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Title: Aux Barricades Mes Enfants!
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/ahttp:/ ... nts/ux-barricades-mes-enfants/
Published: Oct 9, 2018
Author: PHILIP GIRALDI
Post Date: 2018-10-09 07:22:40 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 94
Comments: 2

Time for the sans-culottes to rise up against Washington's insanity

On October 21st there will be a Women’s March on the Pentagon hosted by the Global Women’s Peace Action. My wife and many of our friends will be going and even I will tag along in support in spite of my gender. We participate with some reservations as we have only demonstrated publicly twice since 9/11, once opposing the then about to start Iraq War and once against the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). All too often demonstrations morph into progressive exercises in flagellation of what are now referred to as “deplorable” values with little being accomplished either before, during or afterwards, apart from the piles of debris left behind to be cleaned up by the Park Service. And such events are rarely even covered by the media in Washington, where the Post generally adheres closely to a neocon foreign policy tactic, which means that if you ignore something distasteful it will eventually go away.

Hopefully on this occasion it will be different because the time for talking politics is rapidly being rendered irrelevant by the speed of Washington’s disengagement from reality and Americans of all political persuasions must begin to take to the streets to object to what their government is doing in their name. I am mildly optimistic that change is coming as I find it difficult to imagine that in spite of the relentless flood of mainstream media propaganda there is even a plurality of Americans that supports with any actual conviction what the United States is doing in Syria and what it intends to do in Iran. And apart from a desire to make voting in America safer and insofar as possible interference free, I also believe that most think that Russiagate is a load of hooey and would prefer to be friends with Moscow.

Why now? “Now” is a whole new ballgame, as the expression goes, because the utter insanity coming out of Washington could easily wind up killing most of us here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Specifically, in a press conference on Tuesday, Kay Bailey Hutchison, a former Senator from Texas who is currently the United States’ ambassador to NATO, declared that Washington was prepared to launch a preemptive attack on Russian military installations as a response to alleged treaty violations on the part of Moscow. Note particularly what Hutchison actually said: “At that point, we would be looking at the capability to take out a missile that could hit any of our countries. Counter measures would be to take out the missiles that are in development by Russia in violation of the treaty. They are on notice.”

And note further what she was implying, namely that Washington, acting on its own authority, has the right to attack a nuclear armed and powerful foreign country based on what are presumably negotiable definitions of what are acceptable weapons to base on one’s own soil. It would be an attack on a neighbor or competitor with whom one is not at war and which does not necessarily pose any active threat. By that standard, any country with a military capability can be described as threatening and one can attack anyone else based purely on one’s own assessment of what is acceptable or not.

It is quite remarkable how many countries in the world are now “on notice” for punishment when they do things that the United States objects to. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has warned that she will be “taking names” of those United Nations members that criticize U.S. policies in the Middle East. As increasing discomfort with U.S. initiatives there and elsewhere is a worldwide phenomenon, with only Israel, the Philippines, Nigeria and Kenya having a favorable view of Washington, Haley’s list is inevitably a long one. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, when they are not fabricating intelligence and inflating threats, have likewise warned specific countries that they are being judged by Washington and will be punished at a level proportionate to their transgressions.

Hutchison is not known as a deep thinker, so one has to suspect that her expressed views were fed to her by someone in Washington. Her specific grievance against Russia relates to Moscow’s reported deployment of new land-based missiles that have a claimed range of more than 5,000 kilometers, which is enough to hit most targets in Europe. If true, the development would be in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and would definitely pose a potential threat to the Europeans, but the more serious question has to be the rationale behind threatening a nuclear war through preemptive action over an issue that might be subject to renewed multilateral negotiation.

Hutchison and the State Department inevitably went into double-speak mode when concerns were expressed about possible preemption against Russia. She clarified her earlier comments with an almost incomprehensible “My point: Russia needs to return to INF Treaty compliance or we will need to match its capabilities to protect U.S. & NATO interests. The current situation, with Russia in blatant violation, is untenable.”

Spokesman Heather Nauert at State then chimed in “What Ambassador Hutchison was talking about was improving overall defense and deterrence posture. The United States is committed to upholding its arms control obligations and expects Russia to do the very same thing.” Both disclaimers were needed, even if lacking in clarity, but they did not dispel the ugly taste of the initial comment regarding starting a war of preemption. Russia took note of the back and forth, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman drily observing “It seems that people who make such statements do not realize the level of their responsibility and the danger of aggressive rhetoric.” Hutchison and Nauert also do not seem aware of the fact that Russia’s frequently stated defense doctrine is to use nuclear weapons if and when it is attacked by a superior force, which might well be Moscow’s assessment of the threat posed by U.S. led NATO.

