Sunday, February 8, 2015

Nuclear Brinkmanship

Barack Obama hadn’t even been born when Herman Kahn’s classic “On Thermonuclear War”  was published in 1960. But there’s still time for him to read it before he goes further down his suicidal road in Ukraine.

John Kerry was 18 and bound for military duty in Vietnam when the somber, scholarly warning against  mutual nuclear destruction first appeared in print.  Whether Kerry has read it is immaterial.  He is, after all, the “veterans against the war” actor who burned someone else’s medals in his demonstration on the Capitol steps.  Kerry’s public life has been and continues to be that of an opportunist and congenital liar, born with a natural ability to shed logic as ducks shed water.

Meanwhile, nothing has changed since Kahn wrote his book except the weaponry: it’s vastly more powerful now.

Yet Obama, Kerry and the rest of the Washington’s Ship of Fools continue to lead this country and its allies in Europe, Canada and the U.K. toward an inevitable nuclear confrontation with Russia.  To risk repeating history by ignoring it, one must first know history.  These idiots appear not to have bothered learning history.  It would be worthwhile for some journalist to ask Obama at his next news conference if he’s read Kahn’s book. Better use of time than most of the foreign policy softballs the hacks toss to him.

The fools weren’t content planning and financing a coup d’etat that drove the democratically elected head of the Ukrainian state into exile.  The fools aren’t content with installing their own stooge as head of the new ersatz government, which promptly turned over two of its ministries to neo-Nazi leadership. The fools aren’t content with a western network of countries illegally smuggling armaments into Kiev.  Now the fools want to take the penultimate step to war itself: openly and officially providing a hostile government in Kiev with the means to attack Russia itself. 

Retired diplomats and intelligence experts in Europe, England and the U.S. have warned repeatedly that this would be disastrous. Then, as the respected German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung put it, “Russia would have to intervene, and then, bluntly speaking, to take Kiev. Then NATO would be in a difficult situation. Then you would have to start World War III, which no one wants.”

Well, that’s not entirely true.  The fools want war.  They want war because the indescribably wealthy oligarchs, who owe much of their power-through-riches to the very policy of endless war, want still more war.  And since they own the very minds and souls of the people we elected ostensibly to run this sorry-assed country,  America’s continuing pursuit of war is a certainty. If that pursuit leads to war with Russia over Ukraine, does anyone really think it will be fought with conventional weapons for very long?

While the truthless Kerry would have us believe — and the media sheep so report — that U.S. economic pressure brought Russia to the table in Moscow last week, the fact is that the leadership of both Germany and France — who are opposed to arming Ukraine — seek desperately now to hammer out a diplomatic solution that would head off the Ship of Fools. 

If the new negotiations in Minsk do in fact lead to a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, there would be no immediate “necessity” for Washington to start arming Kiev to the teeth.

Maybe that would give Obama time to read Herman Kahn’s book.  Or to listen soberly to someone who has read it.