More Ukraine

Thu Jan 27 16:08:16 UTC 2022

The Nulands, the Blnkens and Biden will not.

And per the reporting from the field that I sent, looks like Putin's men
are shooting.

On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 11:05 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Glad you enjoyed it.
>
> There are people who will read this and cry, “Where’s your outrage against
>> Vladimir Putin? Why don’t you denounce him?” To which I say, fine, I
>> denounce him. Then what? When you’re done wailing, you’re still faced with
>> deciding whether or not to go to war with Russia, which is not a real
>> choice, unless you’re an idiot or General Jack Ripper-insane.
>> Unfortunately, the Nulands and Blinkens who’ll be making this call just may
>> fit those descriptions.
>
>
> On Jan 27, 2022, at 3:49 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Taibbi is now a full blown caricature of himself if not an asshole fully
> revealed. That line about Biden, which is all I have read, is a stupid
> irreal non-insight and insult if read straight, of course,
> and as satire carries its own out-of-touch cruelty......he thinks he's
> Hunter Thompson but he's only
> a juvenile Tom Wolfe...Thompson KNEW the core of the people he scored
> satirically......Taibbi only shows the core of himself....
>
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 11:10 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Fun exerpts from Matt Taibbi on Ukraine.   He was a correspondent in
>> Russia and may well have defected,  but since Moscow started paying me the
>> big bucks I’m with hima all the Way. Taibbi starts off mentiong Biden's
>> recent wavering on the war talk, after which he assumes electodes were
>> attached to Biden’s testicles to keep him more alert and on message.  He
>> does look extra wary since then. Anyway...
>>
>> …….Obama looked at the big, muddy stretch of land atop the Black Sea
>> called Ukraine and asked if its strategic importance was worth war.
>> Meaning, real war, with an enemy that can fight back, not third-world
>> pushovers in Iraq or Libya who offer as much resistance as the British
>> colonial enemies Blackadder’s officers once described as being “two feet
>> tall and armed with dried grass.” His answer was an obvious no. Ukraine has
>> less strategic importance to the United States than Iraq, Afghanistan, even
>> Kuwait for that matter.
>>    No one will say it out loud, but the greatest argument against U.S.
>> support for military action of any kind in Ukraine is the inerrant
>> incompetence of our missions and the consistent record of destabilizing
>> areas of strategic interest through our involvement, including in these two
>> specific countries. At the moment the Berlin Wall fell the United States
>> had almost limitless political capital with these soon-to-be ex-Soviet
>> territories. We blew it all within a few years. Now that we’re really in
>> trouble in Ukraine, why would we keep to the same playbook that got us
>> here?……
>>
>> ….We started selling drones to “allies” under Obama <
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-cracks-open-door-to-the-export-of-armed-drones-to-allied-nations/2015/02/17/c5595988-b6b2-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html>
>> and escalated the practice under Trump with billions in sales to peaceful
>> democratic havens like the UAE <
>> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-emirates-drones-exclusive/exclusive-trump-administration-advances-2-9-billion-drone-sale-to-uae-sources-idUSKBN27M06L>,
>> who had already used them to massacre civilian populations, children
>> included, in Yemen. We continued escalating such sales under Biden, adding
>> countries like Qatar <
>> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-favors-u-s-sale-more-500-million-worth-armed-n1282413>
>> to our list of excellent customers in part with the idea of using the
>> country as a base for “over-the-horizon” strikes in an Afghanistan bereft
>> of “boots on the ground.” Even after our disastrous wars finish, we find
>> ways to continue them.
>>
>> This is relevant to Russia and Ukraine because we’ve cycled through at
>> least half of the usual failure process with both countries. Just a couple
>> of decades ago we essentially controlled the Kremlin, but so completely
>> mismanaged that situation with aggressive backing of a notoriously corrupt
>> Yeltsin regime that Vladimir Putin was able to consolidate power with
>> widespread backing of a public initially much disposed to us. Ukraine we
>> treated as a pawn nation from the start, backing a series of leaders who
>> shamelessly looted the country before forcing them into a miserable
>> Sophie’s Choice, about which the American public still knows little.
>>
>> In 2013, Ukraine was proceeding down a path of integration into the E.U.
>> Paul Manafort client Viktor Yanukovich, always described in America as an
>> outright puppet of Moscow, was actually a proponent of Euro-integration at
>> this point. “Yanukovich cajoled and bullied anyone who pushed for Ukraine
>> to have closer ties to Russia <
>> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-russia-deal-special-report/special-report-why-ukraine-spurned-the-eu-and-embraced-russia-idUSBRE9BI0DZ20131219>”
>> is how Reuters correspondent Liz Piper described his attitude, quoting him
>> as saying to those wanting to go back to Russia’s arms, “Forget about it..
>> forever!” But Putin’s ferocious tactics, including intense economic and
>> military threats, pushed Yanukovich to back out of the EU deal, and take
>> instead an economic trade package with Russia that included $15 billion and
>> the lowering by a third the price the country paid for natural gas from
>> Russia.
>>
>> This, in turn, spurred a Western response via the “Maidan revolution,”
>> really a U.S.-backed coup, in which Yanukovich was replaced with someone
>> more suitable to our foreign policy geniuses. “Yats is our guy <
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2XNN0Yt6D8>” is how our current
>> undersecretary for political affairs Victoria Nuland put it, insisting that
>> Arseniy Yatsenuk be Ukraine’s next leader, even though Ukrainians might
>> have preferred former boxer Vitaly Klitschko. When apprised some of the
>> E.U. countries were uncomfortable with a coup, Nuland famously said, “Fuck
>> the E.U.” Forget gunboats, here was F-bomb diplomacy!……
>>
>> …..There are people who will read this and cry, “Where’s your outrage
>> against Vladimir Putin? Why don’t you denounce him?” To which I say, fine,
>> I denounce him. Then what? When you’re done wailing, you’re still faced
>> with deciding whether or not to go to war with Russia, which is not a real
>> choice, unless you’re an idiot or General Jack Ripper-insane.
>> Unfortunately, the Nulands and Blinkens who’ll be making this call just may
>> fit those descriptions.
>>
>> The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which
>> America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of
>> the first triggers for the revolt against “experts” that led to the
>> election of Donald Trump. Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who
>> got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into
>> Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives
>> pushing Iraq back to the eighth century……
>>
>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
>