Eric Zuesse

On April 26th, Reuters headlined from Romania, “‘We’re Not Here to Provoke,’ Say U.S. Pilots on Putin’s Doorstep”, and gave as an example: “‘We're not here to provoke anybody, we're here to work with our allies,’ says Dan Barina, a 26-year-old pilot on his first trip to a region where tensions have risen markedly since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Romania's neighbor Ukraine two years ago.”

How can it not be ‘provoking', when Russia now faces a threat from Obama and America's NATO alliance, that’s vastly worse than what America had faced from the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? That was just one missile-base, 90 miles from the U.S. — not dozens of them, some right on Russia’s border. Are those American pilots idiots to believe their superiors’ absurd statements about what their mission is, or is insanity the explanation here — or, is there even some third explanation possible for this oblivious statement from the American pilot? Perhaps those soldiers and airmen are simply drowning in (or drunk with) U.S. propaganda? They really believe that Russia is moving too close to NATO, not that NATO has already moved too close to Russia? Really? The Reuters report said that NATO countries were doing this to protect themselves from “an increasingly aggressive Russia.” Wow. But that’s the line promoted by U.S. President Barack Obama. And he’s accepted as a decent person not only by the millions of voters in his own Democratic Party (though not in the Republican Party, which blames him for everything except the truth: that he is governing so far to the right that they have to concoct false ‘leftist’ reasons to criticize him); but, he’s also respected even by the publics in Europe, where they suffer the flood of refugees from the invasions he leads. After all: one must never underestimate the power of propaganda, to warp the public’s minds.

On February 2nd, the U.S. ‘Defense’ Secretary, Russia-hater Ashton Carter, announced — and the equally Russia-hating NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed and endorsed — America’s quadrupling of its troops and weapons on and near Russia’s northwestern borders; and America’s pilot Dan Barina is part of this extremely hostile action, by the U.S. and NATO, against the people in Russia.

Russia is now surrounded, on and near its borders, by numerous U.S. nuclear weapons — weapons and troops that are as close to St. Petersburg and Moscow as they can possibly get without actually invading Russia.

In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the USSR and ended its Warsaw Pact, upon a promise from the regime of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush to the then-Soviet (soon-to-become merely Russian) leader, that NATO would move “not one inch to the east” — a promise which the American President told his people in private was actually a lie, but which they, and all subsequent U.S. Presidents, have accepted as Western policy founded on that lie, by expanding NATO not merely “one inch to the east,” but right up to Russia’s very borders. That’s what this February 2nd policy by U.S. President Barack Obama and his NATO stooges is bringing substantially closer to culmination.

How can this not be “provocative”? What type of idiot can believe his superiors when they say “We’re not here to provoke anybody”? Of course, it’s not to “provoke” Russians: it’s to downright terrify them. They’d have to be crazy not to be terrified, at being increasingly surrounded by these WMD, from what is increasingly clearly their enemy.

This big lie, that what America is doing there is ‘defensive’, is stanched up by other, lesser, lies, such as Obama’s lie that the reason why he’s expanding America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (anti-ballistic missile, or ‘star wars’) system, in Europe, has been to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles. Iran never had nuclear weapons, and Obama reached an agreement with Iran that will for decades prevent Iran from having them, but he still expands the SDI system right up to Russia’s borders, as ‘protection against Iran’. The people who protest against Obama’s lies are then marginalized as mere kooks, which is the way to get idiots to ignore even the most barefaced facts (such as Western terrorization of the Russian population), because only idiots can continue to believe such liars as the Obama regime, when their lies are so obvious as this. These protests against Obama and NATO and all of Western aggression, aren’t coming from America’s Republicans or other right-wingers: the smearing of these protesters with that broad-brush taint can be believed only by idiots — people who are willingly suckers, suckers notwithstanding the blatancy with which the facts run against the lies they swallow.

From the very get-go, in 1983 — when the Republican U.S. President, Ronald Reagan (with the active support of Ashton Carter at MIT), started the SDI project, under the lie that disabling a combatant’s retaliatory ability isn’t profoundly aggressive against that opponent (basically checkmating him) — the SDI concept was aimed at achieving an invasion of the Soviet Union which couldn’t be effectively countered; it was aimed ultimately at replacing the balance-of-power system of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), by a gross imbalance of power that would enable conquest of the opponent; it would enable a blitz-attack against the Soviet Union, an attack which wouldn’t be able effectively to be responded to via a counter-attack; it would enable an attack which would pre-emptively disable that response to it. In other words: it’s all a con, a lie, to say that SDI is ‘purely a defensive measure’. It can be the most decisive aggressive measure, the only way that’s even conceivable to ‘win’ a nuclear war (as some of the West’s aristocrats think can be done).

