We are on the road to World War III. Europe provoked World War I. It engendered World War II. Now, it is set, inexorably, on the path of being the battle-ground for World War III. No nation should sit on the fence. What is the purpose of having a nuclear arsenal? When you’re pushed to the wall or on the back foot, you use whatever weapon you have…
It must be utterly fortuitous or an act of the gods that my perusal of Chimamanda Adichie’s faction on the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War – Half of a Yellow Sun – should coincide with the on-going Russia-Ukraine war. The causes may differ, but the consequences of war are the same: cataclysmic deaths, destruction and miseries. The human catastrophes make war completely senseless, an act folly. War returns man to the state of nature. It might appear quixotic, but there is actually no justified war. A shooting conflict should be avoided at all cost.
During the invasion of Iraq by the US with its allies in 2003, ostensibly in search of weapons of mass destruction, which it never found, a bomb or missile struck a warehouse, killing five hundred Iraqi women and children in one fell swoop. Although President George Bush later appeared on TV to express regrets, the dead could not be raised to life. Just like lightning and thunder, so is war and collateral damage; hence war must be avoided at all cost. Sometimes soldiers have to lay ambush to the enemy and have to do so by melting with the civilian population, collateral damage becomes inevitable as everything within the source of the attack becomes a target for any counter-attack; hence war must be avoided at all cost. When you distribute guns to untrained civilians or rookie cops, brainwashing them to defend their motherland, they become combatants that are easily eliminated by trained combatants. War must be avoided at all cost.
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The Ukrainian armed forces should have laid down their arms. They did not need to reach such a stage in the first place. Although they signed up to die in defence of their territory, they did not need to perish fighting another man’s war. The Ukrainian political leadership should have distanced itself from NATO. The war is between the United States and Russia, the former planning to be the only super power in the globe. NATO member states are mere pawns on the chessboard of the United States. Remember, how US stabbed in the back a major ally, France, in the AUKUS pact… It is unfortunate Ukraine cannot appreciate this. The US continues to egg them on, supplying them with weapons, initially covertly but now openly. However, it is Ukrainians that continue to die, their cities being pulverized. I weep for Ukraine for being so short-sighted, for allowing its territory to be turned into a battle-ground and its people as cannon fodders for the American war.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not a hero as he is being portrayed by the West – far from it! History will not be kind to him for his inability to see through the shenanigans of NATO and allowing his country and his people to bear the brunt of another man’s war. Is he even a democrat? Is Ukraine a democracy? What about the decommunization laws, which abridged freedoms of expression and association, validly condemned by the Venice Commission?
The US is currently fighting Russian by proxy, exacting economic losses, hoping ultimately for a military defeat of its arch foe, whereupon China will be next target. North Korea will then be the last. The United States is taking the war in Ukraine seriously, galvanizing the world against Russia, using the media like the CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera to control the minds of viewers across the world. The on-going economic war against Russia is as important as the current armed conflict between the US and Russia, disguised as Ukraine-Russia war. The more the war drags on, the better for America, as the effects of the US-UK-EU-imposed economic sanctions against Russia may bring the latter to its knees or render it horse de combat. Hence the US is urging its short-sighted allies to ratchet up economic sanctions and supply of sophisticated military weapons to Ukraine. The original intentions of America to keep NATO after the dissolution of Warsaw Pact is now being achieved, as it is latching on the on-going war to militarize the borders of Russia, the very cause of the invasion of Ukraine. The US Patriot Missile launchers have now been installed in Poland – against which country? Russia, of course!
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Russia is fighting Ukraine plus US-led NATO and it is paying heavily for it. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and their allies keep saying they need to increase the cost of the war for Putin and make his invasion end in a strategic defeat. They’ve now decided to support Ukraine with high-grade (offensive) weapons. But those dying are Ukrainians, not Americans, Britons or the French! The cities being reduced to smouldering rubbles are not in US, UK or France; they are Ukrainian cities. The US-led NATO now uses the current proxy war to test the capabilities and efficiency of some of its weapons. Anyway Russia is doing the same by default.
The gory pictures of dead and decomposing bodies fill one with horror. Are they from the cities in US, UK and France? Those images of blackened high rise buildings with blown off roofs and collapsing floors, the carcasses of burnt vehicles that litter the streets, the plumes and thick dark billows of smoke from factories, industries and oil facilities are not from Washington, London and Paris. They are from Mariupol, Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odessa, Bakhmut,… Zelenskyy is not a hero. The more the supply of weapons to Ukraine by the US-led NATO in order to further the unipolar agenda of America, the more the war drags on, the more the deaths and devastation of Ukraine. It is stupid for this war to go on. Russia must stop the war immediately. Ukraine must openly renounce NATO membership. NATO must dissolve immediately.
Since the dissolution of USSR, Russia had not posed any threats to its neighbours until the US, through NATO, began to expand to encircle Russia militarily. While the expansion of NATO from the 90s to the Eastern Europe continued to discomfiture Russia, the US in 2008 signed an agreement with Poland to install 10 US interceptor missiles just 115 miles from Russia’s westernmost frontier! Condoleezza Rice, the then United States Secretary of State declared, “It is an agreement which will help us to respond to the threats of the 21st century and protect the US and much of Europe against missile attacks from ‘rogue elements’ in the Middle East, such as Iran.” It was the most ludicrous argument as it was evident to the most credulous that Russia was the target of the proposed missile defence. Although the administration of Obama backed down, the hawks, the ultra-nationalists in Washington (not the ordinary American citizens) were never persuaded. The goal of a unipolar world must be achieved, ultimately.
What about the golden rule and equity? The US railed against the Soviet Union’s missile build-up in nearby Cuba in October, 1962 until the apparatus of death was dismantled and the people of America heaved a huge sigh of relief. Now the US wishes to bring Ukraine into its orbit in order to locate apparatus of death at the borders of Russia. In 2015, Turkey, a member of NATO, shot down a Russian warplane. Even if it had intended, Russia could not retaliate in kind without provoking Article 5 of NATO – an attack on a member is an attack on all members. With Ukraine in the US orbit, all that is needed to attempt to conquer Russia is to goad Ukraine into provocative acts against Russia. Article 5 will then be triggered. Russia is far-sighted to see through the danger lurking in the dark, hence its pre-emptive strike, which is justified in international law, once it’s proportionate.
If the late Mikhail Gorbachev rued his actions for ending the Cold War, it was not because he was wrong. It was the United States that had acted and continues to act in bad faith. Gorbachev was quoted to have said “the topic of NATO expansion was never discussed” with the West – there was no basis for such a discussion. No one would ever imagine that US-led NATO would ever think of expansion since the basis for its existence had collapsed. If anything was within contemplation, it should be the dissolution of NATO following the end of Warsaw Pact. For decades, the US ignores the vehement grievances of Russia. Just before the current war began, Russia wrote the US and NATO formally to address its security concerns about NATO’s expansion to its borders. She demanded NATO roll back to 1997, halt its expansion to its borders, remove its military infrastructure from Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics and commit itself against deployment of missiles around its borders. Of course, Ukraine should never be admitted into NATO. The principal demands of Russia were merely scorned as impossible.
Why does NATO still exist? Why is NATO expanding only to the borders of Russia? Why is it not expanding to Africa and South America? Why is the US-led NATO only interested in membership of countries bordering Russia?
Why is the US having military bases all over the world? As stated clearly in the first article on the current war, this writer detests a ruthless tyrant like Vladimir Putin. At the same time, a world in which the US is the only super power poses a greater danger to other nations and peoples of the world. No one wants to be slaves in an American Empire.
