The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, W. Niederhut said:

Jeff,

     You have posted a lot of absurd bunk on this forum during the past five years, but this utterly erroneous comment about Dr. Fiona Hill really takes the proverbial cake.

      Is RT paying you with Bitcoin this month?

     I urge people interested in understanding Putin and the Ukraine crisis to read Dr. Fiona Hill's erudite, informed analysis (above) to judge its merits for themselves.

I don’t know about that. As Jeff points out she is not and has never been on the ground in Ukraine. She is a member of both the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. 
No one, Jeff included, is happy about Putin’s invasion. He is rightly pointing out the history that brought us to this brink. The good guy bad guy vision of the world which so many of you seem to espouse is what gets us here every time. How convenient it is to condemn Russia for being worried about NATO expansion by saying that Russia needn’t worry - these are the good guys in their borders. Why are you incapable of putting your shoes on another’s foot? A new Cold War is unfolding, and you think it’s all Putin’s fault? Our beloved MSM, who does a mighty disservice to us all, here especially, is now our truth teller? They have no perspective. Ukraine on the front page, Myanmar, Yemen notably almost non existent, yet far worse. It’s the same tired song - “look over here, not over there”. Hold the Saudis accountable? No of course not, we’ve got Putin for that. Qui Bono? The Ukrainian people? 

[Matt Allison]

This whole "the media is bad" trope is really stale. 

People are basing their opinions on the dozens of videos they've seen with their own eyes of the carnage, and the statements they've heard directly from Putin's piehole. Period.

Nobody is being propagandized or fooled here, except those that are still trying to push Putin's obvious BS narrative.

[W. Niederhut]

44 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

I don’t know about that. As Jeff points out she is not and has never been on the ground in Ukraine. She is a member of both the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. 
No one, Jeff included, is happy about Putin’s invasion. He is rightly pointing out the history that brought us to this brink. The good guy bad guy vision of the world which so many of you seem to espouse is what gets us here every time. How convenient it is to condemn Russia for being worried about NATO expansion by saying that Russia needn’t worry - these are the good guys in their borders. Why are you incapable of putting your shoes on another’s foot? A new Cold War is unfolding, and you think it’s all Putin’s fault? Our beloved MSM, who does a mighty disservice to us all, here especially, is now our truth teller? They have no perspective. Ukraine on the front page, Myanmar, Yemen notably almost non existent, yet far worse. It’s the same tired song - “look over here, not over there”. Hold the Saudis accountable? No of course not, we’ve got Putin for that. Qui Bono? The Ukrainian people? 

Paul,

     I urge you to study Hill's latest commentary above.  It is quite erudite, and displays a profound grasp of European and Russian history, in addition to direct, firsthand observations of Putin, (including Putin's threats to Trump about using hypersonic nuclear missiles) some of which were not publicized previously.

    Meanwhile, Russ Baker's WhoWhatWhat magazine has just called out Fox News pundit Glenn Greenwald for his moral relativism and faceplant on Ukraine.*

     Personally, I gave up on Nietzschean moral relativism after my sophomore year in college.  As  Huey Lewis put it, "Sometimes bad is bad."

    Perhaps Jeff will eventually undergo a long overdue paradigm shift and acknowledge his Ukraine faceplant, but I won't hold my breath...

*   https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/international/from-russia-with-hate/

Edited March 2, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[Bob Ness]

1 hour ago, Matt Allison said:

Aren't you glad Jeff is here to shill for a guy that indiscriminately bombs apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools?

WTF man. Fix yourself.

Please. He's thrilled they're killing all those Nasi's!! The only person we should be listening to is Jeff. All his sources are the end all. The arrogance is stunning.

[Bob Ness]

4 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

Fiona Hill is a careerist shill. Her experience with Russia is limited to a student exchange trip in the late 1980s. She is a product of the academic/think tank treadmill, and is rewarded with flattery for her mediocre and ill-informed opinions. The people who actually know what they are talking about have all been marginalized and weaned from the system long ago.

NATO expansion is the root of this crisis, and a looming conflict over it has been known and discussed at high levels for three decades. It is clear that policy makers and narrative shapers in the west prefer a “madman” storyline rather than deal with material reality. Russia’s position was clearly articulated back in 2007-2008. US ambassador to Russia at the time, William Burns, spelled it out in a memorandum prepared for the highest levels of the national security bureaucracy in February 2008:

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

Six years later, the U.S. facilitated a coup in Ukraine designed to deliberately cross all of Russia’s red lines. This coup was shepherded by Victoria Nuland, a neo-conservative apparatchik. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney through the first three years of the Iraq War (2003-2005), then served as US ambassador to NATO (2005-2008), and then entered the State Department concentrating on European affairs. Nuland’s avowed positions on Russian “aggression” and “expansionism” rely entirely on pretending that high level discussions and concerns regarding NATO either never happened or were not important.

