aTmAg said:

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BlueSmoke said:

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aTmAg said:

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it has everything to do with the security of the United States.

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This is a regurgitated talking point - we used it in our false flag operations in the Gulf of Tonkin. We used it as a precursor to invade Iraq on a premise of lies. But hey, this time.....

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Except standing by an ally and sticking to a past agreement is nothing like the Golf of Tonkin.

So you think we should not have alliances or treaties, and that we shouldn't stick by them?

Yeah... you are a real foreign policy savant.

(And the Iraqi WMD program thing wasn't a lie, it was an intelligence failure. Even Saddam thought he had them. His own people were lying to him.)

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What ally? Since when are we allies with Ukraine? We are no more allies with them than we were with the S. Vietnamese. We initiated an internal regime change to get their pro-Russian leader out and put "our" guy in. And what agreement? There were no terms of mutual defense/support other than handshakes.

This is a proxy war. Just as Vietnam was for Russia. Afghanistan in the 80's for the US.

As for the bolded part, now we're just off in la-la land. It was a false flag. Full stop. We knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. He knew he didn't have them and communicated this to interrogators in 2003 when he was captured. Or are you intimating that he "thought" he had them and was kept in the dark by a cabal of his own cabinet?

He admitted that he flat out LIED about having them, so as not to appear weak to Iran. The FBI asked him directly - if WMDs could have been developed without his knowledge:

Quote:

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Hussein said no, and claimed on several occasions he held meetings with all of his ministers and asked them specifically if Iraq had WMD that he was unaware of.

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Tea Party said:

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It's the Stanford marshmallow experiment essentially and a trust that Europe shares the same urgency in stopping Russia that you do right now.

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They are wrapped around the Russian O&G axle and may talk a tough game, but they aren't doing much. They can't. They are in a bed they made because of their internal energy policies and now almost completely dependent on outside countries to keep the heat & lights on.

BlueSmoke said:

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Tea Party said:

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It's the Stanford marshmallow experiment essentially and a trust that Europe shares the same urgency in stopping Russia that you do right now.

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They are wrapped around the Russian O&G axle and may talk a tough game, but they aren't doing much. They can't. They are in a bed they made because of their internal energy policies and now almost completely dependent on outside countries to keep the heat & lights on.

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That's my point. We're more broke than Europe per debt to GDP ratios, further from Russia/Ukraine by more than an ocean, and have our own economic and border problems.

If Europe doesnt want to put much effort in helping Ukraine stop Russia, they must either not view Russia as big of a threat to Europe/Ukraine militarily as our resident big gov Ukraine fan-boys here think, or view Russia attacking Ukraine as less important than maintaining trade relations with Russia for energy etc.

Both scenarios should lead a person to believe us funding Ukraine before addressing our own domestic issues is an illogical plan of action.

I'm just seeing if the big gov pro-Ukraine posters would concede funding Ukraine temporarily for more funding later, or if they are pot committed to Ukraine and lying about being conservative caring about our immediate domestic issues.

BlueSmoke said:

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richardag said:

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BlueSmoke said:

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Teslag said:

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Quote:

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Further, we also know if you have a modicum of historical perspective, that encroaching on Russian states would only provoke what we are seeing now.

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Ukraine isn't and wasn't a "Russian state". It is a sovereign nation which Russia themselves recognized as such.

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You obviously know nothing about the history between Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine has their sovereignty, but they are also the front door to Russian land going back thousands of years. It's NATO that has been expansionist, not Russia. Again, we were inches from nuclear war when Russia dared put missiles in Cuba. If Russia or China put bases in Mexico the US would intervene immediately. Going back to the early 90's it's known that any overtures of Ukraine in NATO would be a bridge too far for Russia....and we pushed anyway, knowing what it would spark. Again, we could have stopped this war within the first few months and actively threatened Ukraine with a threat of being cut off if they entertained signing the accords. This is a proxy war that we are loving every minute of and have no intentions to try and assuage.

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You do not know the history of Russia nor the Ukraine.
Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says "No"
Quote from the article

• It is abundantly evident that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fan of NATO. Indeed, he displays a pronouncedalmost obsessiveantipathy toward the Alliance. He claims that NATO took advantage of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enlarge to its east, in violation of promises allegedly made to Moscow by Western leaders. But no such promises were madea point now confirmed by someone who was definitely in a position to know: Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union.

You have been lied to and are blindly regurgitating talking points that are false.

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Your conflating two different things. This is about the repercussions of these moves. Actions have consequences. Jesus, Biden's own CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995!

