On Monday 20 November, as the liberation of Adveeka draws closer with every day and the Russian forces continue to push the Kiev forces out of the Donbass and inflict heavy losses in men and material on their forces all along the front, and as funding for Ukraine dries up and the Kiev regime sits on a sharp blade, impaled by their own delusions and corruption, the US Secretary of Defence, Loyd Austin, made a quick trip to Kiev.
He met with President Zelensky and military command officers and then gave a short interview to the press to state that, in effect, the United States controls all military operations in Ukraine. He thereby made clear, once again, what has been clear from the beginning, that the United States is in direct conflict with Russia, which he described several times as “the enemy.”
He stated that the Kiev regime and its military command assured him that they would continue to press Russia and that victory was just around the corner, that the Kiev forces were learning from their mistakes and had inflicted “significant losses on Russian forces” and would continue to do so. The entire thrust of his remarks made it clear that the Kiev regime answers to Washington and that their forces are at the disposal of the Americans, to be used as they direct.
According to Austin, the war in Ukraine is going well, with just a few temporary setbacks, and that “we and our allies will continue to support Ukraine and give it what it needs” to continue the war against Russia. He and the “journalists” that were allowed to ask him questions-he referred to one American woman as “colonel” indicating she was a military press officer-played their new game of pretending that the war was not lost, it was only a “stalemate” and that the Kiev forces would become “more dynamic,” in hitting back at Russia.
But when it came to concrete assistance to their Kiev legions he could only state that the US had that day approved 100 million dollars in new funding, money found in some previous spending allowances, since the US Congress has not approved new funding of any substantial amounts due to internal bickering over money and with most military aid now going to Israel to assist it in committing war crimes against the Palestinian people. In fact, when asked how he justifies sending weapons and ammunition to Israel being used to commit those crimes, he brushed off the question with a stock phrase that Israel makes its own decisions and the US encourages them to obey international law. But, while Israel is receiving massive military aid and funds, the new aid to Ukraine is a paltry sum, paying for one HIMARS system, after the others sent were destroyed, some missiles and some ammunition, enough to last a fighting army one day. But it was made to seem significant.
He then made a quick shift to state that both wars were important to the USA to protect the “rules-based order” and that Russian “aggression, an attack on a peaceful country,” had to be resisted. However, not one of the journalists present replied, “Well why then is the United States still invading Syria and Iraq, why did it invade Afghanistan and Iraq, why did it overthrow the legitimate government of Ukraine?”
Well, we have the answer to that in President Biden’s pompous, colonialist ravings in his op-ed piece published in the Washington Post on November 18th where he made the claim again that the USA is the “exceptional” nation, standing above the rest and can do anything it wants since it considers itself judge in its own cause, all powerful, to whom the rest of the world must bow in obeisance.
He wrote,
“Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighbouring democracy off the map.”
By this, he attempted to link Russia to Hamas and to confuse people because it was the United States that eliminated democracy in Ukraine with the coup of 2014 and supported the illegitimate puppet governments there ever since, and since Israel can hardly be called a beacon of democracy with a self-serving fascist like Netanyahu in charge and the apartheid state the Israelis have created.
Biden then repeated the old domino theory used to justify the Vietnam War, that, if the Russians are not stopped in Ukraine, there will be a “broader conflict.” To read his piece is a surreal experience, as if one is reading a satire of himself and the United States, but, in discussing the war in Palestine and his equally deluded and impossible solutions, he openly stated why the USA is willing to be a party to the war crimes of Israel. It’s about control of the region to further an American dream project that is meant to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He wrote,
“Just weeks before Oct. 7, I met in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The main subject of that conversation was a set of substantial commitments that would help both Israel and the Palestinian territories better integrate into the broader Middle East. That is also the idea behind the innovative economic corridor that will connect India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, which I announced together with partners at the Group of 20 summit in India in early September. Stronger integration between countries creates predictable markets and draws greater investment. Better regional connection — including physical and economic infrastructure — supports higher employment and more opportunities for young people. That’s what we have been working to realize in the Middle East. It is a future that has no place for Hamas’s violence and hate, and I believe that attempting to destroy the hope for that future is one reason that Hamas instigated this crisis.”
In other words, the Hamas’ resistance, the Palestinian people, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran are in the way of huge profits for US companies and investors and must be crushed, And first to be crushed are the Palestinian people who are to him then completely expendable. This is the American rules-based order; gangsterism, war and genocide as state policy.
The rest of the op-ed parrots Israel propaganda, calls for an impossible two-state solution, meaning that the Palestinians would be forced into unviable enclaves controlled by Israel, and then makes the ridiculous claim that out of war comes peace. So this war must continue. There can be no cease-fire because, you see, the more people you kill, the better the outcome. This is the leader of the claimed exceptional nation, stooping to the platitudes of barbarism.
No, Joe Biden couldn’t care less about peoples lives, only votes and power, which perhaps explains why he wrote the piece, to placate the critics in his own party and American voters who are turning on him in droves because of American actions with Israel against the Palestinians. Those he is just a front for demanded he write it to try to square the circle of advancing a policy of barbarism while trying to appear to be moral.
It is meant to bamboozle the common man and woman. The American people are thrown the choice of Biden for president again, at war with Russia and China, or Trump again, who prefers war with Mexico. War is their answer to all problems. But wars can also lead to revolutionary transformations.
For whereas America’s allies, and those who fear its power, have long pretended to accept its moralistic and humanitarian pretexts for American aggression against the nations of the world, they can no longer do so when confronted with the images flooding our consciousness of the atrocities being committed in Gaza. The United States has lost its pretended moral leadership and has been exposed for what it is. And maybe Biden is right, something good does come out of this tragedy, just not what he thinks, but instead, the loss of America’s claimed moral hegemony; a loss so severe that it can lead to a revolutionary transformation of nations’ and peoples’ world view, an awakening of their consciousness to a new reality of a future without American and European aggression, an awakening that will make it more difficult for the claimed hegemon and its allies to continue their militaristic and imperialistic policies in a world united against them.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”