To explain the current mess in the world with a resurgent al-Qadea conducting conventional warfare operations and a new cold war, I need to start back in 1989, in Panama.

When the USA forced a regime change in Panama in 1989, things went rather smoothly, all things considered. Yes, there were the massive civilian casualties and destruction of property, but there simply doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid those things in any sort of regime change. No, the “smoothly” I use refers to the installation of a pro-US government and the maintenance of Panama as a pro-US client state. We had such a thing under Manuel Noriega until George H. W. Bush repented of his close association with that dictator. But when Noriega had to go, the USA found a ready ally among the Panamanian elites, and Panama persists in its orbit around the USA. All well and good for US interests.

A few years later, when GHW Bush repented of his close association with the dictator Saddam Hussein, he did not opt for a regime change in Iraq. He got the USA a massive base in Saudi Arabia and, later, Kuwait, but he did not support Kurdish or Marsh Arab uprisings against Saddam Hussein. The realpolitik of that decision made perfect sense to me at the time: in Panama, we had extensive contacts that would be loyal to US interests. In Iraq, we had none. Removing Hussein would, at best, give us the devil we did not know and, at worst, plunge the region into a violent conflict involving religious, tribal, and nationalistic factors. Beast though he was, Saddam Hussein kept order in the area.

There was Haiti, where Clinton returned Aristide to power in 1994. Aristide served until 1996, and was reelected in 2001. By 2004, though, he had to go, as he was making business difficult for US multinationals by trying to make them better corporate citizens. He was also making business difficult for drug dealers by arresting a good number of them. Anyone that knows anything about US foreign policy knows that the major US corporations drive that foreign policy and that drug dealers frequently pop up as intelligence assets. Mess with one, the US might lean on your country a bit. Mess with both, and you will not run your nation for much longer.

Which brings me next to Afghanistan: as long as the Taliban were making strides in negotiations with US over a pipeline traversing their country, the media here depicted them as harsh, but decent enough fellows that could bring much-needed order to a chaotic region. When the negotiations fell apart, the media reviled them as cruel vermin that had to be swept aside. 9/11 happened, and the already-underway plans for regime change in Afghanistan had a much more legitimate color. Hamid Karzai, it seems, is the man the US wants in charge there. Perhaps his ties with major oil companies and drug dealers helped in that respect. Accusations that Karzai engaged in election fraud or even power-sharing negotiations with the Taliban have not made him offensive enough to demand replacement in the eyes of US officials.

The point I want to make with all this is that the rest of the world is not Panama or Haiti to the USA. There are places where we don’t have someone ready, waiting in the wings to do our bidding. There are places where other nations have someone ready and waiting to take over, and still others that nobody has a man ready to go, that will dissolve into anarchy, should a strongman be removed.

Since 2001, the people in charge of US foreign policy, regardless of party or ideology, seem to be unaware of the situation described above. The Neocons under bush thought Saddam Hussein could be removed and a pro-US government installed. Years later, a pro-Iranian government came to the fore that gave oilfield concessions to Russia.

The US State Department tried to leverage the Arab Spring movements for its own benefit, preaching that Twitter and YouTube and Facebook would make the world more democratic and wonderful. Instead, Arab Spring toppled the US-backed dictator in Egypt and delivered a very US-hostile Muslim Brotherhood to power.

For some odd reason, the US then chose to back al-Qaeda forces in Libya when they rose against Qaddafi’s government. The US supported the same al-Qaeda forces when they went into Syria to topple Bashir al-Assad. Now that those same al-Qaeda forces are invading Iraq, the USA is not attacking them, but is instead insisting that the regime in Baghdad change. Whaaaaat?

al-Assad is a Shi’a, after a fashion. The rulers in Iraq are Shi’a. The Iranians are Shi’a. The al-Qaeda maniac murderers opposing those three are Sunni. The Qatari and Saudi factions that are backing the al-Qaeda forces are also Sunni. The USA is lining up with those forces. Let me specify that the USA is lining up with extremist Sunni factions that see no political solution for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. The more politically involved Muslim Brotherhood did not get USA backing. The highly violent al-Qaeda did.

Now that the USA attempted a regime change in Russia’s own back yard, it’s not any surprise that Russia will make common cause with the Shi’a. Now an age-old Islamic split takes on a new importance in the new cold war. The USA has somehow decided that it cannot ally with moderates in this case: it makes its cause common with ravenous, bloodthirsty war criminals. Russia is on the side of stability, even if it’s the stability of a harsh regime. Honestly, the Russian position makes more sense to me.