The way out of the crisis that Nuland and the neoconservatives created in 2014 was to walk back the coup. Instead, the Obama administration endorsed it. The way out of the crisis in 2015 was to follow through with the UNSC approved Minsk Accords, but nothing was done.

Now there is a major and very serious international crisis, and the response of the western leadership has been to crash the global economy, apparently in the interest of recreating a bifurcated Cold War system and a return to a “with us or against us” global posture. This will eventually serve only to isolate precisely us - the west. We are in for major financial shocks amidst escalating restrictions in the flow of information and international travel / trade.

Weird Jeff. How much time have you spent in Russia? Presumably you go on occasion for RT. Doesn't keep you from spewing crap. My bet is she know's about 5,000 times more than you on the subject.

Of course it was a coup! How could have been anything else? We can see how the people in Ukraine were thrilled to have Russia take out those nasty Ustachi/Nasis.

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Paul,

     I urge you to study Hill's latest commentary above.  It is quite erudite, and displays a profound grasp of European and Russian history, in addition to direct, firsthand observations of Putin, (including Putin's threats to Trump about using hypersonic nuclear missiles) some of which were not publicized previously.

    Meanwhile, Russ Baker's WhoWhatWhat magazine has just called out Fox News pundit Glenn Greenwald for his moral relativism and faceplant on Ukraine.*

     Personally, I gave up on Nietzschean moral relativism after my sophomore year in college.  As  Huey Lewis put it, "Sometimes bad is bad."

    Perhaps Jeff will eventually undergo a long overdue paradigm shift and acknowledge his Ukraine faceplant, but I won't hold my breath...

*   https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/international/from-russia-with-hate/

W.--

 

I dunno. According the "Dr." Hill, President Biden helped precipitate the Russian invasion into Ukraine by looking weak and pulling out of Afghanistan.

"Beyond the impact of Trump's presidency, Hill also pointed to the Afghanistan withdrawal in terms of why Putin sees now as an opportune moment to challenge the West on Ukraine."----Business Insider

So, the weakling Biden (who has been president for more than a year now) is responsible for Putin's takeover of Ukraine, or so says Hill. 

Do you agree with that? 

 

[Jeff Carter]

Fiona Hill belongs to the national security clique who well understood  fourteen years ago the implications of Burns’ memorandum but accepted a move forward with provocations regardless. As she concedes in the Politico interview:

“Back then (2008) I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action…”

She admits the basic incompetence of the National Intelligence Council and herself - “we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia…we have had a long-term policy failure…we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions.”

Instead, a neoconservative operative was put in place to instigate a coup in Ukraine six years after Burns’ memo, and at the time all the careerist intelligence people claimed to be shocked - Shocked! - that the Russians engaged in preemptive action.

Hill admits the Russians had a “logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007”, and yet spends most of the interview trying to pitch a story that an all powerful Putin is unpredictable, emotional and impulsive.

I don’t see how that in any way represents quality analysis.

[Benjamin Cole]

3 minutes ago, Jeff Carter said:

Fiona Hill belongs to the national security clique who well understood  fourteen years ago the implications of Burns’ memorandum but accepted a move forward with provocations regardless. As she concedes in the Politico interview:

“Back then (2008) I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action…”

She admits the basic incompetence of the National Intelligence Council and herself - “we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia…we have had a long-term policy failure…we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions.”

Instead, a neoconservative operative was put in place to instigate a coup in Ukraine six years after Burns’ memo, and at the time all the careerist intelligence people claimed to be shocked - Shocked! - that the Russians engaged in preemptive action.

Hill admits the Russians had a “logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007”, and yet spends most of the interview trying to pitch a story that an all powerful Putin is unpredictable, emotional and impulsive.

I don’t see how that in any way represents quality analysis.

We can disagree with Jeff Carter and in some ways I do. I think this is a volitional war on Putin's behalf, just as Iraq and Afghanistan were even less justifiable volitional wars on the part of Bush jr. 

That said, the US has almost no interests in Ukraine. But Ukraine is very important to Russia, and seen as a pathway into Russia. On and off for 1000 years Ukraine and Russia have been under one national roof.  

There might have been more tact and diplomacy used in this situation.

It appears the left-wing of US politics, and the Donks, have been totally absorbed into the corporatist global security state, joining the old guard of the GOP. 

Trump accomplished what no other force could: He created an unrecognized  bipartisan America that supports, and is supported by, the Deep State.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Ron Bulman]

'Wanted: Dead or Alive': Russian Tycoon Puts $1M Bounty on Putin's Head (msn.com)

 

[W. Niederhut]

     What Putin is doing right now in Ukraine is merely the most recent chapter in his 20 year KGB/oligarchic ops to divide and weaken Western democracies in Europe and the U.S. in order to expand Russian hegemony.

     It's much worse than Americans realize.

