Are Fears Of False Flag In Ukraine Credible?

Are Fears Of False Flag In Ukraine Credible? 

                                                                                  Saeed Naqvi 

 

When the Anglo American combine embarked on Operation Desert Storm in 1992, it was America’s sole super power moment. Exactly 30 years later, in 2022, the two are involved in Ukraine. This time the US is at its nadir. What motivated the superpower then; what is the driving force now? 

 

On both occasions, the lead has been taken by the Anglo-American duet. In the first instance the idea was for the West, led by the two, to formalize the victory over the Soviet Union. The world was on notice: there was now only one super power and the entity called the West clustered around it. In this cluster, there was one more equal than others – Britain. 

 

There was one more factor which threatened the combine’s dominance of the world order since World War II. In the geopolitical seesaw, Soviet Collapse was also accompanied by German reunification. The unease about Germany’s rise was a factor which contributed to Desert Storm. “A Coalition of the Willing” had by action and deed retained the existing global hierarchy. 

 

Just as Desert Storm tapered off, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher set the cat among the pigeons by recognizing Croatia ahead of EU when Yugoslavia broke up. And now in Ukraine, Germany’s gas dependency on Russia was very much the ignition. Nord Stream-I from Russia feeding Germany and beyond was kosher but Nord Stream-II was not? Will the German people, angry at Putin’s excesses though they are, surrender their energy security to the US geopolitical interests? How the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty fed German nationalism of 1930s is well documented. 

 

Weapons of mass destruction were not the issue in 1992 but allegations to that effect were concocted as a reason to occupy Iraq in April 2003. In Ukraine the boot is on the other foot: the UN Security Council has been discussing Moscow’s claims that the US is funding “military biological activities” in Ukraine. Allegations were supported by China. US Under Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland affirmed the facts in the Senate Foreign Relations committee but with a twist: the Russians were trying to get at them. In an ingenious twist to the yarn she said “we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research material from falling into the hands of Russian forces.” 

 

In both the theatres, Iraq and Ukraine, the media was in the vanguard. As I have written before, Desert Storm was a watershed in the scale on which the media was deployed in Iraq and the subsequent 9/11 wars – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. In Iraq, 2003, 600 western journalists were embedded with US forces. Who are they embedded with in Ukraine? 

 

Even though Thatcher’s extraordinary energy led the build up to Desert Storm, US Defence Secretary, Dick Cheney gave the CNN an edge over the BBC. Peter Arnett of the CNN it was who virtually had the terrace rights of Baghdad’s Al Rasheed hotel from where he inaugurated an era of global media which brought a war live into our drawing rooms. For the first time the BBC had been beaten by an American network. Compared to the CNN’s high tech demonstration, BBC’s chief foreign correspondent, John Simpson looked much the poorer cousin with his satellite telephone. It was only after Desert Storm that the BBC World Service television was born, giving Lyse Doucet the profile which eclipsed Simpson. It must be added in parenthesis that the reputation BBC radio had built over decades for independent journalism, was sacrificed by BBC TV. 

 

It is axiomatic that a media, set up in the midst of a war, would, by the laws of patriotic nationalism, become the propaganda arm of the war effort. Unfortunately for Arnett, the impulse for fair reporting caused him to pry into a children’s milk and medicine facility in Baghdad which was bombed by the allied forces. Arnett paid a price for straying into an unflattering story. 

 

The icon of the global media in 1992, Arnett, had been fired by the CNN by the time I revisited Baghdad during the occupation in 2003. I met a pensive Arnett by the poolside of Al Rasheed on assignment with a less known outfit. 

 

The western media in attendance in Ukraine is circumscribed differently because it presumably operates under the security cover of heaven knows who. In which case it can never file a story which runs contrary to western propaganda. For instance it cannot quote a former top Pentagon adviser, US Army Colonel, Douglas Macgregor’s fear of a possible “false flag” operation with “biological weapons” on Poland, the frontline state helping Ukraine. Victoria Nuland’s spin on the presence of biological weapons in Ukraine has raised the spectre of some such “mishap” taking place. The question at the Senate hearing was: is the US helping Ukraine manufacture biological weapons? “Ukraine has biological research facilities”, Nuland spun the googly “we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent all these research materials falling into the hands of Russian forces.” Well, in a moment of desperation these “materials” can be planted on the Russians, leading inexorably towards a catastrophe. If the US is helping protect “benign” facilities, why this fear of Russians laying their hands on them? 

