Wars usually bring out a goodly share of hypocrisy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is no exception. Here and now we see tremendous upset and concern in Europe, North America and elsewhere over the horrors and injustice of the war and invasion. But there have been many other fairly recent cases of invasion, occupation, mass slaughter, population expulsion or displacement that do not seem to get much attention or rouse much concern at all.
In 2020 we saw the Armenia-Azerbaidjan war/ Thousands were killed and parts of historic Armenia were conquered by the Azeris. Ancient and medieval Armenian buildings were damaged in the war and afterwards by the Azeri forces.
In 1974, Turkey occupied about 35% if the island of Cyprus. Neither the Europeans --inside and outside of the EU-- nor the Americans make much of a fuss over the continued occupation and the expulsion in that year of an estimated 200,000 ethnic Greek Cypriots from their homes plus the Turkish vandalism to age-old Greek buildings/monuments in the occupation zone in northern Cyprus.
Then there is the Syrian civil war, going on since 2011. In the course of this civil war, an estimated 600,000 Syrians have been killed [Syrian Observatory for Human Rights]. Moreover, millions of Syrians have fled or been driven from their country by their own government or the jihadi Sunni mlitias, now mainly sponsored by Turkey or by ISIL [DA'ESH] or other forces on the ground. With more than four million Syrian refugees estimated in Turkey plus a million or so in Lebanon and another million in Jordan, the number of refugees is only exceeded by the number from the war in Ukraine.
Now some may note that a great deal of world attention is focussed on the Palestinian Arabs. This, just parenthetically, reminds us of a rule of the "international community": Arab lives do not matter -- unless somehow the blame for the Arabs' deaths or refugee status or other plight can somehow be attributed to Israel and Jews, with some plausible degree of honesty, however minor, or without any grain of truth at all. Compare the media treatment of the Syrian Arab victims of the Syrian civil war [as well as Palestinian Arabs living in Syria] with media treatment and coverage of the Palestinian Arabs in areas under Israeli jurisdiction -- often fashionably depicted as somehow a separate nation or people but somehow connected to the Arabs in general, and as perennial victims, even as a collective Jesus in much journalistic blather.
Then we have the massacres of Kurds in Syria by Turkish-sponsored Sunni Arab militias and by the Turkish airforce, plus de facto expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kurds from areas controlled by Turkey and those militias in northern Syria. That Kurdish suffering has not gotten much attention in the media.
All of the above is part of the general hypocrisy.
However, the USA has shown its own unique and special hypocrisy. Back in late 2013-early 2014, the USA encouraged "right-wing" or "neo-nazi" Ukrainian parties --Right Sektor & Svoboda -- to revolt against the pro-Russian Yanukovich government. Eventually Yanukovich fled and the new rulers, the extreme nationalist parties named above, made declarations that were felt as highly threatening to the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine, such as honoring Stepan Bandera, who had led a German-sponsored Ukrainian militia during WW2, which slaughtered Jews and ethnic Russians in the Ukraine. These provocative declarations gave Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, the pretext that he needed for invading eastern Ukraine and annexing the Crimea [which truth be told, had been a part of the Russian republic in the USSR but was transferred to Ukraine by the post-Stalin Khrushchov govt in 1954 although its population was overwhelmingly non-Ukrainian ethnically].
Now after the Russian government showed its hand after the overthrow of Yanukovich, the Obama administration refused to sell or give the Ukraine weapons needed for its self-defense against Russia. And this after the State Dept's Victoria Nuland had gone to Kyiw [pronounced Keef] to encourage the rebels. Trump and his administration were the first to supply real weapons to the post-Yanukovich govts.
Then there was Joe Biden's shakedown of the Ukrainian leadership [Poroshenko & Yatseniuk] by threatening to withhold needed loan guarantees if a state prosecutor looking into the Burisma company that had placed Biden's son Hunter on its board, were not dismissed. The prosecutor was fired, as Joe boasted later on.
After Trump, the ill-fated Biden presidency resumed the Obama Ukraine policy. Biden & Co. have been stingy about sending weapons to Ukraine. Maybe if Washington had sent the needed weapons [such as Javelins & Stingers] when Russia began its military build up on the borders of Ukraine in the first half of 2021. Maybe it would thus have dissuaded and deterred a Russian invasion. Even when the invasion began it took some time for Joe B & Co. to decide to send needed weapons. But then how do we explain that on the third day of the war when the Ukrainian resistance was holding up, the Biden national insecurity crowd [Susie R, Brian D, Tony B, Jake S] offered President Zelensky of Ukraine sanctuary outside of the Ukraine? Did they not understand that if the leader ran away the resistance was likely to collapse? Was this offer of sanctuary not hypocrisy? Was it not an effort to undermine the Ukrainian struggle against Russia?
Indeed we may wonder whether Biden's foreign affairs gang were keeping Ukraine relatively weak and lacking the most important self-defense weapons in order to lure the Russians into invading Ukraine [which Putin had apparently long wanted to do]. Does this sound too bizarre, too far-fetched, too unreasonable? Yes, it would -- if we did not know that a major theoretician of US foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's advisor for national insecurity, had not boasted of luring the Soviet Union into making war in Afghanistan around 1978. Now Brzezinski was Barack Obama's mentor in foreign policy matters and Obama was planning to make him his own national insecurity advisor, as Carter had done. Indeed Brzezinski was the favorite foreign policy advisor of the Democratic Party. Now, when a big donor to the Democratic Party, Penny Pritzker, told Obama that she would not donate and manage fund-raising for his campaign if Zbig were to be made national security advisor [Alan Dershowitz, then a prominent Democrat, also opposed a role for Zbig in an Obama presidency], Susan Rice was brought in as a replacement. We may assume that Susan Rice's views on foreign policy, on issues of war and peace, etc, were not and are not far from Zbig's views and theories and understandings and desires. Now since Biden's foreign policy team are retreads from Obama's administration, we may assume that they all [Tony, Susie, Jake etc] share Zbig's basic proclivity for warmongering. Hence if the Ukraine were left weak and lacking needed defensive weapons, it may have been by design in order to lure the Russians into an invasion. As Zbig did in Afghanistan.
Labels: Joe Biden, Russia, Ukraine, USA