Wikipedia notes about Ashton Carter: “Carter was a supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as an advocate of preventive wars against North Korea and Iran.[43][44][45] In response to increase in tension in Ukraine, Carter considered proposing deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy Russian weapons.” That’s a “hawkish” background just as Hillary Clinton’s is, virtually indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; and yet, Barack Obama, when he was starting his political career in a region where the opposition to invading Iraq was strong, Obama claimed that he opposed invading Iraq. Yet, somehow, once he was finally inside the White House, suddenly the people he was surrounding himself with were Wall-Street-backed individuals who had supported invading Iraq (and any other country whose leader was friendly toward Russia). He did to Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, what George W. Bush did to Iraq. If that’s not fraudulent ‘democracy’, then what is? The public had been given no indication they would be getting, with Barack Obama, merely a more-articulate version of George W. Bush.

America has been lying not only regarding its aggressive designs against the Soviet Union, but (and this is far more heinous) — afterward, when the supposed ‘ideological’ reason for the Cold War had ended — it is lying even more blatantly in its ‘justifications’ for its (and NATO’s) anti-Russia policies despite communism having ended and the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact) disbanded.

How much longer will the aristocracy that control the U.S. Government be able to get away with such obvious lies, such continuation and even escalation of the “Cold War” after its very raison d’etre (anti-communism) is long-since gone? If it turns out to be too long, then only a matter of time will pass before those buttons get pushed and those nuclear weapons are released, to destroy the world. Horrific as those weapons are, they are built, and manned, to be used. If this seems unimaginable, then the question has to be this: Is it as unimaginable as is the manifested-existing evilness of America’s aristocracy (such as Barack Obama, Ashton Carter, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, George Soros, the Koch brothers, etc.) and of the aristocracies (in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) that are allied with it?

And, the use of ‘Crimea’ as an excuse for this restoration of the “Cold War” (which is already a hot war in Ukraine, Syria, and other lands, where the U.S. sees fit to replace leaders that ally with Russia), is just as bogus as is the use of ‘Iranian nuclear weapons’ as an excuse for installing SDI. Any aristocracy that needs to lie so blatantly in order to continue along such a catastrophic path as this, needs to be defeated, instead of to be believed and obeyed. They might as well be Satan. Except that, unfortunately, they’re not mythological — which makes all the difference: this demon is all-too-real.

Here are some news reports from perhaps the world’s best living investigative reporter, Christof Lehmann, who has provided shocking details about how vile this global-aristocratic operation is, regarding Syria — entailing not only the U.S. aristocracy, but the European ones, and the Arabic ones, the entire rotten-through-and-through “Western alliance” (an alliance of aristocracies who can be satisfied with nothing less than their collective global conquest).

The first report, on 2 May 2013, titled “EU Lifts Oil Embargo on Syria – Buys Directly from Al Qaeda”, summarizes the key facts that Western media had already reported (prior to their being virtually banned from reporting these things in the West), things such as that 27 of the 28 EU nations had already decided in April 2013 to purchase oil stolen from Syria by “the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group,” in order to assist the Saudi and Qatari royals in financing “the moderate opposition forces” (such as Al Qaeda — the group that had perpetrated 9/11 and other terrorist attacks against Western populations; and, even Seymour Hersh reported, on 4 April 2014, that Obama and U.S. allies were supplying weapons to al-Nusra) to defeat the Syrian army of Bashar al-Assad. (Assad is Shiite but secular, the opposite of fundamentalist Sunni Islamic, which is the jihadism that the Sauds and their fellow-Arab royals are devoted to; and Assad is furthermore allied with those Arab-royals’ chief oil-and-gas competitor, Russia; so, Western aristocracies help these Sunni jihadists who are being sent into Syria to overthrow Assad.)