 

According to the Colonel, the Russians have more or less achieved what they had to on the ground. But the “donors” for the Republicans as well as the Democrats want to expand the war. Blinken and Nuland would like to fight the war to the last Ukrainian. The media will amplify the war to feverish pitch until the Russian economy and Putin are both “destroyed”. An “impossible proposition”, he adds. 

 

From Desert Storm, its sole super power moment, has the US declined so much in power that, 30 years later, it has to stage a rearguard action in Ukraine to keep its grip on the world order? The anxiety about China’s rise is now being replaced by something more complex – the Sino-Russian embrace. 

 

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Ukraine: “Hell Halth No Fury Like A Superpower In Decline”

Ukraine: “Hell Halth No Fury Like A Superpower In Decline”

                                                                                      Saeed Naqvi

Folks waking up from the stupor of opiated liberalism, are falling over each other in surprise at the blatant racism in the western media’s coverage of Ukraine’s tragedy. The plaint seems to suggest that the west was deviating from its usual sense of fair play. All wars are brutal whether in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya and, ofcourse, Afghanistan. Marines urinating on dead Afghans was also racism, but the western media’s “gora, gora bhai bhai” (all whites are a family) removes the difference between marines and journalists.

The western media is misty eyed this time at “blued eyed white kids injured” or “Europeans like us” giving up their homes and walking to neighbouring countries. And the reception for refugees everywhere is heartwarming. Who knows the immigrants may be walking into a trap set by some devious Russian: extend the war to such an extent that millions of Ukrainians migrate to the Europe they have always dreamt of. Imagine the social upheaval this will create in Europe. When these migrants reach the cliff of Dover, will Boris Johnson throw up his arms and scream: “Halt; we have Brexited?”

Really, I am astonished at this wringing of hands at the sight of racism. Even though Lancet magazine cited a million killed in the Iraq war, this figure never found mention in the western media currently in rhythmic breast beating over Ukraine.

Does anyone remember a yelping Qaddafi sodomized by a knife? The other half of the TV screen, showed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “I came; I saw and he “died”. Ms Clinton bile is much in evidence in Ukraine too. Her suggestion may well be the script the Anglo-American combine is following: pump lethal weapons and money to help the insurgency “exactly as we did in Afghanistan.” Give it to her. She admitted before Congress that the Mujahideen “we trained menace us to this day as Muslim terrorists.”

By this logic, AZOV, the far right neo Nazi group, sustaining the insurgency in Ukraine, will link up with their ideological kith and kin sprouting in Europe. Europe be warned: look what your friends across the Atlantic are setting up for you.

After his macabre death, Qaddafi’s body was placed in a large air conditioned warehouse. A young reporter of the BBC, eager for war trophy, was allowed to enter and kneel near the body like a triumphant shikari after a tiger hunt, even as cameras flashed.

To go back a bit in history American excesses during the conquest of the Philippines appears to have been forgotten. Senator Albert Beveridge was only the most eloquent of the numerous Congressmen who shared his views: “It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with orientals.”

Another aspect of the war needs to be understood. This war is being fought primarily on global TV.

Legendary newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst at the turn of the 20^th century, clearly spelt out the nexus between war and journalism. He told the famous painter, illustrator, Frederic Remington: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” This relationship between pictures and war was refined, polished, nurtured until it was a full blown oak on show within a year of the Soviet collapse. It became the amplifier of the post Soviet, US led New World Order. Operation Desert Storm was the beginning of this phase.

Unless the Biden, Blinken and Victoria Nuland trio driving this war are willing to push Vladimir Putin to the nuclear edge, this war will end once Russia has altered the ground realities beyond Donbas, secure access to Crimea and settle for open ended talks.