I know that the USA makes political hay off of supporting democracies around the world, but the fact remains that if we want reliable allies overseas, it often involves installing dictatorships to serve our ends. Corrupt, criminal, festering dictatorships. We like our Francos and our Somozas and our Marcoses, but if they get a little Mussolini on us and start to flex their muscles, we move to silence them. I don’t see how we’ll be well-served in the long run by violent Sunni extremist terrorists.

Neither do the Chinese. They have their own mess of violent Sunni terrorists to deal with, and they’re not about to provide material aid to their fellow-travelers. That gives them one more reason to side with Russia in the current geopolitical line-up. China also might need to use violence to preserve the integrity of its regime: Russia will not criticize that, while the USA will. That’s yet another reason for China to line up with Russia.

So it’s USA and Sunni extremists against Russia, China, and Shi’a governments. In a matter of time, I see the USA coming out the loser in this contest, reaping the whirlwind that it has sown in supporting the very entity that wants to see it destroyed.

I just read a report about how al-Qaeda in Iraq just overran the city of Mosul, Iraq’s second city and home to the heart of its northern oil industry. The al-Qaeda forces also captured the Iraqi Army’s helicopters stationed there… the helicopters we gave them… The same al-Qaeda forces that are turning Iraq into another Syria are, themselves, connected to the al-Qaeda forces that are fighting against the Bashar regime in Syria.

Some time ago, I said that invading Iraq was a huge mistake. More recently, I said that the US’ support of Syrian rebels was a huge mistake.

Well, I promised to keep this short, so instead of countless words spilled over the bankruptcy of US foreign policy, I’ll use just four:

I TOLD YOU SO.

Part of a chapter in a book I’m reading, Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry, by John Braithwaite, deals with the Thalidomide disaster. While it is exceptionally difficult for me to work my way through the descriptions of birth defects, I feel that I owe it to the victims of that horror to steel myself and endure the details of it all. In so doing, I was impressed strongly that this sort of corporate crime should be every bit as infamous as that of the Nazis. That it is not so, I find gravely troubling.

Sane people of this day excoriate the Nazis, and rightly so. They were a political force that devastated the lives of millions with aggressive wars, political purges, and, ultimately, genocides. But they did so not as a unified body of believers, but as a set of individuals making seemingly normal decisions, the sum of which produced the monstrous barbarity of the regime. At the sharp end of Nazism, there was extreme brutality and violence, but almost immediately, there were administrative layers to separate those actors from other persons within the regime. Consider the lot of a train station operator: was he able to approve shipments of food or resources while denying transport of victims to murder camps? Is he complicit in the crimes of his regime? Is he innocent? Perhaps he’s stuck in an awkward, greyish middle, where he condemns the crimes, but feels powerless to halt them because of fear or because he knows that he cannot alone overcome the bureaucratic inertia that put the process into motion. He can rationalize that his role in the crime is small, or that he has no choice but to participate in the crime. Those thoughts can get him through the night without pondering his fate overly much.

I find myself, and, really, anyone else in Western Civilization, to be like that train operator. We may know or we may not know, but we all participate in the crimes of our civilization at least to the extent that he does. If we drive a car, use things made of plastic, or eat food we have not grown ourselves, somewhere in that chain of production, there is the shedding of innocent blood or the pollution of a remote village where petrochemicals are exploited. Can I stop using gas? Can I produce my own food, all on my own with no aid from outside? Perhaps so, but, even then, am I still somehow complicit in the crimes of the world if I do not actively oppose them?

Most people shrink away from that precipice of judgment. Perhaps that is necessary in order to keep on living, to try to do what is right in other areas to overcome our shortcomings in being unable to destroy or convert a system too large for us to fathom completely. But, in so doing, how far does one go before one is adding layers of rationalizations to make a more active role in evil seem palatable?

This brings me to the Thalidomide disaster. A certain drug company, Chemie Grünenthal, produced the drug with the hopes that it would be a huge seller – a sleeping pill that was completely safe, that was the marketing line. Given the normal dangers of sleeping pills, such a thing would be a massive hit. However, Grünenthal’s marketing was a Göbbels-like “big lie”, in that it did not mention the horrific side effects it would have on people and unborn babies, in particular. Even though doctors doing trial tests noted those issues, Grünenthal chose to cherry-pick test results that showed favorable conclusions for Thalidomide. After all, they wanted the authorities in various nations to approve the drug for sale as an over-the-counter pill. All data is subject to researcher conclusions, isn’t it? So why not focus on the positives?

