With apologies to Ukraine and the world, Biden is the leader of War not Peace
Liberals revive the McCarthy era while hailing Biden's shameful shunning of diplomacy. When there are no more voices of peace, there can only be war.
As the urgency of a ceasefire in Ukraine becomes has been obvious for weeks, wouldn’t we want the leader of the free world to be in direct communication with the leader of the country overseeing the invasion? As the American media pummels us round the clock with stories of “devil” Putin and the heroics of the Ukranian people and their military, why has there been zero contemplation regarding what “diplomacy” has been attempted by the Biden administration to stop not only the devastation in Ukraine but the looming specter of nuclear war? Isn’t the mark of a good leader the war they do everything to prevent, not the war they exacerbate by sending billions in weapons while filling the coffers of US defense contractors? Haven’t we seen the results of this strategy play out disastrously time and time again in our invasions and regime change wars in Central America and the Middle East?
When asked during one of her spin sessions why Biden is not talking to Putin, Jen Psaki replied that Biden would not speak to anyone invading a sovereign nation. Of course, our lily white and patriotic press corps did not have the nerve to inquire as to why other leaders should in turn talk to Biden as he has championed more than one invasion of sovereign nations. And those sovereign nations were thousands of miles away and did not have military bases anywhere near our borders, nor did they pose any tangible threat. Perhaps they should have asked Biden why he was stumping for an invasion of Iraq as Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee five years before he cheered on George W Bush and Dick Cheney in their criminal war. Should they have been so inquisitive or shown any remorse for the hundreds of thousands of black and brown people slaughtered in this and other invasions and occupations, it might have made the point that his obstinate silence is not only hypocritical but utterly illogical. I would think that a nuclear superpower invading another country should be THE reason to initiate a dialogue with the leader of that superpower.
So why is Biden refusing to talk to Putin? Talking to him could hardly make matters any worse, and wouldn’t this be time to practice that “steady hand” and “leadership” in foreign policy that we were promised by The Washington Post and NPR and so many other media outlets during the 2020 presidential campaign? If Biden had such a “steady hand” this catastrophic escalation would have been prevented in the first place. One would think Biden, who has known Putin for three decades, would have some personal leverage in negotiations of this sort. Of course, the constant media drumbeat portraying Putin as a “lunatic” and “the devil” certainly helps as much as the leaked “intelligence” regarding the certainty of imminent invasion to validate doing next to nothing to prevent war. If Putin is indeed “the devil,” and there is no doubt that he is a corrupt autocrat, can George W Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton or any other American leaders who bombed sovereign nations or funded the oppression of the black and brown poor of Yemen and Israel be far behind? Are we angels because the hundreds of thousands black and brown civilians we have massacred in remote countries that posed absolutely no threat to the US were not European? I cannot think of many American leaders who have the moral high ground to be calling Putin names and blaming him for all our ills from inflation to loss of our tenuous democracy as an excuse for cutting off all communication.
Now that Biden has failed to intervene, we must dust off tired old strategies in attempt to save face. But these cookie cutter tactics run counter to the lesson of historical precedent. Sanctions have never resolved conflicts. They merely exacerbate inequality and potentiate suffering among the citizenry. Time after time the US has implemented “crippling” sanctions hoping that desperate populations will rise up to overthrow a leader that our intelligence agencies find distasteful. But sanctions rarely if ever end military confrontations and often cause regimes to lash out and escalate their violence. Reckless calls for “No Fly Zones” from pundits and both sides of the aisle, and similar understandable pleas from a desperate Zalensky, ignore the fact that such policy in Libya, Iraq and Bosnia not only failed but led to ground wars in all instances. And in the same futile vein we are sending billions of dollars in weaponry to a wartorn region to arm those on “our side.” Over the past 50 years we have propped up fascist elements and dictators dozens of times in Central America, Asia and the Middle East (and Ukraine) in an attempt to overthrow governments, supplying all manner of arms and weapons. The end result of our meddling is either our having to send US “boots on the ground” to oust the dictator we selected, an increase in economic misery and violence for the people we were ostensibly trying to protect, or a massive weapons cache for terrorists. And if this is not the outcome then the additional artillery just serves to prolong the agony of war and increase casualties.