What will the Washington trio say, when transcripts of President Zelensky’s interview to ABC News in early March, are placed in their hands. “I have cooled down regarding this question (NATO membership) a long time ago after we understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine – the alliance is afraid of controversial things and confrontation with Russia.”

What then were the “sanctions from hell” all about? Putin would have to be an idiot not to realize that Biden, faced with all manner of problems at home and facing Congressional elections, was building up Ukraine’s membership of NATO to a crescendo with a purpose: the clashing of cymbals would take place at the NATO summit in Madrid in June when, (as Putin feared) Ukraine’s membership could be sprung as a fait accompli.

To cope with the whirlwind after the “sanctions from hell”, a US delegation turns up in Venezuela, cap in hand, in the durbar of President Nicolas Maduro, whom Washington does not even recognize. Look at the irony: while the West accuses Putin of plotting regime change in Ukraine the US’s regime change in Venezuela has been in the works for some time. Washington has already recognized “President Juan Guaido”. Poor fellow walks around Caracas and Washington like a discard now.

Guaido is not the only shame Biden carries in his backyard, Monroe doctrine or no Monroe doctrine. On March 11, Chile swore its youngest Communist President, Gabriel Boric. US pocket borough of Colombia has given leftist, former guerilla, Gustav Petro an irretrievable lead. In Brazil, Socialist Lula Da Silva is the front runner. Far away from Latin America, King Salman of Saudi Arabia has hit the dollar where it hurts: he has agreed to sell oil to China in Yuan. Bashar Assad is visiting UAE. High officials of Qatar, Iran, Turkey and UAE have been to Moscow.

I have picked two headlines by writers distant from each other in ideology and intent. The headlines dwell on the aggressive style of the Biden-Blinken’s foreign policy.

Abdel Bari Atwan, respected Palestinian columnist popular on BBC’s Newsnight writes:

“The Last American war will be in Europe.”

Graham E Fuller, ex high CIA officer

“Hell halth no fury like a Superpower in decline.”

Fuller’s headline is ominous. Times are out of joint.

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Regional, Internal Changes For Harmony Inevitable: Victorious Modi Will Cope Better

Regional, Internal Changes For Harmony Inevitable: Victorious Modi Will Cope Better

                                                                                        Saeed Naqvi

These election results provide a sense of stability which the Narendra Modi government requires to cope with the consequences of “our best friend” floundering from Afghanistan to Kazakhstan and now Ukraine. The western media painting Vladimir Putin in lurid colours does not quite disguise Joe Biden’s isolation, an outcome exactly the opposite of what the US President wanted.

Since the US debacle in Afghanistan, there is a certain inevitability about an entente with our neighbours. And, towards that end, something is astir.

Have you in recent years seen our channels telecast a positive India-Pakistan story? Last month, for three days continuously, channels reported that not a bullet had been fired by either side for a year; ceasefire signed by the armies had held. Back channels are meeting in Muscat and Dubai. There are signs of good sense on the Chinese front too.

Had Modi done badly in the elections, the adjustments the region requires would have been perceived as from a position of weakness. Given his obstinate nature, the “give” essential for forward movement would have been slow in coming.

A buoyant Modi can with confidence roll up his sleeves, pour over the drawing board, and spell out alterations in foreign policy without any change in the key relationship. The four upon five outcome has resulted in India’s 200 million Muslims feeling disheartened. “There is a soul of goodness in all things evil would men observingly distil it out.” Shakespeare is apt for the occasion. Changes in foreign policy have become inevitable. Those changes will be in everyone’s interest.

Could Akhilesh Yadav be your messiah? He has established beyond any shadow of a doubt that he simply does not have the “killer” instinct needed for big sport. He has now led the party to four defeats – two Assembly and two Parliament elections. The uncle he never got along with, Shivpal Yadav, won from Jaswant Nagar by a record 90,000 votes. Little wonder Mualyam Singh is toying with the idea of floating a Nav Samaj Party to cast the net beyond caste and shed the “loser” image.

There is a difference between advisers and a coterie which neither the Gandhi family nor Akhilesh have understood. Akhilesh was advised to forge an alliance with Chandrashekhar Azad of the Azad Samaj Party. He happens to be an impressive dalit leader whose spell in Yogi Adityanath’s jail had imparted to him a certain aura.

