by : Bruce Vandiver , gainesville times
Letter to the editor
Published: Mar 17, 2022, 1:50 PM
Western media pundits are up in arms and having fits that Russia has invaded Ukraine. It's interesting to hear these people wail about Russia's supposed war crimes when I remember they were preaching a very different tune during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
For Ukraine, the media hoopla is about selling the American public on an idea that Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler. For the older story (war in Iraq), the hoopla was about manipulating Americans to support a western agenda to invade Iraq by hook or by crook. It's called manufacturing consent.
In the first case, public consent to oppose Russia, and in the second, consent to support a war against Iraq based on a giant lie about weapons of mass destruction.
Time and hindsight have proven Iraq did not have WMD. When confronted about this, Vice President Dick Cheney said he would have pushed for invasion even if he knew in advance there were no weapons of mass destruction. I'll tell you a secret. He did know. There's a reason Cheney and President George W. Bush bypassed reports of our own CIA and chose to rely instead on a questionable report from British MI6 that was based on forged documents. There's a reason Cheney chose to attack American patriots Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame for daring to stand for the truth — when Cheney found truth to be an intolerable inconvenience. This story about neoconservative corruption and warmongering is documented in the 2010 movie “Fair Game.” No one was ever held accountable for the Iraq War, which makes current media allegations against Putin wildly hypocritical.
The real question is whether Russia has a more legitimate reason to be in Ukraine than the USA claimed to have when it invaded Iraq. The answer appears to be yes. Ukraine was historically part of Russia for many years. The west conspired to foment a coup in 2014 to overthrow pro-Russian leadership and install a rabidly anti-Russian puppet government. These details are available to anyone who searches on "Ukraine coup 2014."
There's also a detailed podcast of the Monica Perez radio show (March 8, 2014) titled “Exposing the Shadow Government in the Ukraine” (and the U.S.?). Perez exposes details of an intercepted phone call between Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They were conspiring to install a shadow government in Ukraine before the uprisings that eventually ousted democratically elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. There's no doubt we engineered this coup. We tried to do the same thing in Venezuela with Juan Guaidó. Why?
In Ukraine, Putin's situation is similar to that of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln when he acted to preserve the Union. What would today's Putin-bashing media have said about Lincoln after Gen. William Sherman marched through the south burning defiant citizens out of their homes? And where would we be today if Lincoln had been stopped and our Union was dissolved? It's time for reflection.
The real question is whether Russia has a more legitimate reason to be in Ukraine than the USA claimed to have when it invaded Iraq. The answer appears to be yes. Ukraine was historically part of Russia for many years. The west conspired to foment a coup in 2014 to overthrow pro-Russian leadership and install a rabidly anti-Russian puppet government.