Obama enacted this sort strategy in Ukraine in 2014, funding neo-Nazi forces to overthrow the democratically elected (and admittedly corrupt) president Yanukovych, and George W Bush did the same in Iraq which ultimately helped to arm the al-Qaeda fighters he urged to “Bring it on.” The Trump administration staged a fake coup in Venezuela to oust “brutal dictator” Maduro, complete with reports from CNN about the “thousands of supporters” who were cheering on US replacement president Guado, only to find that there were no cheering supporters and the Venezuelan people had no appetite for US puppet regimes. Now Biden finds himself begging that “brutal dictator” Maduro and pleading with Mohammed Bin Salmen, who just ordered a mass execution of 82 people including political activists, for the oil we have sanctioned for decades in hopes of salvaging fading Democratic electoral prospects. Political expediency makes for strange bedfellows, not to mention a sickening moral turpitude which is willingly reinforced by the selective coverage of reflexively imperialist and racist media.
Unfortunately, liberals would prefer to protect their rudderless and ineffectual leader Biden than do what is right for the people of Ukraine. They wax poetic about the courage of the Ukranian people in standing up to Russian forces, seemingly oblivious to the fact that most of those who take a stand will be killed or captured. But these crocodile tears for the Ukrainian people and the wall-to-wall exploitation of their plight by US media are surefire distractions from the abject failure of the Biden administration’s diplomacy. Of course, suggesting that Biden has any accountability will have liberals rabid and attacking me about making concessions to the Putin monster who is going to take over the world. They have been fed thousands of hours of propaganda from MSNBC, NPR and CNN speculating about Putin’s mental state and his alleged Trump conspiracies, to the point that they are now espousing the patently false Cold War “Domino Theory.” They claim they can tell Putin has gone off the deep end from one rambling press conference, while at the same time insisting that nobody can tell Biden is having some functional issues despite his own rambling press conference and recurring incidents of inappropriate behavior and disorientation to person, place or time. Putin is such a villain, so much like Trump, that the Pavlovian liberal response is to align with the interests of those who would benefit from war rather than those impacted by it. So sending billions in weapons to Ukraine is of course a wonderful idea if you are a defense contractor, as are sanctions and having NATO encroach upon Russia’s borders if you favor the fantasy of American Empire. We evidently prefer an extension of the Cold War, or even a hot war with the prospects of nuclear obliteration, to our defense contractors and our military losing their pre-eminent position in American foreign policy decision making and media messaging.
Of course, virtually all of the major foreign policy decisions made by Establishment politicians like George W Bush, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been counterproductive at least and mercenary at best. Biden’s decision to complete the exit from Afghanistan was indeed the righteous one, but his calamitous execution of that exit and subsequent inhumane actions against the Afghan people serve to remind us of his unerring commitment to American hegemony and the militarism that enforces it. His inexplicable refusal to talk directly to a world leader who could at any moment launch nuclear weapons, and the liberal/progressive media’s complicity in the escalation of conflict, are evidence that while we rightfully accuse Putin of reliving the Nazi horrors of World War II, Biden and Democrats are stuck in the Cold War McCarthy era. Putin is indeed the perfect patsy for a country sinking in the mire of tribal relativism and the divisive beckonings of echo chamber media, an easy target for a grandstanding political party bereft of moral superiority to get its base to rally around an ineffectual party leader with sagging poll numbers. In his support for Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen, counterfeit wars in sovereign nations that have killed nearly one million in the Middle East and daily human and civil rights violations imposed by Israel upon Palestinians, Biden has no moral standing to refuse to talk to Putin.
