Anti War: Thread

[grarpamp]

The Long, Lucrative & Bloody Road To World War 3
Connor Freeman

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-long-lucrative-and-bloody-road-to-world-war-iii/

Well, this war in Ukraine will last “months and years.” At least, that
is what the leaders of the D.C. foreign policy blob, the media,
President Joe Biden’s men, Pentagon and NATO leadership have decided.
Their plan is to pour oil on the flames and keep the fire raging.
Also, Americans are going to have to cough up the dough for another
massive aid package, with $20 billion worth of weapons to keep the
blood flowing. In total, this next package will cost the taxpayer $33
billion. With Biden’s proposed $813 billion “defense” budget for 2023,
the U.S. is spending more on the military and war now than ever before
in the country’s history.

Now that we have our very own Ministry of Truth, it would appear any
national debate over these polices, indeed if such a debate is ever
allowed to take place, will likely have to be moderated by cockroaches
and Keith Richards.

NATO is set to expand again, bringing in Finland and Sweden. This will
extend the alliance’s border with Russia by greater than 800 miles and
further stoke nuclear tensions, bringing the current brinksmanship to
a whole new level. Moscow plans to respond including by increasing air
and naval forces in the Baltic Sea and reinforcing its Kaliningrad
exclave, which lies between NATO members Poland and Lithuania, with
additional nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles. Until 2004, it was
unthinkable that NATO would ever expand to Russia’s borders until that
actually happened. Like most of our issues with Russia, this is all
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’s fault.

Even as Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other leaders in
Moscow repeatedly warn of nuclear conflict and World War III, even
directly comparing the current situation to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
senior Pentagon officials say they are not concerned.
Images: AP

Nor do our all-knowing rulers appear concerned with the fact that they
have “almost zero” ability to keep track of the myriad sophisticated
weapons systems they are sending to Ukraine. CNN quoted briefed
sources saying intelligence shows American arms are falling into a
“big black hole.” They say it’s worth it.

Nor do they seem to be concerned with the Russians’ warnings regarding
how the West’s weapons flood in Ukraine threatens to expand the war
into NATO territory and destabilize Europe. UK Foreign Secretary Liz
Truss demands the West must “double down” on arms shipments, insisting
particularly on “heavy weapons, tanks, airplanes—digging deep into our
inventories, ramping up production. We need to do all of this.”

Our top diplomat Antony Blinken says the plan is regime change in
Moscow, much like his boss did in March with his Polish “gaffe.”
Ironically, the $47 billion in weapons and other U.S. aid pledged to
Ukraine these last two months will soon surpass the State Department’s
entire budget. Eat your heart out, Netanyahu!

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, former Raytheon board member, says
the goal is to see Russia “weakened” to the point where it lacks even
the capability to defend itself just outside its borders. As Pat
Buchanan notes, this policy, whether its intended to or not, pressures
the Kremlin to more seriously consider pulling its nuclear trigger.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the
kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin said
with a clear eye toward increasing Russian casualties and the long
term destruction of Moscow’s conventional power.

Perhaps, Austin wants to cripple Russia so severely that his Pentagon
can fight a war with China, the “most consequential strategic
competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department,” without
having to worry so much about Moscow—deemed a second tier “acute”
threat, albeit one armed with roughly 6,000 nukes—getting involved.

Austin’s Raytheon pals are making a killing on this proxy war as well
as the ancillary effects such as European NATO states, at long last,
increasing their military spending.

    “You are making it possible for the Ukrainian people to defend
themselves without us having to risk getting in a third World War by
sending American soldiers to fight Russian soldiers.”
    — Biden, to workers at a plant that makes Javelin antitank
missileshttps://t.co/lrPmeYcVhe
    — Cliff Levy (@cliffordlevy) May 3, 2022

As Ron Paul has written,

    One group of special interests profiting massively on the war is
the US military-industrial complex. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes recently
told a meeting of shareholders that, “Everything that’s being shipped
into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at
DOD or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually
we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business.”

    He wasn’t lying. Raytheon, along with Lockheed Martin and
countless other weapons manufacturers are enjoying a windfall they
have not seen in years. The U.S. has committed more than three billion
dollars in military aid to Ukraine. They call it aid, but it is
actually corporate welfare: Washington sending billions to arms
manufacturers for weapons sent overseas.