Akhilesh must rue the day he said “no” to the proposal. Look how Mayawati is now a cipher because the dalit vote deserted her and fell for the BJP’s social engineering. And how clever. Field a hundreds dalit candidates to lure dalit voters secure in the knowledge that the candidate will win because the upper castes too will vote for him since he represents the BJP. What a cleverly contrived electoral confluence of castes otherwise opposed to each other.

Without this massive shift of dalit vote the outcome in UP may well have been different because the vulgar edge given to the Hindu cause at the street level appears not to have increased the BJP numbers. Compared to 2017, the party is down by 52 seats.

The number of Muslims in the UP assembly is now 9% of the House – 36 seats. This inflates the SP numbers not because a caste party is in good health but because the Muslim vote, scared of the BJP, did not even sniff at the Congress and sought SP’s protection. Just as the dalit and upper castes drifted towards the BJP, Muslims and Yadavs made a beeline for SP.

These new combinations do not entail anything more than 2+2 and so on. But in due course chemistry will develop.

There has been no numerical gain for the BJP by lumpenizing Hinduism. What gave it winning numbers was its secular, economic measures – rations, cash, money for housing. Is this not some kind of welfarism?

Will the experience of recent electoral battles therefore tone down the BJP’s saffron, smoothen its craggy rough edges? Or am I clothing the BJP in my wishful thinking because the image of a moderate BJP is quite incompatible with the Yogi’s habitual excesses?

Of the other dramtis personae in play does the Gandhi family not have an iota of pride and self-respect the way their own partymen call them names, insult them? They stay on, piling defeat upon defeat. How thick can a skin be?

The media, either on official signal or following its own class preference, keeps the Gandhis in play. Will the love fest last after these results?

This is a matter of concern even for the BJP. The Congress had become its pliant B team. Now it cannot be set up even as a scarecrow. At this precise moment Aam Aadmi Party has set the cat among the pigeons by rearing its head in Punjab. BJP, Left parties, Congress on the brink of expiry will speak in one voice rubbishing Kejriwal for different reasons. Congress and the Left nurse a desire to revive, they know not where. The BJP sees in AAP a real threat, not a fake one, the Congress, it has so far cunningly kept in focus.

Remember AAP’s 67 seats out of 70 in 2015? How successive Lt. Governors shackled him, lest he run away with the show. The media was arrayed against him. He was soft-saffron, they said, a professional agitator. What the media did not play up was where he could be pinned down: Kejriwal turned callously away from the Delhi riots of February 2020.

Elsewhere in health, education, water, electricity, his team have been doers. The effort was palpable.

And now that the “doers” have arrived in Punjab, the New Delhi establishment will throw every obstacle in his way. To begin with, abruptly Delhi Municipal elections have been cancelled for no rhyme or reason. Why? Because Kejriwal may just trounce the BJP, the first face to face combat after Delhi was first conquered in 2015.

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Clinton Gives Game Away “Bleed Russians In Ukraine Like Afghanistan”

Clinton Gives Game Away “Bleed Russians In Ukraine Like Afghanistan”

                                                                                      Saeed Naqvi

Has Vladimir Putin been lured into Ukraine? Did he really imagine that it would be an easy two day outing? Something he did not put into his calculus was the years of planning at the Pentagon, Langley and the British military intelligence to entrap him. Who knows Putin may have counter moves up his sleeve. He is an exceptional chess player.

Lethal equipment was obviously stationed in Ukraine by the West much before the war drums rolled. In fact the chorus, “Putin is about to invade”, was raised after the equipment was in place and duly manned. Who will ever find out that the men in uniform behind the fancier machines were Ukrainians, Poles or British?

Russians acted on a script they have been refining since the Orange Revolution of November 2004. The crisis has been building up from much earlier though. Let me pick a few dates arbitrarily:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who single handedly reduced the Soviet Empire to modern Russia, had serious concerns about a reunified Germany in NATO. James Baker, Bush Senior’s Secretary of State, an old fashioned diplomat, reliable, not flighty, prevailed on Gorbachev on the German question, but promised that NATO would not move closer to Russia even “by an inch”.

