by Donald A. Smith, PhD
In order to get Republicans to agree to supplemental funding for the wars in Ukraine, Israel, and (soon) China, Democrats seem on the verge of agreeing to draconian immigration and deportation policies.
CBS News reports White House open to new border expulsion law, mandatory detention and increased deportations in talks with Congress. Likewise, NBC News reports: Title 42 on steroids': Democrats consider expanding migrant detention and deportation in order to pass Ukraine aid. "Immigration advocates are furious at the potential for the administration getting new powers to expel migrants from the country."
This exposes some of the many harmful effects of America's hyper-militarized, aggressive foreign policy. Not only is the migration crisis largely due to U.S. overthrows and sanctions in South America, the war in Ukraine was totally avoidable and was engineered by some of the same people who engineered the war in Iraq.Indeed, Chas W. Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a Lifetime Director of the Atlantic Council, says in The Many Lessons of the War in Ukraine: "Less than a day after the US-engineered coup that installed an anti-Russian regime in Kyiv in 2014, Washington formally recognized the new regime... The United States and NATO began a multi-billion-dollar effort to reorganize, retrain, and re-equip Kyiv's armed forces. The avowed purpose was to enable Kyiv to reconquer the Donbas and eventually Crimea.... Crimea was Russian-speaking and had several times voted not to be part of Ukraine." And: "From 2014 to 2022, the civil war in Donbas took nearly 15,000 lives." Freeman says that the U.S. undermined several possible peace deals. "Ukraine is being eviscerated on the altar of Russophobia, but Russia has not, after all, been weakened.
Similarly, former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock says in in Ukraine: Tragedy of a Nation Divided:
Interference by the United States and its NATO allies in Ukraine's civil struggle has exacerbated the crisis within Ukraine, undermined the possibility of bringing the two easternmost provinces back under Kyiv's control, and raised the specter of possible conflict between nuclear-armed powers. Furthermore, in denying that Russia has a "right" to oppose extension of a hostile military alliance to its national borders, the United States ignores its own history of declaring and enforcing for two centuries a sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere.
Diplomat and historian George Kennan, quoted in Thomas Friedman's This Is Putin's War. But America and NATO Aren't Innocent Bystanders , wrote about NATO expansion: "I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves."
Ambassador Michael Gfoeller and David H. Rundell wrote in Newsweek's Lessons From the US Civil War Show Why Ukraine Can't Win: "Before the war, far right Ukrainian nationalist groups like the Azov Brigade were soundly condemned by the US Congress. Kiev's determined campaign against the Russian language is analogous to the Canadian government trying to ban French in Quebec. Ukrainian shells have killed hundreds of civilians in the Donbas and there are emerging reports of Ukrainian war crimes. The truly moral course of action would be to end this war with negotiations rather than prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people in a conflict they are unlikely to win without risking American lives."
Alfred de Zayas, a former senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says in The Ukraine War in the Light of the UN Charter: "The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014. The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements. These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2022, as reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine."
James W. Carden, journalist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State, wrote: "The de facto alliance of Ukrainian westernizing liberals and the fascist Ukrainian far-Right which together drove the so-called Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14 ignored their obligation to respect the democratic process."
Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, in We Always Knew the Dangers of NATO Expansion: "[T]rying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching, " recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests." William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, said something very similar in How the US Lost Russia - and How We Can Restore Relations.
Neoconservative Robert Kagan wrote, in an otherwise hawkish essay in Foreign Affairs: "to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading."
NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said: Putin "went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders."
The Washington Post recently exposed that "Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine's Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said.... The extent of the CIA's involvement with Ukraine's security services has not previously been disclosed."
The CIA and National Security Agency made stenuous efforts to cover their tracks. The New Yorker reports: "it was part of a broader effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many 'sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters.'"
The RAND Corporation even predicted that arming Ukraine -- which it recommended doing to "over-extend and unbalance" Russia -- would result in a war.
Meanwhile, the United States occupies one third of the sovereign nation of Syria (the parts with oil), with help from its proxy army, the Syrian Defense Forces.
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