The disconnect between the White House’s often expressed desire to improve relations with Russia and the bureaucracy’s tendency to send the opposite message is typical of what has been referred to as Trump’s “dual-track presidency”. Gareth Porter has recently observed how President Trump, for all his faults in so many ways, is indeed desirous of military disengagement in some areas but he is repeatedly being overruled or outmaneuvered by the permanent bureaucracies in government, most notably the Pentagon and intelligence services. Hutchison, Haley, Pompeo and Bolton speak and act for that constituency even when they appear to be agreeing with the president.

So given the danger of war based on what Washington itself says about the state of the world and America’s presumed role in it, it is time to take the gloves off and march. That a high-level official can even stand up and speak about preventive war with a major nuclear power is disgraceful. She should be fired immediately. That she has not been fired means that someone somewhere high up in the bureaucracy agrees with what she said. Nuclear war is not an option. It is an end of all options.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

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#1. To: Ada (#0) (Edited)

in a press conference on Tuesday, Kay Bailey Hutchison, a former Senator from Texas who is currently the United States’ ambassador to NATO, declared that Washington was prepared to launch a preemptive attack on Russian military installations as a response to alleged treaty violations on the part of Moscow. Note particularly what Hutchison actually said: “At that point, we would be looking at the capability to take out a missile that could hit any of our countries. Counter measures would be to take out the missiles that are in development by Russia in violation of the treaty. They are on notice.”

And note further what she was implying, namely that Washington, acting on its own authority, has the right to attack a nuclear armed and powerful foreign country based on what are presumably negotiable definitions of what are acceptable weapons to base on one’s own soil. It would be an attack on a neighbor or competitor with whom one is not at war and which does not necessarily pose any active threat. By that standard, any country with a military capability can be described as threatening and one can attack anyone else based purely on one’s own assessment of what is acceptable or not.

It is quite remarkable how many countries in the world are now “on notice” for punishment when they do things that the United States objects to. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has warned that she will be “taking names” of those United Nations members that criticize U.S. policies in the Middle East. As increasing discomfort with U.S. initiatives there and elsewhere is a worldwide phenomenon, with only Israel, the Philippines, Nigeria and Kenya having a favorable view of Washington, Haley’s list is inevitably a long one. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, when they are not fabricating intelligence and inflating threats, have likewise warned specific countries that they are being judged by Washington and will be punished at a level proportionate to their transgressions.

Hutchison is not known as a deep thinker, so one has to suspect that her expressed views were fed to her by someone in Washington. Her specific grievance against Russia relates to Moscow’s reported deployment of new land-based missiles that have a claimed range of more than 5,000 kilometers, which is enough to hit most targets in Europe. If true, the development would be in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 and would definitely pose a potential threat to the Europeans, but the more serious question has to be the rationale behind threatening a nuclear war through preemptive action over an issue that might be subject to renewed multilateral negotiation.


5 linked refs. w/INF Treaty info @ Wikipedia included:


1. 4um Title: Russia Denies Violating INF Treaty Provisions - Feb 18, 2017


2. NATO-Russia Tensions Rise, Arms Makers Benefit - YouTube, 19.75 minutes

Published on Jul 16, 2017 by TheRealNews

For the first time, the U.S. has deployed advanced Patriot missiles as part of military exercises in the Baltic region, escalating tensions with Russia and helping boost military industry stock prices to record highs

[Notes: New START Treaty; @ 10:23 1987 INF Treaty disputes; @ 12:19 1972 ABM Treaty withdrawl by GWBush in 2002; @ 16:02 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty]


3. Russia not to withdraw from INF treaty - [Azerbaijan source] azernews.az | 14 December 2017

“We did not step out of the basic treaties - on ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty], INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty]. Conditions are created and information and propaganda work is conducted for the U.S. withdrawal from the INF. In fact they already left it. They delivered anti-missile systems in Romania. They just removed them from the sea. These systems can easily be replaced with medium-range missiles. In fact, the process has started. ...

When the Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, the newly-independent states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine inherited more than 3,000 strategic nuclear weapons, as well as at least 3,000 tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons.

The United States and Russia reached a solution to this complex problem by engaging Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine in a series of talks that led to the Lisbon Protocol. That agreement made all five states party to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which required Washington and Moscow to each cut their deployed strategic nuclear forces from approximately 10,000 warheads apiece to down below 6,000 warheads on no more than 1,600 ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), and long-range bombers.

The new START treaty signed in 2010 replaced the 1991 START I treaty and superseded the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), which terminated when New START entered into force.

Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump has called New START, which was signed in 2010, “one-sided” and “a bad deal,” and has even suggested the U.S. might withdraw from it.

Negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the now-defunct Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty was signed on May 26, 1972 and entered into force on October 3, 1972. The treaty, from which the United States withdrew on June 13, 2002, barred Washington and Moscow from deploying nationwide defenses against strategic ballistic missiles. In the treaty preamble, the two sides asserted that effective limits on anti-missile systems would be a “substantial factor in curbing the race in strategic offensive arms.”

The Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the elimination of their intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles, commonly referred to as the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty, requires destruction of the parties' ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, their launchers and associated support structures and support equipment within three years after the treaty enters into force.


4. 4um Title: Trump's Crazy-Stupid Ambassador to NATO Must Resign NOW! - Oct 4, 2018


In summary: The INF Treaty has been referred to as the only Cold War Treaty still in effect. However, it was a treaty with the Soviet Union that technically dissolved when the Soviet government did; along with other Soviet era treaties like the ABM Treaty and the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (which the speaker in the above-linked video him-haws around about vaguely as if the CFE Treaty fell apart for various reasons that had nothing to do with the Soviet Union's disintegration -- and he also neglects to say that the ABM Treaty was procedurally reinstated with non-Soviet Russia and some other countries in alliance with it, before GWBush scrapped it in 2002. Although the INF Treaty is usually reported as if it simply continued uninterrupted when the Soviet Union dissolved, without any need of further ado such as the ABM Treaty-reinstatement officiations, I haven't found any online evidence yet to corroborate such an anomalous exception -- like it's no plebeian's business anyway to be quizzical about that; or maybe it was something of a "classified" process off the books, with verbal agreements and handshakes amongst America's neocon/neolib/nihilist/Commiecrat War Party here being the only supposed INF Treaty "re-authorizations" requisite to use this alleged issue as their next WWIII-risky pretext to jeopardize American lives and many others worldwide.

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"They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC

GreyLmist  posted on  2018-10-12   10:57:03 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: All (#1) (Edited)

Re: Post #1 info


From the video-notes @ linked ref. #2: NATO-Russia Tensions Rise, Arms Makers Benefit - YouTube, 19.75 minutes

@ 10:23 1987 INF Treaty disputes; @ 12:19 1972 ABM Treaty withdrawl by GWBush in 2002

Fron the article-excerpt @ linked ref. #3: on ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty], INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] ... the Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991,

From the post-summary: The INF Treaty has been referred to as the only Cold War Treaty still in effect. However, it was a treaty with the Soviet Union that technically dissolved when the Soviet government did; along with other Soviet era treaties like the ABM Treaty and the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (which the speaker in the above-linked video him-haws around about vaguely as if the CFE Treaty fell apart for various reasons that had nothing to do with the Soviet Union's disintegration -- and he also neglects to say that the ABM Treaty was procedurally reinstated with non-Soviet Russia and some other countries in alliance with it, before GWBush scrapped it in 2002.) Although the INF Treaty is usually reported as if it simply continued uninterrupted when the Soviet Union dissolved, without any need of further ado such as the ABM Treaty-reinstatement officiations, I haven't found any online evidence yet to corroborate such an anomalous exception


Timeline from Wikipedia sources:

Soviet Union - Dissolution >> Russian Federation

On March 17, a referendum was held, in which the vast majority of participating citizens voted in favour of changing the Soviet Union into a renewed federation.

In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin became the first directly elected President in Russian history when he was elected President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which became the independent Russian Federation in December of that year.

In August 1991, a coup d'état attempt by members of Gorbachev's government, directed against Gorbachev and aimed at preserving the Soviet Union,

On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords.

On December 25, 1991, the USSR was dissolved into 15 post-Soviet states. ... Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.

The following day [December 26, 1991], the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body of the Soviet Union, voted both itself and the Soviet Union out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state.[66] The Soviet Army originally remained under overall CIS command, but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991, Russia was internationally recognized[67] as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed overseas Soviet properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol [effective December 5, 1994], Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well,


[ABM] Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - newworldencyclopedia.org [w/bracketed annotations]

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 the status of the treaty became unclear, debated by members of Congress and professors of law, Succession of the ABM Treaty, State Succession and the Legal Status of the ABM Treaty, and Miron-Feith Memorandum. In 1997, a memorandum of understanding[4] between the US and four of the former USSR states was signed and subject to ratification by each signatory, however it was not presented to the US Senate for advice and consent by President Bill Clinton.

On December 13, 2001, President George W. Bush gave Russia notice of the United States' withdrawal from the [Soviet-era] treaty [that had dissolved with the USSR], in accordance with the clause that [had] require[d] six months notice before terminating the pact. This was the first time in recent history the United States has withdrawn from a major international arms treaty [that was already defunct for over a decade and still hadn't been properly re-established here]. This led to the eventual creation of the Missile Defense Agency.[5]

the United States stated that it intended to discuss a bilateral reduction in the numbers of nuclear warheads, which would allow Russia to reduce its spending on missiles without decrease of comparative strength. Discussions led to the signing of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty in Moscow on May 24, 2002 [aka SORT aka the Treaty of Moscow].


Search result @ newworldencyclopedia.org for extension:

/entry/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty [INF]

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"They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC

GreyLmist  posted on  2018-10-14   5:07:14 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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