The US March to War in Ukraine Sounds Familiar

How our Military Industrial Complex (MIC) manufactures conflicts that end in tragedy

Eisenhower and Kennedy

In early 1961, President Eisenhower gave a now-famous 10 minute address to the American people, as he prepared to leave office for the last time. After a 50 year career in the military and as President, he first spoke of Great Compromises, as “Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.” Later in the speech, he said:

“We yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment…

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea…

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Three days later, President Kennedy was sworn in and immediately involved in an ill-advised plan to overthrow the Cuban government in a CIA-supported coup, the Bay of Pigs invasion. The invasion failed, due to a number of errors and it is reported Kennedy said he wished to, “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

The next year, during the Cuban missile crisis, elements in the MIC tried to convince President Kennedy to launch air strikes in Cuba, which many believe would have led to a nuclear exchange. Kennedy worked directly with Khrushchev to avoid the crisis and strike a secret deal. Its been said that both men felt they were the only people interested in stopping war, holding back their respective military leaders ready for a fight. The next year, Kennedy was assassinated and many Americans believe the CIA was directly involved.

Vietnam

Which leads us to Vietnam. Most Americans have a grasp of our direct involvement in Vietnam and the terrible tragedies that still haunt us today. What’s often overlooked is that the United States government, long before “directly” entering the Vietnam Conflict, funded the French effort to fight Communism there for at least a decade. (Which is a pretty close facsimile to our funding of the Ukraine War over the past 2 years). As early as 1954, the US considered directly intervening, but cooler heads prevailed.

WikiCommons photo of the Gulf of Tonkin incident

Later, the US involvement began to escalate in earnest in 1964, due to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. What many don’t know is that the New York Times reported in 2005, based upon documents that had finally been released by the NSA, that show the NSA doctored intelligence and the MIC misled the public in order to drive public support for action. Indeed, actions that were reported as an attack on US Navy warships (which incidentally were conducting covert operations against the North Vietnamese at the time) on August 4th never happened. But the NSA doctored intelligence and President Johnson leveraged this false intelligence to bring the United States into the war. 282,000 Americans and 1,353,000 total people died in the subsequent conflict from 1965 to 1974.

The War on Terror (Afghanistan and Iraq)

After the terrible tragedy of the Vietnam War, overt conflict by our military waned. While the CIA continued to participate in a long list of escapades that included coups or military action in: Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Peru, Angola, East Timor, Argentina, Afghanistan, Poland, Chad, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama between 1970 and 1991. For the most part, the American people were kept largely in the dark to these operations, while major troop deployments abated.

Until 2001. While the invasion into Afghanistan seemed justified at the time, it is important to remind our dear readers that the mujahideen and the elements that became the Taliban were CIA allies during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s; the CIA armed and financed them through 1992 when the Soviet Union exited Afghanistan. Additionally, there are many questions and little answers about the role Saudi Arabia played in funding the 9/11 attack and the CIA’s efforts to help them cover it up.

Worse still, the reasons given for the subsequent invasion into Iraq in 2003 were complete lies. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and no links to Al Qaeda. 4,550 US soldiers died in the Iraq War; 2,401 in Afghanistan. It has been estimated that the total cost of the War on Terror was $21T and over 1,000,000 total dead.

Ukraine

While the war between Ukraine and Russia is covered extensively every day in the news, and our continued support ($113B to date) a hot topic of debate across the nation, it seems many are unaware of the role the US and CIA had in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which flipped that country from a pro-Russian government to a pro-American government.

There may be no more central character to the US’ clandestine involvement in Ukraine than Victoria Nuland, a former Dick Cheney advisor during the Iraq War. She is the current Deputy US Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and has a long history of supporting Cold War politics, NATO expansion, arms races with Russia and encircling Russia for containment.

Ms. Nuland’s most famous for a leaked phone call in which she discussed openly overthrowing the elected President in Ukraine in 2014 with the then-US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. She is also famous for admitting the US has bioweapons labs in Ukraine. They both discussed whom they would support in the future coup, and lo and behold, he became the new leader (this is from the same linked article in the previous paragraph):

During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be plotting to replace or undermine elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European Union for favoring former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko to take over as prime minister, instead of the U.S. first choice, Artseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed took power after Yanukovych was ousted about three weeks later. 

Indeed, it is a well-known secret that US Intelligence helped trigger the Ukraine War, including treating Ukraine as a NATO ally in all but name. The coup in 2014 led directly to Russia’s invasion into Crimea at that time and the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine that continues to this day.

In the US, the pro-Ukraine propaganda continues unabated. CBS’ 60 Minutes still says that Putin’s actions were an “unprovoked invasion,” leaving out all of the history and details. President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, while leading standing ovations to honor Nazis at the Canadian Parliament, claims he is the only thing standing between Russia and Word War 3. He appears to me to be the single person most likely to trigger such a war, as the Russians are now warning.

The record here is clear.

The US Military Industrial Complex has its own, secret agenda. It has manufactured American wars in Vietnam and Iraq, led us into terrible conflicts elsewhere and has participated in covert operations to overthrow leaders around the world. We see the same patterns unfolding in Ukraine, as we are asked for every increasing funding and ever increasing involvement in the stalemate. The intelligence Community (IC) has no qualms with lying directly to the American people and its leaders in order to serve these clandestine goals. None of the actors in the MIC and IC are elected. They regularly stand in direct conflict with our democratically elected government and are bad actors killing innocent people all over the world in the name of the American people.

It must stop, and today is a great day to start the stopping - do not continue to fund the manufactured war in Ukraine. We must seek peace.