The second in the series, on 8 August 2013, was titled “EU/US Al-Qaeda Massacres on Kurds for Oil and Secession.” It opened with this summary: In April 2013, the European Union lifted its embargo on the import of oil from “rebel held” Syrian territories. The import [of oil] is primarily to come from the predominantly Kurdish region of Syria. In July and August 2013, confirmed and unconfirmed reports about massacres of Kurds, committed by western-backed, Al-Qaeda associated insurgents, increase simultaneously with an influx of insurgents [jihadists] from western countries. An estimated 17,000 fighters from the Kurdish Workers´ Party, PKK have deployed from Turkey to the region near Irkuk, in the Kurdish Administrated Region of Iraq. The function of the EU/US strategy – massacres [of Syria’s civilian population] for oil, to finance mercenaries [those jihadist groups that are pouring into Syria to eliminate Assad], and to create a demand for secession among Syrian Kurds, over perceived security concerns.

The third in the series, on 22 June 2014, was titled, “U.S. Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider”, and it opened:The green light for the use of ISIS brigades to carve up Iraq, widen the Syria conflict into a greater Middle East war and to throw Iran off-balance, was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council meeting in Turkey, in November 2013, told a source close to Saudi-Lebanese billionaire Saad Hariri, adding that the U.S. Embassy in Ankara is the operation’s headquarters. A “trusted source” close to the Saudi-Lebanese multi-billionaire and former Lebanese P.M. Saad Hariri told, on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq with ISIS or ISIL brigades was given behind closed doors, at the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 22-23, 2013.

“Certain circles in Washington put a hell of a lot of pressure on Obama to put a gun to al-Maliki’s head”, said the Hariri source, adding that “time was running out and Obama was hesitant.” Asked what he meant with “time was running out” and if he could specify who it was that pushed Obama, he said: …“Who exactly pressured Obama? I don’t know who delivered the message to Obama.”The summit was, among others, attended by Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernst Monitz, Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft [and others]. … Noting that a prominent member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Prince Abdul Rachman al-Faisal has been named as the one being “in command” of the ISIS brigades, and if he could either confirm or deny, he nodded, adding that “the Prince” is responsible for financing the operation and for part of the command structure, but that the operations headquarters is the U.S. Embassy in Ankara Turkey.

The fourth in this series, on 7 October 2013, was titled, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria”, and it’s so good, it simply must be read (just click onto that link). This report documented that Obama’s accusation that Assad had been responsible for the August 2013 sarin attack in Syria is a lie, and that Obama and his allies are the actual people who were behind that sarin attack. It opened: “Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.” It described the scheme, by the White House, plus Saudi King Salman, plus Turkey’s President Erdogan, plus Qatar’s Emir Thani, to run sarin-precursor chemicals from Muammar Gaddafi’s stockpiles through Turkey into Syria, to be turned there into sarin, so that the 21 August 2013 gassing in Ghouta Syria resulted, and it was blamed, by these liars, against Assad, so that it could be used by U.S. President Obama as the excuse to do to Assad what Obama and his allies had already done to Gaddafi.

There were many subsequent news-reports, by Seymour Hersh and others, which documented different aspects of this operation, but none gave a fuller picture of it than did the original, by Christof Lehmann.

By no coincidence, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, all were leaders who had been friendly toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The idea among the Western aristocracies is to eliminate all of Putin’s foreign allies, and then (once he has no foreign allies remaining) to get rid of Putin himself, because Putin refuses to buckle to Western control.

As regards jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda and even ISIS: though they’re of big concern to Western publics, Western aristocrats are far more concerned to conquer Russia. Their foreign policies display this top priority of theirs. To these aristocrats, jihadists are just a side-show. The main event is Russia. The end of communism, and of the USSR, and of the Warsaw Pact, don’t really make any difference to them. They want the land, and its resources. They don’t care about the people on it — anywhere. Just nuke ’em, maybe? It’s a messy job, but it’s the type of job for people such as Dan Barina. Western taxpayers pay their salaries, but the people who control what they do are the Western aristocrats.

Thus, for example, Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015 uses the term “aggression” 18 times, and 17 of them refer to Russia; none of them refer to Al Qaeda, nor to ISIS (which he calls instead “ISIL,” because that’s the English-language version of “DAESH,” the name that the royal Sauds give to the organization), nor to the Sauds and the other Arabic royal families, who finance jihadist groups. (Their only demand upon them is to avoid perpetrating their terrorism within their own countries — to do it only abroad.) However, if the West’s enemies are their own aristocracies, which control both their government and their ’news’ media, then it makes sense that their propaganda will blame Russia and its allies (i.e.: blame the countries the West’s aristocrats want to conquer), for everything they can concoct to blame them. Where the public’s main enemy is in charge, it’s natural for that enemy’s chief foreign enemy to be blamed by the government and the ‘news’ media, so as to get one enemy of the aristocrats (their own public) fearful of the aristocrats’ other enemy (the foreign aristocracy they want to defeat). “Let’s have you and him fight it out.”

