American Empire employs propaganda to justify arms to Ukraine
Dangerous fabrications of former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates equal or better the instruction of Putin's lies
A few voices asking why the United States should care about the fate of Ukraine ignited a panic attack within the richly adorned corridors of power of the American Empire. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates responded with a column in the Washington Post (“Time is not on Ukraine’s side, January 8, 2023) claiming our lavish military assistance to Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory was necessary to prevent an eventual threat to our national security.
National security clairvoyance is not their strong suit. The two Soviet experts spectacularly blundered in failing to discern the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They were partial architects of a 20-year, $2 trillion war in Afghanistan that returned a second edition of the Taliban more oppressive than the first. Ms. Rice concocted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify a United States war of aggression.
The two maintain, as self-evident truths, that “the United States has learned the hard way—in 1914, 1941, and 2001—that unprovoked aggression and attacks on the rule of law cannot be ignored. Eventually, our security was threatened and we were pulled into conflict.”
But the Rice-Gates truths are not true. Indeed, they are self-evident falsehoods. For starters, the United States was not pulled into conflict in World War I. We chose to be a co-belligerent from the outset by abandoning neutrality and systematically assisting the military endeavors of Britain and France. We gratuitously entered the war in 1917 not because we had been attacked by Germany, but to defend a contrived right of Americans to travel on vessels in war zones notwithstanding clear warnings of danger. President Woodrow Wilson, to stir up American fury, lied about the Lusitania carrying ammunition for the Triple Entente.
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was not unprovoked. The United States had already become a co-belligerent with China against Japan by creating Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in support of the corrupt Chiang Kai-check. We had also enforced a crippling economic embargo against Japan.
We again provoked the 2001 terrorist abominations of Al Qaeda by gratuitously maintaining United States troops near the two holiest places in Islam: Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
Rice and Gates are predictably silent about the unprovoked attacks of the United States on Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. Putin was simply following our instruction in attacking Ukraine. To paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, all unprovoked attacks are equal but some are more equal than others in the eyes of Rice and Gates.
Putting their historical distortions and hypocrisies aside, Rice and Gates celebrate a doctrine of anticipatory self-defense, a euphemism for the crime of aggressive war, that guarantees that the United States will war over straws.
According to the duo, we must enter the Ukraine war as a co-belligerent because Putin’s invasion has jumped inflation and damaged economic growth. By that standard, we should be attacking Saudi Arabia and every OPEC member for spiking the price of crude oil, or China for interrupting supply lines.
The doctrine of anticipatory self-defense contradicts the United Nations Charter and the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in punishing aggressive war as crimes against peace. Rice and Gates are unable to articulate a manageable principle for determining whether a threshold of risk to the United States has been reached that triggers a right of preemptive warfare. Adolf Hitler invoked anticipatory self-defense to attack Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and multiple other countries. Indeed, Putin invoked putative nuclear weapons or plans in Ukraine to justify his invasion.
The U.S. has employed anticipatory self-defense to invade Cuba, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Syria. The interventions have inflicted vastly more misery than they have alleviated. The doctrine will get us into a disastrous land war with China over Taiwan, which President Biden has threatened at least four times.
The lesson of history is that we should not abandon our neutrality over Ukraine. We should confine our influence abroad to the influence of example as President George Washington instructed in his Farewell Address.
You forget Nicaragua, Grenada, Argentina (Falklands War), El Salvador, Chile, Lebanon, Panama, Cambodia, Laos. Nicaragua, uniquely, is an example of where Congress specifically prohibited military intervention but Regan, in a clearly impeachable offense, flaunted the Constitution.