    By many accounts these shipments of weapons like the Javelin
anti-tank missile (jointly manufactured by Raytheon and Lockheed
Martin) are getting blown up as soon as they arrive in Ukraine. This
doesn’t bother Raytheon at all. The more weapons blown up by Russia in
Ukraine, the more new orders come from the Pentagon.

    Former Warsaw Pact countries now members of NATO are in on the
scam as well. They’ve discovered how to dispose of their 30-year-old
Soviet-made weapons and receive modern replacements from the U.S. and
other western NATO countries.

There is scarcely a status quo to oppose. For weeks, escalations have
continued apace. London has deployed SAS troops in Kiev to train
Ukrainian troops on English anti-tank weapons. The U.S. is training
Kiev’s troops in Germany and two other secret locations in Europe on
heavy artillery, radar systems, and armored vehicles. Washington is
expanding intelligence sharing with Kiev for its war with Russia in
the Donbas, providing howitzers, vehicles to carry them, and an
additional 144,000 artillery rounds. Poland is sending tanks to
Ukraine, Slovenia has a plan to send large numbers of T-72 battle
tanks as well. The Germans will be supplying anti-aircraft tanks to
Kiev and the Pentagon says an unidentified European ally is providing
Ukraine with warplanes.

London’s armed forces minister declared his government’s support for
Kiev’s “completely legitimate” attacks inside Russia using British
arms. This comes amid an uptick in reports of Ukrainian cross border
drone and helicopter assaults including on Russian oil depots,
residential areas, and villages. The U.S. and its European allies are
implementing a long term policy that looks to exile Russia, looking
toward a new world order where they no longer seek to “coexist” with
Moscow.

London wants Europe to cut off all Russian energy “once and for all,”
which would make war more likely, impoverish innocent people, and
cause massive recessions.

The U.S., NATO, and Russian presence in the Mediterranean Sea has
reached Cold War levels, as NATO builds new Eastern European
battlegroups.

In March, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned that any “use
of chemical weapons would totally change the nature of the conflict,
it would be a blatant violation of international law and would have
far-reaching consequences.” This weekend, legislation for a new
Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) has been introduced
by Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). Kinzinger’s announcement calls
the would be AUMF a “clear red line,” which would authorize Biden to
deploy troops to Ukraine to fight Russians if Moscow should “use
chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons.”

With the almost complete bipartisan Congressional support for the
renewal of Lend-Lease and other anti-Russia, pro-war legislation, it
is not outside the realm of possibility that this bill and its cynical
redline trap becomes law.

For nearly two decades, Washington has funded “biological research”
and other laboratories inside Ukraine. According to the head of the
DoD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, some of these labs may
contain Soviet-era bioweapons.

As Dave DeCamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, has reported,

    The Pentagon funds labs in Ukraine through its Defense Threat
Reduction Agency (DTRA). According to a Pentagon fact sheet released
last month, since 2005, the U.S. has “invested” $200 million in
“supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and
diagnostic sites.”

    Moscow has accused Ukraine of conducting an emergency clean-up of
a secret Pentagon-funded biological weapons program when Russia
invaded. The World Health Organization said it advised Ukraine to
destroy “high-threat pathogens” around the time of the invasion.

    For their part, the U.S. maintains that the program in Ukraine and
other former Soviet states is meant to reduce the threat of biological
weapons left over from the Soviet Union. While downplaying the threat
of the labs, Pentagon officials have also warned that they could still
contain Soviet-era bioweapons.

    Robert Pope, the director of the DTRA’s Cooperative Threat
Reduction Program, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in
February that the labs might contain Soviet bioweapons and warned that
the fighting in Ukraine could lead to the release of a dangerous
pathogen.

Much like previous Syrian redlines, this is practically the hawks’
invitation to bad actors seeking U.S. intervention to go ahead and
launch an attack that could be plausibly blamed on our Hitler du jour
to manufacture their desired casus belli.

It seems there may be ample sites somebody could hit that would cross
Kinzinger’s cleverly drawn line in the sand. And much like the CIA,
Turkey, and Saudi Arabia’s al Qaeda allies in Syria, the Azov
Battalion and other Nazi groups, who have taken a humiliating beating
thus far in the war, are prime candidates to launch a false flag.

If the American people do not wake up and demand an end to our
government’s intervention in Ukraine, the U.S. may be directly
entering this war soon.

If Russia was doing what the U.S. and its allies are doing in Ukraine,
in Mexico or Canada, in addition to the unprecedented economic war
being waged, these hawks in D.C. would have pulled the aforementioned
nuclear trigger months ago.