I would like to ask Biden which is more important — Republicans, corporate media and The Third Way balking at your “weakness” or your “apology tour,” resulting in election losses that are going to occur regardless, or warding off the potential end of civilization as we know it (or at the very least the deaths of thousands of Ukrainians, a refugee crisis, and the obliteration of Ukraine’s infrastructure and history)? Evidently Democrats and their media have answered that question, so as we are mesmerized by the drumbeat of accolades for Biden’s unification of weapons clearinghouse NATO peppered with inspiring anecdotes of Ukranian resistance, I still ask the question as to why Biden did not do more to prevent this disaster in the first place. And why is he not talking to Putin right now? There can be no ceasefire without US leadership involved in a negotiated settlement, so where precisely is that leadership? Zelensky’s posing of this same question in his address to Congress created ripples of concern among Democrats and their media that Zelensky was offering Republicans talking points in doubting Biden’s leadership, emblematic of the warped priorities and facile warmongering of the Democratic Party.
Before liberals sit me before The House Un-American Activities Committee, rest assured I understand the political and personal perils of resisting war rather than embracing it for the good of the party. What I don’t understand is how the rejection of critical thinking, the abdication of moral responsibility and the acceptance of blind nationalism and militarism in favor of your preferred political party represents democracy. What is the good of democracy if those who grandstand about protecting it merely fall in line with echo chamber propaganda? And if that is all we have remaining, two parties working against our collective interests protected by their echo chamber media and tribal bases, one side working only to prove how much worse the other side is, do we really have a democracy at all? Where have Democrats been as the US assists Mohammed Bin Salmen in the massacre of 400,000 Yemenis and the starvation of hundreds of thousands of children? We should point out that our involvement in the barely mentioned war in Yemen was initiated by Barack Obama and earnestly continued by Biden, who has defied his mealy-mouthed promise to stop giving “offensive” aid to Saudi Arabia in the conflict. Somehow Biden’s lies, which are starving children to death every single day, are not as worthy of compulsive condemnation as Trump’s.
Driven to distraction by the enmeshment of a consolidated and conglomerated media/political party/military/entertainment complex, America is far less concerned with hearing the truth then parroting what their hero pundits, politicians and podcasters have told them. We have been trained to defend our political heroes at all costs, because the other side is so much more of a threat that one can’t risk “circling the wagons” (to quote formerly progressive talker Thom Hartmann). I would argue that truth has become a casualty of war and war has become our singular call to unity, the only thing that will boost a president’s sagging poll numbers because we all have to rally around him regardless of the resulting carnage. This time the excuse is “crazy” Putin. In 2001 we went into Afghanistan to find Osama Bin Laden, then when that didn’t work we changed the regime and occupied the country for no apparent reason, committing war crimes over 20 year period. In 2003 it was deemed time to bomb Saddam Hussein is Iraq for his fabricated weapons of mass destruction and kill half a million civilians while we were at it. In In 2011 it was that “mass murderer” Qadaffi, after whose assassination then Secretary of State Clinton callously chuckled “We came , he saw, he died.” In 2014 it was time to bomb that “butcher” Assad in Syria (he can share that moniker with Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy idol Henry Kissinger). In 2017 it was “socialist dictator” Maduro’s turn in Venezuela. Somehow the outrage against these “unwarranted and unprovoked” incursions by the US was but a whisper compared to the 24 hour flogging of Russia and Putin.
It should be obvious by now that our “World Order” in completely out of order. Because we had the biggest weapons and ended World War II by incinerating half a million innocent people (I know, how else are you going to win a war?) we placed ourselves in charge of the “World Order.” Only it’s likely we have caused far more death, destruction and mass migration in our mismanagement of that World Order since WWII than there would have been if we had done nothing militarily to maintain it at all. Nobody can accurately count the millions of innocents we have slaughtered over the past five decades and the countless war crimes we have committed. So forgive me if I fail to join the chorus of neoliberals and warhawks making the rounds on virtually every media outlet feigning outrage about Putin’s war crimes, it’s only because these brokers of misery are just as inhumane, bereft of judgment and criminal as Putin is. They want Putin out and see this as the ideal opportunity to do so, regardless of the cost to us or to the people of Ukraine. While the lives of so many here in the US have been made so much harder due to the horrific costs of American Exceptionalism and our “World Order” fetishism, the people of Ukraine are suffering acutely from it. They are the latest victims of misguided external geopolitical forces, sandwiched between a neighboring authoritarian who is obsessed with their independence from western influence and a democracy over 5 ,000 miles away that is as belligerent in its militarism as it is feckless in its diplomacy.