When Thalidomide went on sale in various countries, it received multiple brand names. While the drug under one brand name would be recalled in, say, Germany, the same drug would continue to be sold under a different brand name in, say, Sweden or Brazil. Now, the question facing us is this: is it wrong to use different brand names for the same thing? In this case, it resulted in additional, avoidable deaths.

There were pharmaceutical salesmen in Australia whose wives used the product while pregnant, only to deliver babies with the outrageous birth defects associated with Thalidomide. They reported these tragedies up the line, but nobody within Grünenthal moved decisively to halt the distribution and sale of the drug. Worse, when an Australian study was submitted to the British medical journal, The Lancet, the editors of that journal rejected it, citing pressure to publish other papers. A German physician published a paper about the dangers of Thalidomide, but Grünenthal attacked both the physician and the journal that published the paper as being sensationalist. Grünenthal did withdraw the drug from sale in Germany, not out of safety concerns, but due to the negative publicity the drug had received. Grünenthal admitted no wrongdoing in that case.

Even though the FDA did not approve Thalidomide for use in the USA, Grünenthal worked with a US firm, Richardson-Merrill (itself guilty of a major pharmaceutical fraud with the drug MER/29), to distribute the drug as part of a test trial. Richardson-Merrill salesmen told US doctors that they had been specially selected to participate in the trial, but supplied no placebos and told those same doctors that they didn’t need to keep accurate records. Just prescribe it and be part of a money-making enterprise, that’s what the salesmen told the doctors. Did the salesmen themselves invent those lies and deceits? Were marketers culpable? Were executives that wanted to increase profits ultimately to blame for creating a system that wanted to sell a drug without regard to the horrors it would inflict upon those that took it?

The pharmacologists at Richardson-Merrill knew the drug could cross the placental barrier and become a threat to fetuses. But was it a crime to say the drug might be a threat instead of it will be a threat? It’s hard to condemn a person for choosing a conditional term instead of an absolute term, but given how that conditional term then enabled another deviation from an ethical line down the road, which itself led to another and another, it should be just as hard to shrug and say that there wasn’t anything wrong with using a conditional term.

Richardson-Merrill also committed outright frauds. Their own employees created trial information and put the names of fictional doctors on the covers of those reports, then submitted them to the FDA as part of the approval process. But could a director or other executive claim to not know what was going on and, thereby, be innocent of that wrongdoing? Of course. Also of course, that same executive wouldn’t hesitate to approve the dismissal of an employee that wasn’t producing positive results to boost revenue. That same executive would also not hesitate to give more work to clinical testing labs that produced consistently positive and helpful findings for his firm. As long as he never officially knows of any wrongdoing, he can feel insulated from whatever crimes are being committed.

And that brings us back to the Nazis. Hitler did not personally stand at the controls for the showers in Auschwitz to deploy the nerve gas instead of water. Göring did not personally receive victims to burn alive in ovens. Himmler did not personally load Russians into an Einsatzgruppen van, where they would receive the carbon monoxide from the engine exhaust for half an hour, killing them. Himmler did witness executions, but it was always someone of a lesser rank that pulled a trigger or flipped a switch or buried a body. Himmler produced innovations in processes that made exterminations more efficient, but he left it to others to carry out those exact details. If he had had access to enough paper shredders and a corporate legal team, he could have claimed no involvement at all in the Holocaust.

And that, then, brings us back to the corporate world. Grünenthal executives in Germany had broken the law, a prosecutor determined, and would stand trial. In their defense, the Grünenthal executives claimed that unborn children did not enjoy legal protection under German law, except in the matter of a deliberate, criminal abortion. The Grünenthal executives then brought forward a parade of experts to say that they had no conclusive knowledge of fatal and worse birth defects being linked to Thalidomide. Two years into the trial, Grünenthal employees were still at work, threatening anyone that was being publicly critical of the firm and its drug. Grünenthal executives made a public plea that they would continue the trial, even if it meant using all the resources of the firm, but would consider an out-of-court settlement to end the affair. Of course, they would not admit guilt in such an event, but would merely be making the settlement so as to get on with its business and to give some measure of comfort to those that believed they were wronged in some way by Grünenthal or its products. Grünenthal paid an amount equal to $31 million, and that was that.