    What most people don't know is that the Soviet KGB never disappeared.  It merely went under the radar during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-- as did Dresden-based KGB Major Putin-- before eventually assuming control of the Russian Federation in the guise of "democratic" leaders like Putin (and his mentor Sobchak.)

     Yeltsin would never have come to power without tacit KGB support.  And the KGB had long anticipated that the USSR would collapse.  They prepared for it.

    In the process, the Russian Federation under Putin devolved into an international, oligarchic, KGB-directed crime syndicate.  And they were very aggressive with ops to de-stabilize Western democracies-- using oligarchic money to fund right wing politicians throughout Europe (including Boris Johnson , Le Pen, and Berlusconi) and Trump in the U.S.

    The goal was to weaken and divide NATO, the EU, and U.S. society.

    Putin and Russian oligarchs like Konstantin Malofeyev also funded superficially "Orthodox" fascist right wing agitators to destabilize Ukraine, as early as 2010 in Donetsk, four years before Putin's green men seized the Crimea in 2014.

    An excellent book detailing this history is Catherine Belton's Putin's People.

    Chapter 14 details Putin's Ukraine and EU ops during the past decade.

    Chapter 15 focuses on Putin's KGB/oligarchic recruitment and entrapment of Donald Trump.

Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West

https://www.amazon.com/Putins-People-Took-Back-Russia-ebook/dp/B07VMZYK13/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1646273626&sr=8-1

Edited March 4, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[Matt Allison]

Fiona Hill will be on Stephen Colbert's show tonight; I'd expect her appearance around 12:15 EST on CBS

Watch and judge her with your own two eyes.

Edited March 3, 2022 by Matt Allison

[Benjamin Cole]

15 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Fiona Hill will be on Stephen Colbert's show tonight; I'd expect her appearance around 12:15 EST on CBS

Watch and judge her with your own two eyes.

Matt-

Here's the thing. The Fiona Hill crowd, which is to say the DC globalist blob, have a world view that results in fantastically expensive perma-wars and entanglements.

According to Hill, Biden invited Putin into Ukraine when Biden showed weakness and left Afghanistan. This is the same argument we heard after Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, and other sinkholes. The world is beckoning tar babies. 

And on the front end, if we do not react to a provocation, then we also show weakness. So, the US reacts to a provocation in the Tonkin Gulf, and then we are trapped for decades. 

Here is a list of the "10 most influential" think tanks: 

Brookings Institution

The Heritage Foundation

Council on Foreign Relations

Cato Institute

Center for Strategic and International Studies

American Enterprise Institute

RAND Corporation

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Atlantic Council

Hoover Institution

With the possible exception of Cato (and even they are entirely globalist when it come to trade issues), there is no alternative to globalism in DC. 

People talk about "liberal" or "conservative" think tanks as if they are tin soldiers on an intellectual battlefield, but when it come to globalism, there is no battlefield. All the tin soldiers point the same way (actually they do on most other issues too).  

US cities can turn to crap, but we have to prevail in Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or form alliances across the world and spend $1.3 trillion annually on national defense. 

And if you do not agree, then you are a Russian stooge, a domestic terrorist, or a total ingrate regarding the terrific sacrifices made by our armed forces for your freedoms.

Hill may be pleasing personally, may be literate, may be well-spoken. So what? 

Is there a way off this unending carousel of entanglements, each one breeding more? 

Biden chickened out on Afghanistan, and prompted Ukraine. And if he chickens out on Ukraine then....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Matt Allison]

I enjoyed her appearance. The talk was primarily about off-ramps; de-escalation that provides the most acceptable outcome to all parties.

She said something that I had actually been thinking myself, which is that rather than the slow crawl being due to the Russian Army being inept, they might have actually been hoping to minimize casualties up to this point.

(That does not excuse the horrible decision to invade. And thinking there wouldn't be resistance by the people of Ukraine is as clueless as it gets.)

She said she hopes that Xi could enter the discussions, as he has the ear of Putin; Putin and Xi get along well. However as of today, she thinks it's currently unlikely.

Putin is highly intelligent yet made many bad decisions here; he should return to pragmatism.

[Matt Allison]

Ben- I'll have to read up and check the context of that quote.

I like to get a read on people using my own observations and instincts. Up to this point that's served me well, and hopefully will continue to; knock on wood.

[Ron Bulman]

Thinking earlier about the stalled 40 mile long convoy.   Fuel, food, maybe self punctured gas tanks?  Demoralized troops?  

I also read of unconfirmed reports of Ukraine forces attacking it at points.  Last night I read of I believe they're called newer NLAW shot from the shoulder anti tank weapons.  Deadly up to 900 yards.  I'd heard of older Stingers or Javelins.  Didn't know they were effective up to nearly two miles.

So if they could sneak up to within half mile to two miles with these weapons at points, they could play havoc with progression?