As the leader of the free world, it is Biden’s charter to maintain the peace, and now that he’s failed to do so it is his imperative to restore it. Yet he sits back waiting for sanctions to work, talking to everyone but the person in charge. Biden’s ironic response to Zelensky’s plea for him to be a leader in peace is to flood the region with $800 million more in weapons which will bring anything but peace. He offers crippling sanctions that will ultimately harm the Russian people, many of them already poor, far more than they will harm Putin and his oligarchs. The “World Power” that is the United States is left impotent by its decades of bullying on the world stage, left to enable the people of Ukraine to do its dirty work and then glorifying their death and suffering as heroism to distract from America’s impudence. One can’t help to admire the courage of Ukrainians taking arms to protect their country, and that narrative provides David and Goliath imagery that is perfect for framing by a media that assumes it is our natural right to intervene in any and all international conflicts (much less trigger them). Only the idyllic Biblical fantasy becomes a nightmare when Putin’s rage becomes fully realized. As UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres said in his address to the UN Security Council “This conflict will have no winners, only losers.”
The overwhelming power of nationalism, the stifling of the truth that comes with partisan political cheerleading and the belief that our country and its leaders are somehow superior to others has potentiated a downward spiral that appears to be bringing us closer to World War III and nuclear annihilation. It will take a major rethinking of our foreign policy and priorities to prevent the increasingly grim prospect of a global war, already bubbling under due the instability we have caused from the Middle East to Central America to Eastern Europe to Africa. While our current foreign policy is to maintain over 800 military bases in 70 countries, this policing of the world has not resulted in the prevention of unending occupation, genocide, mass migration and military escalation. Ukraine was pleading with the Biden administration to do something about the Russian troop buildup on its borders as early as December of last year, but their pleas were met with a stonewall citing concerns about provoking Putin. Yet our policy regarding NATO positioning in the region has been doing just that for decades.
The cruel joke is that nearly all voices in American media and politics consider a massive transfer of weapons to Ukraine as some sort of noble response. This war profiteering is a ruse proving once again that our country is all but owned by the military/media complex, with “progressive” voices acting as their useful idiots chiming in to protect their hero Biden in the interest of winning the next election. It is a grotesque spectacle when merely agreeing that Ukraine will not become a part of NATO and will remain neutral in its military association with the west is likely all that was needed to avoid the destruction of $100 billion in Ukrainian history and infrastructure and the loss of thousands of lives. We are so conditioned to war and the performative stoicism of our leaders, so easily directed by a tabloid and trivialized media to fear the latest bogeyman, that we unite in favor of death and destruction then attack those who would have the nerve to bring us down from our reality-show war high and propose solutions for peace.
Zelensky’s call for Biden to be a “leader in peace” serves as a painful reminder of how the United States has been a leader in war and escalation of militarism around the globe. Biden needs to make it clear that he is taking Ukranian membership in NATO off the table, and that the US will stand behind any concessions made by Ukrainian leadership to end the conflict. The indifferent reaction to Biden’s lack of engagement in diplomacy shows the degree to which America is desensitized to its own hegemony. Who are we to think we are capable of spreading democracy when our country elected Donald Trump who then proceeded led an insurrection against his own government? Is democracy marked by our own representatives passing laws making it more difficult or impossible for selected constituencies to participate in it? What kind of democracy allows members of its own governing body to explicitly threaten death to fellow members and remain in office? And what kind of democracy shuts down the notion of peace because it thinks it has the right to tell another world leader how he is supposed to “behave” when it has behaved in far worse fashion on the international stage? Does a democracy stand by in silence while its leaders slaughter millions of innocents around the world? Is this the future we are envisioning for Ukraine, a mini-America run by its own oligarchs who are perceived as more benevolent than Russian oligarchs?
