by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
The war can only end when it helps Biden reelection
I am surely not the only one who has noticed that the defensive propaganda lines that are flowing out the Democratic Administration have become more than ordinarily ridiculous of late. One is astonished at the melding of fact and fiction to create narratives that depict the White House and all that pertains to it as forging a new and more wonderful country. Wasn’t “Build Back Better” the battle cry, whatever that is supposed to mean? And the spin is endless, even when a clueless Joe Biden belatedly winds up in Maui to relate to the tragedy in which at least 1,000 died, only to be greeted by surviving local residents saluting the president with their middle fingers upraised. As the president looked out over the destruction of an entire city by fire he reminisced by recalling his long ago “almost” encounter with a fire in his kitchen. Locals who were screaming for help from government were, in fact, getting almost nothing while the nation’s Chief Executive was in the Oval Office gloating over sending another $23 billion to the arch crook Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, money to fight a war that Biden encouraged and has blithely entered into.
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Washington politicians characteristically have no morals and are driven only by their desire to perpetuate their party’s dominance so that the corruption that makes so many of those who adhere to the process rich, including Joe Biden. How do 500,000 dead Ukrainians and Russians matter if a myth about the United States and its values can be exploited to obtain electoral victory for Biden in 2024? As the greatly esteemed monster Madeleine Albright once put it, “I think it is worth it!”
I would suggest that our political class and the parasites that surround it are approaching depths not yet plumbed when I occasionally peruse articles or listen to speeches produced by the Washington DC spin machine. But even by that measure, I was appalled by a recent article that appeared in Politico and which immediately received considerable replay in other publications frequented by the inside-the-Beltway crowd.
Politico was acquired by Axel Springer, a German publisher in 2021, Europe’s largest newspaper and magazine conglomerate. Ideologically, some have described Springer publications’ political bias “as leaning left of center or moderate” but my personal exposure to the group since my army days in Germany has led me to believe that it is actually much more conservative than that. All employees at Springer, to include Politico, are expected to support the European Union, NATO, Israel, the war against Ukraine, the open society, and free market policies.
The article is entitled “Here Are 3 Ways to End the War in Ukraine. One Might Actually Work” with a subtitle “Putin has a veto over two endgames for Ukraine. But there’s a third that would bypass him.” The piece was penned by one Tom Malinowski, an assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor in the Obama administration before serving as a Democratic Party congressman from New Jersey’s 7th district between 2019 and 2023. He is currently under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics over “substantial reason to believe” that he had violated federal laws relating to conflicts of interest. He had reportedly traded and failed to disclose approximately $1 million of stock in medical and technical companies that would be receiving taxpayer assistance as part of the COVID-19 pandemic response, which would inevitably result in a large surge in stock values.
Malinowski is currently a senior fellow at the McCain Institute, one of those foundations funded by defense industries where politicians go to hide and get rich between terms in elected office. The Institute is a Washington DC based allegedly “nonpartisan think tank established in cooperation with Arizona State University.” Its declared mission is to “fight for democracy, human dignity, and security for a world that is free, safe, and just for all people.” Inevitably, it is rather selective in terms of who exactly benefits from its largesse and one might recall that its eponymous founder Senator John McCain hardly ever saw a war he didn’t like and once dismissed Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a “gasoline station pretending to be a real country.” McCain was also a major player in the “regime change” operation in Ukraine in 2014, suggesting that his judgement about America’s relationship with the rest of the world just might be a little flawed.
Malinowski is inevitably fully on board with the White House view of why the United States has gone whole hog in a proxy war against Russia that uses Ukraine as its instrument of choice . He says in his first paragraph that “’Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia — never,’ President Joe Biden said in a speech in Poland this year, and rightly so. For the war in Ukraine to end on terms consistent with American interests and ideals, Ukraine must be seen to have won, and Russia’s invasion must go down in history as a decisive failure, enough to deter other authoritarian powers from launching similar wars of aggression in the future.”
Malinowski poses his “3 Ways” as follows: first, for “its armed forces to take back all the territory Russia has unlawfully seized since its first invasion in 2014 — including Crimea. This would be a fantastic outcome. It is still possible. And the United States should do everything possible to support it, including, if Congress approves more funding, by providing the more advanced weapons Ukraine has requested.”
If Malinowski thinks armed victory by Ukraine is “still possible” he is delusional, but he does not seriously expect that outcome, except for the “more funding” part. His Second Way, also a “red herring” to disguise where he really wants to go, would be “through a diplomatic agreement. Earlier this month, 40 countries, including China and the United States, met in Saudi Arabia to discuss President Volodymyr Zelensky’s 10-point plan for peace, which would require the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, the return of abducted children and justice for war crimes. Any settlement based on that plan would, of course, be wonderful. But Russia under Putin has never ended its wars at the negotiating table; at best it has frozen them, keeping its options open. Russia has shown zero interest in making concessions that would come close to the minimal requirements of Ukraine and its allies. As long as his military avoids total collapse, and he believes there is a chance of political change in the West, Putin will likely keep sacrificing Russians to stay in the fight.”
