Eric Zuesse

I am a lifelong FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Democrat and therefore am anything other than prejudiced against the Democratic Party. But, that Party died when Bill Clinton became President and undid FDR’s regulations on the megabanks and FDR’s AFDC income program for children in poor families, and when Clinton replaced that with restoration of Wall Street's control over America (like before FDR, only a more convoluted form of it).

However, the way in which both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endanger all people’s lives and property and health and welfare, has to do with something else, something that’s even more evil than what Bill Clinton did, and it’s the Obama-Clinton (that’s Secretary of State and now Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) foreign policy, to overthrow the leaders of nations who are allied with or supportive of Russia — such as most recently Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, but before that Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, and before that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It’s no mere coincidence that all three had had cordial relations with Russia.

George W. Bush’s 2003 overthrow of yet another pro-Russian head-of-state, Saddam Hussein, had already done enormous damage not only to Iraq but to the U.S., and yet Obama and Clinton are at least as determined to surround Russia by enemies, as Bush was; and they now even support the installation, on-and-near Russia’s very borders, of a ‘Ballistic Missile Defense’ system that’s actually designed to disable Russia’s ability to retaliate against a U.S. surprise nuclear attack on Russia — the BMD is astoundingly aggressive, especially considering that whereas in 1991 the Soviet and then Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev terminated both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact on the basis of an understanding from George Herbert Walker Bush and his agents, that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”, this crucial promise from the U.S. government was violated by Bill Clinton’s extending NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland; and by Bush’s son Bush then extending NATO into Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; and by Obama then extending NATO into Albania and Croatia and trying to bring into it also Ukraine and some other nations bordering or near Russia.

American President JFK didn’t allow the Khruschev regime to place nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S. in Cuba in 1962, and Russian President Putin can’t stand the Obama regime to place nuclear missiles right on Russia’s borders, but it’s happening now, and it endangers us all — not only the Russian people. Post-communist Russia is vastly different than the communist USSR was, and the U.S. government’s treating it even more aggressively than the USSR ever was treated is simply mega-criminal and can be ‘justified’ only on the basis of lies.

Furthermore, with the support of both U.S. President Obama and his neo-conservative former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (famous for her psychopathic “We came, we saw, he died, ha ha!!” comment), NATO’s current Secretary General and other top people at NATO are now increasingly beating the drums for war against Russia, and are using for ‘justification’ of it the very same lie that both Obama and Clinton do, as Obama has stated it: Russia’s alleged ‘conquest' of Crimea. As I have documented headlining “The Entire Case for Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies”, there was no such ‘conquest’, and even Western-sponsored polls of Crimeans both before and after Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to reject the newly imposed February 2014 Obama-engineered coup-government of Ukraine and to rejoin Russia of which Crimea had been a part until involuntarily transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet dictator Khrushchev in 1954, showed the very same overwhelmingly high level of public support for rejoining with Russia that was shown in the plebiscite-results.

The U.S. government accepts the right of self-determination of peoples, so that the residents of Scotland can vote to separate from the UK if they wish, and the residents of Catalonia can vote to separate from Spain if they wish, but where it comes now to the right of the residents of Crimea, who had voted 75% for Viktor Yanukovych and who were disgusted by Obama’s overthrow of him, to separate from the newly-imposed Obama-coup-regime in Kiev (and even the head of Stratfor called it “the most blatant coup in history”), Obama and Clinton reject that same right for the Crimean people. Why do they reject it? They have to do this, in order to support NATO’s war-buildup against Russia, and support their surrounding Russia with extremely dangerous missiles. (In fact, Russia’s alleged ‘seizure’ of Crimea is even the ‘justification’ that Obama gives for his economic sanctions against Russia; so, he’s deep into lying about it.)

The expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders proves NATO’s (that’s to say, the U.S. aristocracy’s, and its subordinate national aristocracies that are represented in NATO) aggressive intent against Russia. Putin had done everything he could to have friendly relations with America, but now under Obama the relationship has plunged into clearly a pre-war situation, not only in Syria, and Ukraine, and elsewhere on Russia’s borders, but in American propaganda against Russia. The addition of installation now of BMD is flashing to all Russians the extreme-danger signal that the next stop is Moscow, and if Russia therefore launches a surprise nuclear attack against the U.S. at some time before the BMD becomes fully operational, the blame for it belongs to George Herbert Walker Bush, and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, and all who have lied so viciously against Russia and who so blatantly violated the promise that the George Herbert Walker Bush regime had made to Gorbachev in 1990.

Fair is fair, regardless of the particular nation, and unfair is unfair, regardless of the particular nation; and, in this case, clearly, the U.S. government has been extremely unfair to the Russian people, and so the Russian government’s patience with the lies of the U.S. government and of its NATO stooges, might have a limit that precedes activation of BMD — this would mean a Russian first-strike (and they won’t warn about it in advance). They don’t want to be just sitting ducks. And they all know that only fools think that disabling an opponent’s ability to retaliate is only a defensive act. Any intelligent person knows that it can be also an extremely aggressive act. And the coup in Ukraine, which started to be organized in the U.S. Embassy in Kiev by no later than 1 March 2013 — a year before the coup itself — was an extremely hostile and aggressive act against not only Yanukovych, but also against Russia. The U.S. went so far as to be one of only three countries voting in the U.N. General Assembly against a resolution condemning “glorification of Nazism” and “neo-Nazism”, because there was a widespread recognition among U.N. representatives, that what the U.S. had recently done in Ukraine was supporting and even putting into place as the new Ukrainian government a specifically anti-Russian form of nazism. Obama couldn’t deny it on the facts, so he simply had his neoconservative U.N. representative Samantha Powers vote “No” on it — and she even cited (the new, post-coup) Ukraine’s vote against it as being her reason for voting against it, as if following those thugs’ leadership was somehow ‘American’. Obama’s reversal of FDR there was simply shocking.

The way in which Obama and Clinton are endangering all of us is that, if Russia waits and the BMD (which itself is ‘justified’ only on the basis of lies) that’s now starting to be installed, turns out to work, then only Russia will immediately be reduced to nuclear char; but, if it doesn’t work, then both sides will be destroyed; and, if Russia doesn’t even wait to find out, but instead strikes first, then only the U.S. and maybe other NATO nations will immediately be destroyed; and, in any case, the level of nuclear contamination of the entire world, and the amount of smoke that will be thrown up into the high atmosphere from the fires and then generate a long-term global freezing (“nuclear winter”) that will be just as extreme and far more sudden than the otherwise global warming, will make life not even worth living.

Obama and Clinton aren’t the only Americans who are pushing this needless vile brinksmanship, but it is needless; it’s entirely unnecessary, and, on the U.S.-NATO side, it’s based clearly upon lies; so, the U.S. government must repudiate it and halt the BMD, right now.

If there’s anything sane that’s still remaining in American politics, this issue will be the central issue of the 2016 Presidential campaign. Because, if things continue drifting in the way that they have been drifting, then the world-as-it’s-always-been-known will soon end, and what replaces it will become hell-on-Earth, everywhere. And America’s leaders will have been the cause of it.

Any Presidential candidate who doesn’t condemn both Obama and Clinton for it, has no rational justification for receiving anyone’s vote. Because, if the next U.S. President doesn’t forthrightly repudiate and reverse this pathological policy, then we’d all better somehow join the aristocracy and buy deep nuclear bunkers, with years of supplies to outlast the first phases of nuclear decay. Except that the people who have already done so are fools for even wanting to live in such a post-war world. (But at least they’re smart enough to recognize that things are heading in this direction.)

The only solution to it is to avoid electing Presidents such as the ones we’ve been electing. Instead, to elect a President who condemns them — and for the sane reasons, not for other, insane, ones. Because this issue is too important to continue any insanity.

There is simply no ‘justification’ for it, other than lies. And it’s the most dangerous policy in the entire world, right now.

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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.nomic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.ity..