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© Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters |
With US military bases breeding faster than McDonald’s franchises,
and 28-member NATO smashing up against Russia’s border, antagonizing
Moscow with war games, the West continues selling the pulp fiction of
‘Russian aggression’ to an increasingly suspect audience.
In
the latest serving of steaming rhetoric designed to make Westerners
tremble and quake at the very mention of the name ‘Vladimir Putin’, a
Newsweek article proclaims in its apocalyptic headline, “How and Why Russia is Moving to a War Footing”.
Russia has been found guilty – by the non-jury court of NATO opinion -
of carrying out the very same task that every nation performs if it
hopes to maintain its sovereignty: spending money on modernizing its
forces.
The author of the hit-piece, Andrew Monaghan, nervously
describes the funds the Kremlin has set aside for military expenditures
as “impressive figures.”
In 2010, Russia “committed $610 billion
to a decade-long transformation process… ensuring that at least 70
percent of military equipment is modern, including the procurement of
thousands of pieces of high performance and heavy equipment, such as
tanks, artillery, military aircraft and naval vessels,” Monaghan wails,
as if Russia had just invented the concept of national armies.
The
author fails to mention, however, that the US Pentagon spends about
that much every month feeding the voracious appetite of its vast
military empire. And since global conflagrations have been erupting in
direct proportion to how far NATO forces wander abroad, many countries
do not perceive this US-engineered monster as a remotely positive thing.
Indeed, they see it as a direct threat to their national survival.
Russia, which finds itself on the front line of the encroachment,
wasted no time modernizing its military after coming to the realization
that Washington’s pledge of cooperation with Moscow against terror, not
to mention the US-built missile defense system in Eastern Europe was an
elaborate fraud, designed to lull Russia into a false sense of bilateral
security with the global superpower.
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Moscow warns of response after US sends destroyer to Black Sea |
Washington’s "anti-Russian
policies" have convinced the Russian leadership that making concessions
or negotiating with the West is futile. It has become apparent that the
West will always support any individual, movement or government that is
anti-Russian, be it tax-cheating oligarchs, convicted Ukrainian war
criminals, Saudi-supported Wahhabi terrorists in Chechnya or
cathedral-desecrating punks in Moscow,” wrote Dr. Evgenia Gurevich, Dr. Victor Katsap, Dmitry Orlov and A. Raevsky.
At
the same time, Western media and think tanks regularly accuse Russia of
harboring evil designs towards neighboring states, and despite the fact
that Russia has not given the slightest indication of threatening
behavior. Consider this opening line of a recent article in
Foreign Policy, citing a Rand Corp. study, that certainly sent shudders
across the tiny Baltic States: “If Russian tanks and troops rolled into
the Baltics tomorrow, outgunned and outnumbered NATO forces would be overrun in under three days.”
The article was published on the same day US Defense Secretary Ash
Carter announced a $3.4 billion plan to add more heavy weapons and
armored vehicles in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. In other
words, a very nice payday for numerous American defense contractors, who
now want debt-riddled Eastern European countries to crack open their
wallets and donate or go it alone against the invisible menace of
‘Russian aggression.’
“And our estimates for 2016 indicate a
further increase of 1.5 percent in real terms this year. This is
progress. But I will call on allies to keep up the momentum, and to do
more,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a press conference
this week.
Personally, I hear faint echoes of blackmail in that comment.
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Polish soldiers look on as U.S. Army soldiers unload M1 Abrams tanks which will participate in exercises at the training ground in Drawsko Pomorskie, Jankowo Pomorskie, northwestern Poland © Agencja Gazeta / Reuters |
Time for a quick reality check: If Moscow was really as
aggressive as NATO leaders want us to believe it is, the map around
Russia would look radically different right now. Ukraine would be torn
apart and Balkanized between no fewer than two autonomous republics,
while Georgia, which launched a brazen crack-of-dawn attack on Russian
peacekeepers in South Ossetia on August 7, 2008, would be fortunate if
it had escaped with nothing less than the lengthy occupation of its
territory.