Western governments have been heisted by Western aristocrats. This is what has become of “Western ‘democracy’” — and not only of Western kings and princes such as reign in the Arabic countries. They’re all actually tyrannies, even the ones (such as Obama) who speak pretty phrases — who lie right and left about why they are doing what they are doing.

entire U.S. alliance — all of the aristocracies that comprise it — are rotten to the core. Millions of refugees have poured into Europe, and the publics in Europe are outraged, but the people who are behind it all are their own nation’s leadership (both elected and unelected), who support or even participate in American invasions and coups — not those refugees, from the mass-murder and chaos those Western leaders had caused, in Iraq, in Libya, in Ukraine, in Syria, and elsewhere. The publics in the West take the terrorist attacks and other blows, while their government and media blame Russia and its allied countries such as the BRICS, though the real villains are their own national leadership, and the leadership of “the Western alliance” — the invasion-alliance.

The sickness, that’s destroying the world, emanates from Washington and Riyadh, not from Moscow and Beijing. The proper name for it is “conquest.” This is not the way authentic democracy functions. Feudalism used to function this way. Fascism now does. And now, the biggest of all its Big Lies is that it’s all being done in order to “promote world peace and security.” It’s like in George Orwell’s allegorical novel, 1984.

The real enemy lies within, where it reigns, even in the outlying aristocracies. It calls itself “the Western alliance.” It’s not only responsible for the invasions that are increasingly a curse upon the world; it (via the “Collective Defense” provision of the NATO portion of it) constitutes the hair-trigger for global nuclear annihilation.

Either NATO will end, or the world as we’ve always known and wanted to live in it, will. It’s one or the other. George Herbert Walker Bush left us this curse upon the world, and the challenge now is to end NATO now, because, if it shouldn’t have ended when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact did, then when should it end — or is it going to end only when the world-as-we’ve-known-it ends: in nuclear annihilation? If it’s not going to end in nuclear annihilation, then a global decision will have to be made, that NATO is a criminal organization, which must be ended now.

The result of that would be a better and a safer world, for everybody. Aristocratic dreams of world-conquest have already reached beyond the danger-point, to the alarm-bell. If the solution is not now, it will be the final solution for everybody. The dreams of Obama and many others in the U.S. aristocracy, for “Prompt Global Strike” and “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy”, are a mythical solution that will actually lead inevitably to such a final solution — not only for Russians, but for everyone.

Peter S. Rieth, at East-West Accord, headlined on April 28th, “Are Poland’s Elites Itching for War with Russia?” and he documented that they are, and that their hatred of Russians goes back at least to when “Poland invaded Kiev in 1919.” He vaguely urges the Obama Administration to withdraw its thousands of new troops and new weapons from Poland, because, “The United States fails to recognize that although it will presumably retain command over any American troops eventually stationed in Poland, it will be helpless in the face of Polish impetuosity.” But his statement is ambiguous, weak, and even evasive: the actual reason that (as he only implicitly acknowledges) the Polish aristocracy’s “impetuosity” could produce World War III, is that both Poland and the U.S. have signed the NATO Treaty with its mutual-defense Article Five saying, in effect, that whenever one member-nation claims to have been attacked by Russia, the U.S. will launch its nuclear weapons against Russia. The only rational opinion of such a commentary as that, is: Cut it out! The reality is: End NATO now!! NATO after 1991 is a criminal organization, the biggest threat to the entire world; and, such pusillanimous commentaries, which don’t even point to the real hair-trigger for nuclear war, are worthless.

Nothing short of ending NATO now, will suffice. Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact in 1991. When will NATO end — or will the world end first?

The worst part of it is: Germany, France, and UK, haven’t yet withdrawn from NATO. Until they do, NATO will continue to be the red-hot danger it is. No rational voter in any of those countries will vote for any politician who fails to state clearly: End NATO Now! We must withdraw from NATO!!

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.