Grünenthal continued to make settlements, often with a condition of non-disclosure and non-discussion to go along with the money. Given that it makes roughly a billion dollars per year of late, such payments would be a noticeable, but not devastating hit on profits. Grünenthal has since had multiple citations from regulators, so they are by no means a group of choir boys as a result of the Thalidomide disaster. They paid their blood money, but spent no time in jail. Such is the lot of a corporate executive that has not been deprived of his access to corporate resources.

It is also the lot of a person who has done some very bad things, but whose knowledge or position is such that he is too big to fail for, if he should fail, then he takes down much of the structure of society that supports him. There were Nazis that had important scientific knowledge: they escaped trial. There were Nazis that acted as informants against the Soviet Union: they escaped trial. There were Nazis that were willing to fight against Communists in Latin America: they escaped trial. Today, we see bankers that sat atop massive frauds that also escaped trial.

And, by keeping the settlements secret, Grünenthal also prevented the formation of a class-action lawsuit. Only one Thalidomide case ever went to trial, and Richardson-Merrill (the defendant in that case) arrived at an out-of-court settlement during the appeal process.

Thalidomide resulted in more stringent laws around the world to control pharmaceutical safety, but access to money and power means there is always the opportunity for a pharmaceutical company to circumvent those laws. Just as the Nazis’ access to money and power provided legitimization for the regime – witness all the global firms that did business with the regime in spite of their connections to criminal activities – so it is for corporate actors.

So what if the Nazis never got involved in the Second World War? They would have been brutally murderous, yes, but their infamy would be no greater than that of the Ottoman Empire during World War One, or one of many US-sponsored Latin American military dictatorships. Consider even the reputation of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin: those men headed up regimes more murderous than the Nazis, but they never lost their access to power and money, so they are frequently viewed as more benign than their German counterparts. American slave owners, the British East India Company’s opium trade, right-wing death squads acting against Communist rebels… the list goes on of persons and collections of persons that retained access to power and money and thereby avoided facing full accountability for their crimes. The Nazis simply present an unusual chapter in history as a corporate group that lost its access to power and money and, therefore, had to face some sort of responsibility for its actions.

Thalidomide the drug is itself infamous. But the manufacturers of the drug, Grünenthal, continue to do business. They released an apology in 2011, but did not move to retroactively offer additional compensation or admit wrongdoing, even though a mass of documents points to not only a large number of breaches, but a large variety of breaches, as well. Grünenthal does business and there is no immediate name recognition for that company name to connect it to Thalidomide, much in the same way as a black swastika in a white circle on a red field is instantly recognizable as a symbol intimately connected with evil. Grünenthal is representative and typical of the powerful: the Nazis are the exception, the group that abused absolute power and faced punishment for it.

In much of the public mind, there are only two organized political threats to freedom: Nazis and Communists. In the public mind, both those movements are over, save for a few Nazis that serve to validate Godwin’s Law on demand in Internet debates. In reality, the threat to freedom came from a variety of vectors. Just because America is not currently going down the road that Germany took in 1933 or Russia in 1917 does not mean that it’s not on a side street that runs parallel to what happened in Japan in 1932.

On 15 May 1932, 11 Japanese naval officers assassinated the Prime Minister and then took taxis to the police station, where they turned themselves in. Even though they had murdered the head of government, public sentiment was such that they received very light sentences. Four years later, on 26 February, army officers attempted the same thing. Although the 26 February 1936 plotters were dealt with harshly, their action resulted in a more complete takeover of the nation’s politics by the military. The time of “government by assassination” was over, but the assassins were now themselves the ones in charge.

As I read that in my World History class on Coursera, I reflected on how the USA has a similar situation, but with bankers. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial wipeout, none of the parties that caused it faced any sort of punishment, unless appearing before a Congressional committee is some sort of substitution for prison. No, instead of punishment, the bankers were rewarded with even deeper hooks into the government and the financial flows of the nation. Fear became a tool for the bankers and their supporters in Congress and the bureaucracy to extend their hold on government.

Now, there are rumblings about high-frequency trading. These aren’t just people crying about it in the wilderness: these are actual, official, rumblings. These HFT guys have gone too far, so say the rumblings, and they’re going to get punished. If 2008 was our banker’s own May 15 Incident, the HFT traders are going to be made to take the fall when the market crashes again – our own February 26 Incident. They’re expendable and their fall will make for more fear and chaos that the bankers will easily exploit. The criminals will end the exploits of the HFT gang, but the cost will be that they will have near-complete control of the government. Not just the current high degree of control, but they will be primary among the elites that vie for influence in government.

