Ukraine Intervention: How NATO Stirred Resting Bear into Action?

By Nauman Sadiq for VT Islamabad

Quoting acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva last June, the Russian leader uttered an ominous warning: “There is no true happiness in life, only flashes, a mirage of it is on the horizon — cherish those.” But the establishment media mocked the stark warning as nothing more than rants and raves of a deranged mind.

At the time, the British Royal Navy Defender had breached Russia’s territorial waters [1] in the Black Sea and as many as 20 Russian aircraft conducted “unsafe maneuvers” merely 500 feet above the warship and Britain also lamented shots had been fired in the path of the ship.

“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not say whether he had personally approved the Defender’s voyage but suggested the Royal Navy was making a point by taking that route,” a Politico report [2] alleged in June.

Boris Johnson didn’t explicitly acknowledge the naval incursion into Russia’s territorial waters was done on his orders. Something a lot more sinister happened behind the scenes that could have ended up in a false flag naval engagement like the Gulf of Tonkin incident before the Vietnam War in 1964 and given the NATO powers a pretext to start a war over and above the heads of elected politicians.

While the responsibility to recklessly provoke Russia ultimately rested with the entire British cabinet, there was a catch. A Telegraph report noted [3] that former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had raised concerns about the mission, proposed by defense chiefs, and that Boris Johnson was ultimately called in to settle the dispute.

Therefore, what Johnson actually did was to play the role of a mediator in the dispute between the civilian cabinet and the UK’s military. The provocation was clearly planned and executed by the UK’s deep state in collaboration with its partners in the transatlantic NATO military alliance led by the Pentagon.

It’s noteworthy that all the militaries of the NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command.

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed during the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down [4] to over 100,000 after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy, and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

During the last year, the United States has substantially ramped up the US military footprint in Eastern Europe by deploying thousands of NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles, and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and the NATO forces alongside regional clients have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

Excluding the self-styled global hegemon, the imperial United States, the rest of the Western powers might have been colonial powers before the Second World War but they are no longer “powers” in global politics. In fact, they can more aptly be described as Western regimes that serve no other purpose than act as Washington’s client states via the framework of transatlantic NATO military alliance to maintain the charade of multilateralism.

The national security and defense policies of modern nation-states are formulated by civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed as the deep state. Whereas trade and economic policies are determined by corporate interests and business cartels within the framework of neocolonial economic order imposed on the post-colonial world by corporate America following the signing of the Bretton Woods Accords at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Purportedly democratic governments, elected through the heavily manipulated electoral process, are reduced to performing ceremonial gimmicks and are meant only to serve as showpieces to legitimize militarist and capitalist exploitation.

Fomenting crisis in Ukraine by audaciously intruding into Russia’s territorial waters isn’t the only instance when the deep state flagrantly interfered with the US foreign policy. It went to the extent of discrediting and, at times, even brazenly assassinating American presidents who dared to refuse to toe the national security policy formulated by the high command of the world’s most powerful military force.

It’s worth recalling that at the height of the Cold War in the sixties when the US domestic politics was infested with the McCarthyite paranoia and communists were persecuted all over the country, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of a pacifist and non-interventionist American president was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper trained expert marksmanship by the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was murdered in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized his successor Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American national security establishment was the only beneficiary of the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the raging Cold War.

Besides the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, another reason the Kennedy administration fell from the grace of the deep state was the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles in April 1961 to topple the government of Fidel Castro that JFK approved but later severely castigated the CIA for the fiasco and sacked CIA director Allen Dulles and several employees. The Pentagon wanted Kennedy to immediately invade Cuba following the foiled plot but he “vacillated” and let a golden opportunity to dismantle a security threat close to the US soil slip by.

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was a leading Democratic candidate for the presidential office when he was shot dead by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. Being a pacifist himself, Bobby Kennedy opposed the US involvement in the Vietnam War and wrote a book on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which he credited his brother, JFK, for showing restraint and amicably resolving the crisis.

As the former attorney general of JFK, Bobby probably had good leads on the masterminds of the JFK assassination and wanted to avenge his brother’s shocking murder by exposing the assassins after being elected president. This was the principal reason he, too, was silenced before he could be elected president.

Though serving a life sentence at a California penitentiary, Bobby Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan, now 77 years old, is a suspicious and deranged character, who frequently backtracked on his testimonies and confession during and after the trial, had no recollection of the murder and subsequent events, and his defense team had pleaded for a retrial several times but the request was summarily denied. He was due to be released on parole last August but California Governor Gavin Newsom decided against setting him free in January.

Likewise, the US security agencies turned against Richard Nixon after the deep state helped him get elected in the 1968 elections by eliminating his formidable Democratic opponent Robert F. Kennedy and felt betrayed after Nixon decided to end the Vietnam War.

The Watergate scandal was clearly orchestrated by the deep state, as Nixon was responsible for the Fall of Saigon and the humiliating defeat of the US in Vietnam at the hands of communists. Despite the allegation of illegal wiretapping, nothing was actually recorded at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters.

An additional charge was brought against Nixon that he had installed a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, which is a customary practice for all the presidents before and after him, as all the offices in the White House and the Capitol are known to be bugged, though only a handful security officials have access to recorded conversations.

Not surprisingly, the perpetrators of the clumsy wiretapping attempts at the DNC headquarters turned out to be former FBI and CIA agents. All 48 Republican campaign officials who threw Nixon under the bus by becoming approvers and testifying against him were found guilty but were handed down light sentences, ranging from fines and several months in prison, excluding Gordon Liddy who served four and a half years in the penitentiary and later became a celebrity anchor.

To his credit, despite being a reviled politician in the American political discourse, Nixon ended the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973. He also ended the military draft the same year. Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, the first-ever by an American president, eventually led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two nations. Buttressing his pacifist credentials further, he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union the same year.

On October 10, 1972, the “October Surprise” on the eve of elections on Nov. 3, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relying on an anonymous source “Deep Throat” (likely a Freudian slip implicating the deep state or could be a double entendre even more sinister), subsequently revealed to be an FBI director, reported that the FBI had determined that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee.

Although venerated as credible “investigative journalists” by mainstream audiences, both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were formerly rogue reporters for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post before becoming best-selling authors, and are known to be unapologetic deep state shills.

In 2019, the Trump administration awarded the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract JEDI [5] to Microsoft over its rival Amazon’s bid. Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos contested the decision in federal court, which ordered the Pentagon to reconsider certain aspects of the contract. The contract was subsequently scrapped by the Pentagon last July due to the controversy.

It’s worth recalling the reason the corporate media took a morbid interest in the gory details of the grisly assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 was that Khashoggi was a columnist for the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $200 billion net worth and the owner of Amazon.

Bezos had a score to settle [6] with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Mohammad bin Salman hacked Bezos’ phone in May 2018 and sent the details of Bezos’ extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in January 2019, leading to Bezos’ wife MacKenzie Scott divorcing him and taking a significant portion, $35.6 billion, of Bezos’ obscene wealth as alimony.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post, with its vast network of NATSEC shills having access to insider accounts of the deep state sources, has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA, as Bezos won a $600 million contract [7] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

About Author: Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geostrategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and the Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, the military-industrial complex, and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to alternative news media.

Citations

[1] Britain says don’t get carried away by warship spat with Russia:
[2] Russia says next time it may fire to hit intruding warships
[3] British PM Boris Johnson ignored warnings of his foreign secretary
[4] What the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?
[5] Jeff Bezos contests the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract
[6] The Saudi heir and the alleged plot to undermine Jeff Bezos
[7] Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the Dark