Groundhog Day

(credit: USA Today)

It's deja vu all over again. It's fascist coup all over again.

 In the past half century alone, the USA has invaded, bombed, and/or occupied Vietnam, Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Gulf States, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, and Syria.  And even that is only a partial list. There are shadow wars being waged all the time from more than a thousand American military bases dotting our endangered planet.

Deja vu has popped up its rabid, fascist little head all over again. Because while you were distracted watching the Super Bowl last night, the Obama administration and its corporate partners brazenly tacked yet another gigantic hunk of real estate onto their plunder list. And that is Ukraine, and by extension, Russia.

Oh, we've known for awhile that the White House fomented the right-wing coup in Ukraine last year in order to wage a not-so-proxy war against Russia, and has used special ops and the CIA to help its puppets attack civilian populations -- conveniently demonized as "pro-Russian rebels" -- in the east.

 But now they're moving on to the next level: directly and openly arming their puppets, escalating the civil war, leading to the hoped-for toppling of Vladimir Putin and the opening of Russia to the Western flank of the global oligarchy. The ever-helpful New York Times slapped the announcement on its front page today, right next to all the gruesome football coverage.

As commenter Patricia M. points out, the timing of the latest roll-out was everything. American leaders waited until the sponge colonies of consumer-spectators were riveted on one jingoistic spectacle before debuting another one for our paranoid, patriotic pleasure. Stun the "bewildered herd" while they're still mindlessly wallowing in their alternate televised universe of blood, brawls, and babes. Strike while they're helplessly hung over by the annual spectacle of guts, glory, and greed that is the Super Bowl.

For as Noam Chomsky observed in Manufacturing Consent, "If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it's necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence."

So last night, we saw one football player suffer a compound arm fracture and another one dragged off the field with a concussion, interspersed with flying Thunderbirds, fireworks, and Katy Perry riding a giant metallic robot. We overcame any sickly inhibitions we might have otherwise felt about a new war. Our consent was being cynically engineered by the media-political complex.

Strike while the striking is good, and the news of yet another front in the forever war is almost guaranteed to be met with a group "Meh" by an exhausted viewing audience replete on beer and Doritos and a funny Superbowl commercial featuring drunk-driving Lindsay Lohan selling cheap car insurance. Strike, yet disguise the coming bloodshed in the blandest possible terms.

 Michael Gordon, the same Times reporter who helped Judith Miller plant the phony weapons of mass destruction bunk that enabled Bush's criminal invasion of Iraq, co-wrote this propaganda too:

With Russian-backed separatists pressing their attacks in Ukraine, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position, American officials said Sunday.

President Obama has made no decisions on providing such lethal assistance. But after a series of striking reversals that Ukraine’s forces have suffered in recent weeks, the Obama administration is taking a fresh look at the question of military aid.

Breedlove sounds like a character straight out of Catch-22, doesn't he?   Breedlove is the designated breeder of war fever. And since familiarity breeds contempt, Obama the Minderbinder is allowed to distance himself from the plot, pretending that he is just starting to agonize over whether to liberally intervene in a situation that he himself created.

The usual suspects have their carefully orchestrated roles down pat:

Secretary of State John Kerry, who plans to visit Kiev on Thursday, is open to new discussions about providing lethal assistance, as is Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officials said. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who is leaving his post soon, backs sending defensive weapons to the Ukrainian forces.

In recent months, Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, has resisted proposals to provide lethal assistance, several officials said. But one official who is familiar with her views insisted that Ms. Rice was now prepared to reconsider the issue.

This is the obligatory creation of a crisis atmosphere. The architects of mayhem are portrayed as having to address circumstances that they had no hand in orchestrating. The masters of war and the fomenters of right-wing coups posture as victims who have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into combat. Susan Rice, whose reputation for bloodthirsty bellicosity precedes her (Congo, Libya), is  miraculously recast as the woman of peace who is now forced to become a reluctant warrior.

Gordon and his cohort Eric Schmitt continue the charade:

 “Although our focus remains on pursuing a solution through diplomatic means, we are always evaluating other options that will help create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

That is Newspeak worthy of Orwell. Bombs and guns and death and destruction have become the means to "create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis."

Obama himself created that space awhile ago. Of course, he euphemizes his coup by bragging that he "brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine."  

And the Times dutifully marches on:

Fueling the broader debate over policy is an independent report to be issued Monday by eight former senior American officials, who urge the United States to send $3 billion in defensive arms and equipment to Ukraine, including anti-armor missiles, reconnaissance drones, armored Humvees and radars that can determine the location of enemy rocket and artillery fire.

Michèle A. Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official who is a leading candidate to serve as defense secretary if Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected president, joined in preparing the report. Others include James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the top NATO military commander, and Ivo Daalder, the ambassador to NATO during Mr. Obama’s first term.

Translation: they want more war for endless profits. Flournoy is the founder of the weapons industry/Wall Street-funded Center for a New American Security, (CNAS) whose main purpose is to gin up "responsibility to protect" excuses for waging war and making billions of dollars for the military-industrial complex in the process. It was CNAS which orchestrated and still controls Michelle Obama's "Joining Forces" propaganda campaign, whose goal is to get the American public to support American imperialism through "supporting the troops." (who wouldn't support the troops?) Mrs. Obama's recent promotion of entertainment like American Sniper is a huge part of the corporate-funded Permawar effort. Moreover, she's seen to it that movies and TV shows portraying soldiers and veterans will now be subject to a military seal of propaganda approval.

But back to the New York Times propaganda:

The administration’s deliberations were described by a range of senior Pentagon, administration and Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were talking about internal discussions.

A spokesman for General Breedlove declined to comment on his view on providing defensive weapons, which was disclosed by United States officials privy to confidential discussions.

What a bunch of craven cowards, starting wars while hiding behind their cloaks of anonymity in their office towers. This is the territory of the controlled leak. It is not punishable, because leakers in high places never punish themselves. Only whistleblowers exposing war crimes and official incompetence ever get punished.

The entry of the United States into a new, semi-proxified war against Russia is all of a piece with the ongoing fascist coup destroying what's left of American democracy. Besides the Center for a New American Security, the other authors of the report calling for the launching of a thousand new missiles in Ukraine are the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution. The chairman of the Chicago Council is none other than Lester Crown, one of Barack Obama's original funders and a major stakeholder in General Dynamics, manufacturer of weaponized drones and other military hardware. The Atlantic Council is a bloated cornucopia of war-hungry multinationals:  Chevron, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, the Blackstone Group, Northrup Grumman, Coca-Cola, HSBC, US Chamber of Commerce, Microsoft... to name just a few.

If any member of the Forbes 400, or any the top 80 billionaires already owning half the world's wealth have been left out of the Ukraine War Manifesto, it has to have been an oversight. I am sure there's still time to score an invitation, though, and turn their money into speech, their speech into more blood-soaked money.