Whether or not the bankers stay in charge depends on whether or not Mao was right. Power does emerge from the barrel of the gun, but does it originate with the gun itself, or does the money control the gun? We shall find out, I believe.

Terry Kincaid spun around in his ergonomic chair while the proto-punk blasts of the MC5 blared at nearly unbearable volume inside the Launch Control Center of the 17th CIA Nuclear Weapons Division. Terry always did stuff like that when he was flying on acid. It helped to while away the hours and he didn’t have to leave the LCC – which made it better than smoking. Besides, it was so cheap in the commissary, so why not?

Terry’s buddy, Chuck Burzus, staggered into the LCC with a fully loaded water pistol and proceeded to discharge it all over Terry. Terry responded by drawing his sidearm and firing, barely missing Chuck’s head.

Chuck spun around to see where the bullet struck the wall, just a half-inch away from the fire alarm. He laughed, “Dude, no way can anyone die here.” Chuck took another beastly swig from his bottle of Jack.

Terry laughed right back. “Not until God says it’s time to die! Whoo-hoo!” He started to pound randomly on his keyboard and the buttons at his station. Several red lights started to flash, repeatedly and urgently.

Chuck pointed at the flashing lights. “Armageddon rave!” He proceeded to dance the Frug. The dance seemed rather macabre, what with him performing in front of the melted remains of a bulkhead that had fallen victim to a time when the pair brought a flamethrower to work.

Terry was laughing his head off as he played out a drum roll on his station, knocking his coffee into the innards of some sort of vitally important equipment. Smoke began to rise from the stricken system. That only made him laugh harder.

Chuck wasn’t doing acid, though: the liquor was starting to make him think. “Hey, Terry… Terry?”

Terry stopped laughing and focused what was left of his brain cells on what Chuck had to say. “Yeah?”

“You know how, uh…”

“Yeah?”

“Like, in science fiction stories… there’s like, always, an ironic ending?”

“Yeah?”

“You think that’ll ever happen here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like with all the insane stuff we do, you think we’ll accidentally start a nuclear war or something?”

“Naaaah.”

“Really? How do you figure?”

“That stuff is only in stories. This stuff here…” Terry held his arms high and made another ergonomic spin. “This is reality, dude. If God wanted nuclear wars to start accidentally, that would have happened back in 1948.”

“So, no irony for us?”

Terry shook his head. Only irony we’ll ever have is if we launch and blow ourselves up by mistake.”

Chuck knocked back his bottle and wiped his lips on his sleeve. “I dunno. Maybe we’re tempting God with all the stunts we pull.” Chuck threw the empty at an important-looking computer, whose lights suddenly went dark.

Terry kept shaking his head. “No way, dude. God loves us. That’s why we’re here with the best job in the world. We keep America safe and nobody gives a flying flip how we do it.” Terry then had a funny idea and wondered where he could get a box of hand grenades.

Chuck looked at the broken glass by the broken computer. “I still say something ironic is bound to happen. To us, even.”

Terry went back to shaking his head. “No way, dude.”

The red phone rang. Terry answered.

“Yeah?… Really?… OK, then… yeah, we got it… no problemo, sir.” Terry hung up.

“What was that?”

“We got a go code. Time to launch one.”

Chuck’s buzz went along well with the rush of adrenaline. An actual launch. Chuck sat in his chair and typed in his username, followed by his password, “password.” Having unlocked his launch control station, he selected one of the CIA’s best and brightest missiles to shoot into the sky. He clicked on the missile, armed it by typing in the arming password, “password1,” and then asked Terry, “OK, dude, where does this one go?”

Terry squinted, hoping it made what he was about to say all the more dramatic. “Take a guess.”

Chuck thought hard, hoping against hope that this was the ironic moment he anticipated earlier. “London!”

Terry made an honestly surprised face. “What the hell, dude? That’s not even funny. Guess again.”

Chuck composed himself. He remembered their mission and who their targets were supposed to be. There wouldn’t be anything ironic in this LCC. Not now, not never. “Boston?”

“Close. Providence.”

Chuck selected “Providence” from the drop-down list of targets on the CIA launch control program and then clicked on the “Launch” button. He then clicked the “OK” button on the confirmation screen. He turned to Terry. “OK, bro. Bombs away. One less nest of rebellion and terror.”

