AIIB. Their balance sheets will either confirm or deny the proposition, and from that whether a new multipolar world has been upon us for a while and is becoming even more firmly established or not.

I assert it has been, is and will be for the medium to long term. These are heavy wheels which are turning.

Sources

SIGAR Performance Audit Reports, SIGAR (created under the authority of Section 1229 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008), the site is hosted under .mil (a USA DoD, domain)

A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7, J. Leroy Hulsey, Institute of Northern Engineering (University of Alaska Fairbanks),

• Final Report

White Helmets (subject tag), The Grayzone, various articles

OPCW (subject tag), The Grayzone, various articles on the Duma incident and its coverup largely by Aaron Maté

NATO's Secret Armies - Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Daniele Ganser, 2014

One Nation Under Blackmail, Whitney Webb, 2022

Summer of the Hawks, Seymour Hersh, (republished at) ScheerPost, 2023-08-19

• Original

NYET MEANS NYET: RUSSIA'S NATO ENLARGEMENT REDLINES, Ambassador William J. Burns, US State Deptartment via Wikileaks, 2008-02-01 (publication of the original internal document)

Ukraine's F-16 Dream Comes True - Does it Matter？ w⧸Col Doug Macgregor, Napolitano interview Macgregor, Judging Freedom, 2023-08-22

Culture

J. Haydn - Hob III：30 - String Quartet Op. 17 No. 6 in D major

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