His direct quote from that time:

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Hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally
felt across the domestic political spectrum here (Moscow)

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Then a letter he wrote in 2008 in a memo to Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice:

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Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines

for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and
a half years of conversations with key Russian players . . .
I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as
anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests

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Or William Perry, who served as Defense Secretary under President Bill Clinton. In
a 2017 interview:

Quote:

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In the last few years, most of the blame can be pointed at
the actions that Putin has taken. But in the early years I
have to say that the United States deserves much of the
blame.

Further:

Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction
was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European
nations, some of them bordering Russia.

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Too recent? In 1997 FIFTY prominent foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, "We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions" that would "unsettle European stability."

Maybe George Kennen, who was the father of western Cold War containment doctrine matters - who also stated that expansion would trigger cataclysmic repercussions all the way back in 1998

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Talk about conflating an issue.
In simple terms, Putin is using the false trope that NATO's expansion is provoking him. It has been established by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev there was no agreement that NATO would expand, which is precisely one of the reasons Putin used to invade Ukraine.
Putin has openly stated his intent to reunify the Soviet Union. Putin would have used any number of bull**** reasons for the invasion of Ukraine. What he didn't calculate was the historic hatred of Russia dating back centuries with the most recent unmitigated gall Russia had in trying to starve Ukrainians to death, Holodomor.
Your grasp of history is distorted to the point you are excusing a tyrant's invasion of a sovereign country.

aTmAg said:

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BlueSmoke said:

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aTmAg said:

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it has everything to do with the security of the United States.

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This is a regurgitated talking point - we used it in our false flag operations in the Gulf of Tonkin. We used it as a precursor to invade Iraq on a premise of lies. But hey, this time.....

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Except standing by an ally and sticking to a past agreement is nothing like the Golf of Tonkin.

So you think we should not have alliances or treaties, and that we shouldn't stick by them?

Yeah... you are a real foreign policy savant.

(And the Iraqi WMD program thing wasn't a lie, it was an intelligence failure. Even Saddam thought he had them. His own people were lying to him.)

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It was NOT an intelligence failure.

The "satellite photos" that were presented to the security council and used to justify the invasion were photoshopped.

They have admitted this.

They could not produce actual evidence of WMD's so they fabricated it to justify the invasion.

Ags4DaWin said:

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aTmAg said:

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BlueSmoke said:

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aTmAg said:

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it has everything to do with the security of the United States.

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This is a regurgitated talking point - we used it in our false flag operations in the Gulf of Tonkin. We used it as a precursor to invade Iraq on a premise of lies. But hey, this time.....

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Except standing by an ally and sticking to a past agreement is nothing like the Golf of Tonkin.

So you think we should not have alliances or treaties, and that we shouldn't stick by them?

Yeah... you are a real foreign policy savant.

(And the Iraqi WMD program thing wasn't a lie, it was an intelligence failure. Even Saddam thought he had them. His own people were lying to him.)

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It was NOT an intelligence failure.

The "satellite photos" that were presented to the security council and used to justify the invasion were photoshopped.

They have admitted this.

They could not produce actual evidence of WMD's so they fabricated it to justify the invasion.

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My internet skills are limited and I could not find any reports confirming your assertion. Could you provide some internet links?

Everyone talks about the "CIA coup" the US pulled off in Russia in 2014. It's very shortsighted imo. Russia was playing the exact same intelligence/propaganda games as the CIA at the time. They just lost. They got mad they lost and now are flipping the board over and then blaming us for cheating when they were doing the exact same things, just not as well. It's been the Russian way for almost 100 years now.

I'm not sure what your point is. If they played 'that game' with Canada or Mexico we wouldn't let it sit for10 years.
The grievances around the maidan revolution, ongoing subsequent shelling of Crimea/Russian areas in the East/South etc. may be water under the bridge.

But we still don't have a real interest in Donetsk/crimea/Donbas/wtf happens there vs. what happens in, say, Mongolia, or some random place in Asia/africa. They may not be innocent but we can stop playing/funding the game as though it's worth it to us. Dismissing it as just 'well you're only flipping the board' is naive/shortsighted in that it neglects the bigger picture.

My point is that it's dishonest to justify russias invasion with the reasoning that the US was meddling over there. The bigger picture is that they were too, we just won. They didn't like the results of the game that was being played, so they went to war and are trying to cry foul when the other side plays by the new rules they decided to initiate. They were sore losers. They will continue to be sore losers.

we need to keep meddling anywhere and everywhere around the globe and any time we install our preferred regime somewhere, we should only have one word for anyone that's angry about it: "don't"