Terry pulled out a bottle of wine. “L’chaim, dude!”

Chuck produced two coffee mugs. “L’chaim back at you, bro! Time to pour!”

Terry poured and enjoyed his inebriating draught. “Life is good.” Suddenly, Terry suffered a massive stroke.

Chuck’s eyes widened in amazement. “Holy crap! Irony!” He watched Terry die as he kept drinking the wonderful wine.

In 1962, Russia took a chance on putting ICBMs in Cuba, only a few dozen miles away from the USA. In October of 1962, the USA very nearly invaded Cuba and very nearly triggered the launch of those ICBMs – which had their warheads already installed – as well as the ICBMs in Soviet submarines stationed in the area… submarines that were observing radio silence and that had orders to launch should the USA so much as touch a Russian ship en route to Cuba. One voice in the USA spoke to the president on the verge of ordering forces to undertake actions that would result in the launch of thousands of nuclear missiles… one voice spoke, and managed to convince a room full of hawks to take a different path. War between great powers did not happen that day.

Ten years later, Richard Nixon gave orders to the USA’s nuclear bombers to make glancing probes of Russian airspace. He ordered the missions to show the Russians how determined we were to win the war in Vietnam. Russia responded with minor violations of our airspace, presumably to show how they were equally as determined. Both sides had made their point and managed to step away from mutually assured destruction.

But this latest matter in Ukraine… this is perhaps too close to home for the Russians and too much of a stretch for the USA to back away from. Or, maybe this one, like other close calls before it, will be just that – a close call. But it will be one less close call before the final one that isn’t a close call at all, but the beginning of the real thing.

Look back 100 years ago to see a similar pattern. The great powers of Europe had nearly come to blows over colonial matters quite frequently in the years leading up to 1914. They managed to avoid wars in those cases, but each of those incidents made it more possible for those great powers to contemplate war with each other. In the end, it was a particularly violent and dramatic expression of violence in the Balkans that provided the sudden release for that pent-up violence. It didn’t have to be the assassination of an Archduke in Sarajevo that launched the Great War, but it was. Had a Serb not slaughtered a Hapsburg, something else was bound to have happened to get the great powers to commence destroying each other. 100 years ago, the great powers had exhausted the exploitation of the world to the south and east of them. Their economies demanded new asymmetric relationships, and that meant doing to each other what they had done to the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans.

Germany got it first, good and hard. Its reparations fueled the boom of the 1920s in the nations of the victorious West. Its bankruptcy caused a sudden starvation of the whole system, triggering the seizures of the Great Depression. The Germans emerged from that experience with a leader and a mass of followers that were determined to reverse the asymmetric relationships and use the plunder of nations to fuel its own growth.

The German nation failed in that enterprise, leaving the USA and USSR as the premier consumers of nations on the planet. They struggled mightily with each other, with the sudden collapse of the USSR in 1991 leaving the military-industrial complex of the USA in a quandry. If it had no great enemy to fight, what was the massive military might of the USA needed for?

The answer came in the form of tiny nations around the world that tried to find their own way, preferably those with oil under them or in possession of some strategic bit of land. But after the USA paid a bloody visit to the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan, it found itself in a world in which its own ability to act unilaterally greatly curtailed.

China held a large amount of USA debt. Russia’s military strength had grown along with its fortunes in the energy trade. Once again, the world was host to competing great powers, playing their great games.

What will start the next, terrible, cataclysmic war? Will it be the shoving match between Japan and China in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands? Will it be the squabble over the rocks that pass for the Spratly Islands, where China demands what the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and even Taiwan claim as their own? Will it be in Ukraine, where the CIA-backed government refuses to back down to the Russian-backed government? Will it be in Syria, where Russian terrorist proxies do battle with American terrorist proxies? Perhaps it will be in Turkey, a state on the verge of violently unraveling as horribly as did Libya or Egypt? Could we see it all begin with one mortar shelling too many across the Line of Control in Kashmir? A misfire in the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula?

Any of those could be the spark, or something else equally minor yet elevated in importance because of the context in which it happens. 2014 is not 1914, but the world of 2014 is very much the world that was in the days leading up to 1914. At one point, one of the great powers will step too far, make a miscalculation, or simply decide that this time, it cannot back away from an ultimatum. At that point, the war begins.