But as things stand, Russia never launched a military invasion of Ukraine, as so many Western experts had predicted it
would, and Georgia (free of former President Mikhail Saakashvili, who
ordered the attack on Russian positions) remains a free and independent
state with steadily improving relations with Russia.
Does that sound remotely like the actions of a country hell bent on restoring empire? On
a side note, I am personally convinced that the West was not only
anticipating but desperately hoping that Russia would have jumped at the
opportunity of invading Ukraine as the capital Kiev succumbed to
Western-backed neo-fascist forces. An invasion by Russian forces would
have bogged Moscow down in a protracted conflict that would only have
succeeded in destroying Russia’s relations with European countries for a
very long time, possibly forever. At the same time, it would have given
US-led NATO forces a free hand in deciding Syria’s fate, a fate that the United States has already
unilaterally determined - without even a hint of democratic due process
- has no place for President Bashar Assad.
The other purported excuse for NATO forces massing on Russia’s
Western border is due to Crimea voting to leave Ukraine at the height of
the Kiev’s political crisis. Although it is rarely admitted in Western
media - many journalists who should know better still describe the
annexation as due to an invasion - Russia never employed military force
against the peninsula. Today the people of Crimea – in poll after poll – have only positive things to say about their new national status.
President
Putin on Friday had strong words regarding NATO's advance on Russia's
borders under the false pretext of Russian aggression.
"After the
'Arab Spring' they have already moved closer to our borders. Why did
they need to support the coup in Ukraine", Putin said at a plenary
session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
The
Russian leader believes such actions were taken to justify the existence
of the North Atlantic Alliance. "They need an external enemy, an
external opponent - or why else would this organization be needed?" he
explained. Monaghan, meanwhile, has taken the position that Russia’s militarization and modernization are “not so much responses to what NATO is currently
doing but rather reflections of what would have taken place anyway.” In
other words, nothing NATO is doing in Russia’s backyard can explain the
Russian military’s actions of late; Russia is militarizing because,
well, it’s Russia. This explanation is either willful self-deception or a
flat-out lie. Moscow has been warning for years that unless US-led NATO
demonstrates that it wants a real partnership, and not just a bunch of
hollow statements, the option is nothing less than another arms race to
the bottom.
All things considered,
Russia made the right move on the global chessboard. Even before
Washington showed its hand at the geopolitical poker table, revealing
that its calls for cooperation with Russia were nothing but a bad bluff,
Moscow had already understood Uncle Sam had cards up his sleeve.
Today,
the US military leviathan has grown to such monstrous proportions that
it is nearly impossible to say with any certainty how many military
bases the United States operates abroad. Journalist Nick Turse reported in 2011 that there’s "one number no American knows and that is the number of overseas US military bases". “Today,
according to the Pentagon’s published figures, the American flag flies
over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S. territories
abroad,” Turse wrote. “This figure does not include small foreign sites of less than 10 acres or those that the U.S. military values at less than $10 million.”
Indeed,
the Pentagon – which funds through US taxpayer money about 75 percent
of NATO expenditures - has become so large and cumbersome that it lost
track of $2.3 trillion dollars, former US Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld told reporters on September 10, 2001.
It
appears that not only has US-led NATO become a threat to hundreds of
sovereign states around the world with its extreme imperial overreach,
the very same malignancy that the Roman Empire succumbed to, it has
managed to become a threat even to itself.
Today, Russia is not
taking any chances with the unpredictable global hegemon, whose list of
nations it has invaded grows annually. Indeed, the Russian military is
engaged in a “transformation process” at the very same time NATO is
pounding on the front door. But instead of throwing open the gates to
the Western juggernaut, Russia has hedged its bets on long-term
strategy, investing in strong national defense.
And that is an “act of aggression” US-led NATO simply can’t tolerate.
Source: RT
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