American media did a 24/7 shift lauding ‘s courage in holding up a sign behind a Russian state television anchor that read “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” Yet they only talked about how it was directed at Putin, but it was also directed at us. It is an anti-war sign, and the lies being told to recruit support for Putin’s war are the same ones told here to gin up support for every war since World War II. Or worse yet, there are no lies because some of our wars are simply not discussed by our media, or other modes of war like our drone wars are simply hidden from view by our government. In fact, the protest against war is far more visible in Russia, billed as a dictatorship, than it is here in our democracy, because our media pretends that this war is just a figment of Putin’s paranoid imagination. And while there is a kernel of truth to that, it is a half-truth at best. Our media was amplifying the message of intelligence agencies that have misled us about wars and regime change time and time again, assuring us that Putin was ready to strike. Were any of them calling for Biden to stop it? Where were the voices of peace in our media? The idea is absurd that for weeks our intelligence agencies were having our media broadcast their certainty that Putin was about to massacre thousands (or millions) of people, yet the only thing our media was interested in was speculating about why and when and not at all what could be done to stop it. What is the good of being so sure about impending mass destruction if you don’t intend to do anything to intervene? What was the usefulness in feeding the American public this information with such persistence in the absence of offering any potential solutions, or with any influential voices calling for peace?
If you think I should tacitly accept the manner in which NPR, MSNBC, CNN and the rest wantonly programmed us for war, please alert me the next time any of our major newsmedia spends half of their day talking to the starving people of Yemen, or details human interest story after human interest story about the victims of our infernal and perpetual wars in the Middle East. Propaganda takes many forms, from suppression of certain issues while spending inordinate amounts of time on others to broadcasting the unquestioned and unfiltered intelligence of your own government 24 hours a day. In America, our sources of information are so consolidated and so intertwined with and invested in the forces that control our foreign policy and global trade that it is difficult to weed out “propaganda” in the traditional sense because all of these sources start from a perspective that we are the “good guys” and naturally have the right to commit mass murder anywhere we please. We have our own form of “state run media,” or “oligarch run media” if you prefer, and while some of that media transmits its bullet points along party lines, when it comes to war it’s only a question of calling for more intervention not less depending upon if that particular conglomerate‘s ideology leans Democrat or Republican.
While soaking in all the tragedy and violence that reality war show coverage brings will boost your norepinephrine and cortisol levels, potentiated by that vicarious excitement that comes with playing your own game of real world Stratego along with the pundits to figure if we should or shouldn’t send those fighter jets from Poland or implement a “No Fly Zone,” it will be a lot less fun and hardly vicarious when reporters from the BBC are pointing cameras at you while you run bloodied in the streets telling your story of how you barely escaped the destruction of your home. Because Americans are unable to view their country through anything but the lens of their imperialist pundits and politicians they are equally unable to comprehend the human suffering and hostility towards the US caused by our culture of war. Our willing embrace of the new Cold War being marketed by corporate media multi-millionaires and billionaires and the standard Lazy Susan of US military and security officials who make the rounds on those Sunday shows could see us encircled and threatened by our enemies in a mirror image of our foreign policy. It is not at all farfetched to see a scenario far worse than the Cuban missile crisis, with Russia stationing hypersonic missiles off the East Coast, one finger twitchy trigger finger away from a nuclear holocaust.
At the very least I’m sending this to my representatives and urging them to start talking to the Biden administration about negotiating new nuclear disarmament treaties, removing U.S. missiles from countries bordering Russia and dialing back NATO expansion. But with the numbing drone of Red Scare propaganda being burnt into our brains every minute of every day, I’m afraid there aren’t many who aren’t already programmed to mock peace and instead are trained to worship war. And I’m afraid when the day comes that there are enough who will join me, it will be only because it’s too late. It’s already too late for the people of Ukraine. Are you content to sit back and watch until doomsday?