We might take some solace in the thought that the combatants of WW2 did not use poison gas as often as those of WW1. Then again, the intention to starve entire populations to death prompted campaigns of unrestricted submarine warfare and firebombing of cities – only the defeated in WW2 were tried for war crimes. WW2 saw the first use of nuclear weapons. If WW3 does not see them, well and good. But WW3 would still see the carnage of machine guns (all of which are today reviewed on thegunsource.com), fuel-air explosives, cluster bomblet munitions, anti-personnel landmines, so-called “poison” bullets, and the like. Perhaps the nascent developments in biology and customization of microbes will see the first biological war, in which diseases ravage nations that are too afraid to use nuclear weapons on each other.

None of this informs the actions of nations in the present day, because their leaders all depend upon a myth of invincibility and ultimate triumph to sustain their grip on world power. Do your worst, we shall rise victorious in the end – so they all boast. So it was in 1914, but of the eight mighty empires that entered that war, four of them were completely shattered five years later. That was only with a few of the horrors mentioned above. If we see the use of nuclear weapons, we may see all of the mighty empires that enter into the next war come to their end.

And yet, we keep taking steps toward war.

When you look at US military bases in Afghanistan and place them on top of proposed pipeline routes from Turkmenstan to Pakistan, one sees that the bases trace out the pipelines. Back in 2001, the hope was that the USA would take charge in Central Asia and, by association, the petrochemicals beneath the soil and sands of that region. The neocons spoke highly of the dictators of geologically-blessed regions until news of their boiling opponents alive came to light or, worse, said dictators chose to orbit either Russia or China and not to play ball with the USA, which never really got Afghanistan calmed down enough to get that pipeline project underway.

Now that the Central Asian dictatorships are no longer interested in American ventures, we no longer need to keep troops there to guard a pipeline route that will never exist.

Interestingly enough, Chevron, a company that had great interest in the Afghan pipeline, is also quite interested in exploring hydrocarbons beneath Ukraine. If they weren’t behind the recent riots that unseated Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, I’d be surprised. Oil companies have been behind assassinations, bombings, massacres, coup d’etats, wars, and other assorted acts of mayhem since the start of the 20th Century, when it became clear how much money and power was connected to black gold. Fun fact: Condoleeza Rice, a huge proponent of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, is a former Chevron employee. How about that?

So, we’re at Chevron being interested in Ukraine and probably getting the CIA to topple a tinpot elected official. Like it or not, Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was elected after a runoff election between him and his opposition that received the most votes. His election was as fair and valid as the USA’s own 2000 election, if one wishes to cast aspersions upon it. The guy was elected, and he certainly leaned towards Russia. Chevron got him out of the way and…

… obviously, Chevron totally forgot that the USA isn’t the only nation with an interest in putting its soldiers along pipeline routes. Russia today is not the disorganized post-Communist mess that it was in 1991. It has its act together, and is not afraid to project its power. If one looks at the major natural gas pipelines that cross Ukraine, one notices a line that goes strictly through predominantly Russian-speaking areas in the east and south. If Russia pushes into those areas to defend Russian-speaking people, it will also be securing a major pipeline route to Europe. Another pipeline to bypass Ukraine completely should be finished by 2017. All the same, Russia would prefer all of Ukraine to be friendly to its interests, but Russia does not like take a risk without hedging its bets.

At the very least, Russia will occupy eastern and southern Ukraine. The pipeline dictates that. Will Russia stop there? Maybe not: the other pipelines dictate that. But will Russia go beyond the borders of Ukraine? I don’t think so. It has customers on the other side of Ukraine’s borders. Ukraine couldn’t pay for Russia’s gas with money, so it has to pay for it by other means. Germany and the rest of Europe have cash and can pay for that gas, so there’s no need for Russia to move further west unless that money runs out.

Crimea is part of Ukraine, right? The USA is right to backstop the territorial integrity of Ukraine, right? Well, let’s take a look…

Truth be told, Crimea hasn’t been a part of Russia for as long as Ukraine. The Russians conquered it from the Turks back in the 1700s. Back then, the Russian Empire tried to leave its stamp everywhere, to the point of suppressing local languages in favor of Russian, a policy that continued under Communist government. When Gogol wrote Taras Bulba, the Czarists took the Ukrainian epic and forced it to become Russified. When the book was made into a film a few years ago, the very Russian producers made it a very Russian movie, even though all the characters were Ukrainian. The Russian attitude towards Ukraine is that it is an integral part of Russia’s sphere of influence, preferably a part of Russia’s state.