Baker’s word was not kept. The climax was reached in 1998 when the US senate, after a perfunctory debate, ratified NATO expansion. One of the finest minds on strategy and possibly America’s greatest expert on Russia, George Kennan, gave a prescient interview which I have referred to earlier also.

“I think this is the beginning of a new Cold War. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe.”

Critics will leap and point fingers at Kennan: “Look, he was wrong; Russia has attached a European country.” To understand why Ukraine has been attacked Kennan’s statement must be read in full.

“Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now (in 1998) we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime……… Ofcourse there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you.”

Despite Kennan’s warning, the Military Industrial Complex stopped at nothing. Since 1991, 14 new member states have been added to NATO. Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO (whom I interviewed as a peacenik Prime Minister of Norway) has been salivating on Georgia and Ukraine, both red lines for Russia. In January 2021, Zelensky approached Biden on bended knees: “Please, Sir, take us into NATO.”

This is when Russian troops in large numbers moved towards the border. The other purpose was to deter neo Nazi groups menacing for the past eight years, Luhansk and Donetsk, the pro-Russian enclaves of Donbas in the East.

Why did the US orchestra on Ukraine reach a crescendo in February?

By late January 2022, Boris Johnson’s sins had caught up with him. Partygate was reverberating in Parliament. Every time Labour leader Keir Starmer sought Johnson’s resignation for his misdemeanours, Johnson would lean on the dispatch box and, in addition to offering flimsy defence, make the smallest parting between his lips and emit “Phutin” to divert the Parliament’s attention. Just when his neck seemed to be on the line, he flew to Ukraine to shed the boozy image.

Supposing Johnson had fallen, President Joe Biden would have slipped with no hand to pull him up. Questions were being raised about his mental fitness; Trump’s rating were the same as his, pandemic blues were not ending; race relations were plummeting, school kids were killing school kids with automatic weapons regularly.

All of this against the backdrop of defeat in Afghanistan, a failed attempt at regime change in Kazakhstan and the western alliance in total disarray. Who was Johnson’s pet hate: Emmanuel Macron or Vladimir Putin? Was the Brexit boomerang from Northern Island hitting him hard or was Ukraine the problem?

The Anglo-American combine were beating the war drums at such high decibel levels that a larger war with Europe was being dreamed up. The US was across the Atlantic; Britain beyond the channel, distanced even more from Europe by Brexit. Were these two troubled, non European entities trying to drag Europe into a war with Russia?

Some of it was deception. An atmosphere of war was a red herring. The Military intelligence of the countries was pointing to the 1,20,000 Russian troops on the Ukraine border as precursor to a general war. But war hysteria was a smokescreen to lure Russia into the Ukrainian foxhole for a sufficient length of time to enable the western media, transformed into a lying propaganda machine, to demonize Putin irreparably.

A minor digression has come from Andrew Higgins of The New York Times. Rabbi Kaminezki, the chief rabbi in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine had warned against Zelensky, a Jew, becoming President. “We will have pogroms in two years if things go wrong.” Zelensky not only ignored the rabbi but proceeded to appoint Volodymyr Groysman, a fellow Jew as his Prime Minister. This caused NYT to take note: “Ukraine is the only country outside Israel where the heads of state and government are Jewish.” Since then, the Prime Minister has changed. I wonder if this detail makes any material difference to the story.

Western propaganda about Putin is scary. Russophobia is growing. Russian embassy in neighbouring Warsaw has been “seized” not by mobs but Poland’s Foreign Ministry. How will Russia retaliate?

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton has spilt the beans. In an interview to MSNBC she said Russians should be trapped in Ukraine and defeated by a well funded and armed insurgency exactly “As we had done in Afghanistan.” Ms. Clinton forgets two facts: Americans too were “trapped” in Afghanistan for 20 years and left in disgrace.

She herself had told Congress (video available) that “we armed the Mujahideen”, threw money at them and ended up manufacturing the terrorists who plague us to this day.

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