Ukraine itself is a gradient of a nation, with stronger Ukrainian culture in the west that begins to blend with Russian culture the further east and south one goes. The part around Lviw wasn’t even a part of Russia until 1939, having previously enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy and then becoming part of interwar Poland. That region has never comfortably identified itself with Russia and has persistently been the core of resistance to Russian domination.

During the Russian Revolution, Ukraine attempted to break away as a state and Russia forcibly integrated it into the USSR. During the 1930s, Stalin stripped the Ukraine bare of food, creating a mass murder by starvation known as The Holomodor. Back when Hitler was only severely restricting Jews with no organized plan of mass murder, Stalin was killing people by the millions – and Stalin kept it under wraps as much as possible, with Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times journalists shouting down any reporters that tried to get the truth out. We may point fingers at Swiss bankers that touched Nazi gold looted from Jews, but we hardly ever think about how our own New York Times was knowingly complicit in Soviet genocide.

When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, many Ukrainians hoped for a lessening of the oppression and welcomed the invaders. That mood changed when the Germans proved as brutal as the Russians, leading to the formation of a Ukrainian nationalist resistance movement. The Ukrainians wanted full independence, nothing less.

By 1943, it was clear to the Ukrainian partisans that the Germans were on the way out. There was no further point in resisting their government: the Russians were the real, long-term threat. And so, in order to gain German equipment and training, the Ukrainians began to volunteer for the foreign mercenary parts of the Waffen-SS. The 14th Waffen-SS division “Galizien” formed and it fought ferociously on the Eastern Front. When it was posted to France, it deserted ferociously, so the Germans put it back on the Eastern Front, where it would sustain upward of 80% casualties in nearly every engagement it participated in.

Truth be told, much of that casualty rate was fudged by unit commanders in order to hide the truth that, once trained and armed by the Germans, the Galizien soldiers would desert to get behind the Russian lines to carry on the fight for Ukrainian independence. The Germans would have preferred for them to stand and fight, but there we are. The Ukrainians weren’t collaborating with the Nazis as much as they were using them as a vehicle to help them arrive at their own desired ends.

The Ukrainian resistance actually created a political entity independent of Moscow from 1944-1946, but the best recognition they got from the West was clandestine US support of the movement until 1946. After the war with Germany ended, the Russians set about crushing the Ukrainian resistance, finally clearing the field in 1949.

So, even if the Ukrainians had been part of Russia for centuries, the events of the 20th Century showed that there was a real desire on their part to be independent of Russia. The Russians that lived in Ukraine, however, held no such sentiments. They rather enjoyed being part of Russia, all other things being equal. The Russians in Crimea, the peninsula attached to the south side of Ukraine, were very happy to be part of Russia all the way up to 1954, when that region was administratively attached to Ukraine. Later on, Ukraine granted it some autonomy. As far as Ukrainian territorial integrity goes, it’s not really part of Ukraine. Demographically, it’s got a Russian majority.

Strategically, it’s got Russia’s Black Sea Fleet’s home base. While Putin could hem and haw about the need to keep Ukraine in Russian orbit if he wanted, he can not and will not entertain any flexibility on that base and the land around it. It will be Russian, full stop. It is necessary, so the Russians will do it. If Ukraine clings to the West for a while, its hyperinflation and lack of natural gas will get it to face East again after the next winter. But if Russia loses its naval base, that would be a disaster for its ability to project its power. It cannot let that port slip through its fingers for even a moment.

In this chess game, Russia is committed to defending the Crimea to the hilt. Russia is destroyed without it, so it will risk destruction to avert a guaranteed destruction. Does the West have the same set of outcomes at stake? And as far as territorial integrity goes, why did the West not insist upon Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity in the 1990s? It actively broke apart that nation, because it suited the desires of the West to do so. It’s harder than ever for the West – particularly the USA – to try and claim a moral high ground, given how the USA exercises police state powers on the level of the Stasi, KGB, and Gestapo. Have I gone too far? Consider the extra-judicial killings and torturings carried out with Presidential approval, and we have an apt comparison.

As I typed this, Russia cut off its natural gas discount to Ukraine. I’m not surprised. Next will be to cut off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine, which will also impact Europe. Is Europe committed to Ukrainian territorial integrity if it means its energy costs will become much, much higher?

I said this was a chess game. The USA just took down one Russian pawn, but its knight’s position is threatened. Will the USA bring in supporting pieces to threaten those Russian pieces involved in taking down the USA’s knight, or will it withdraw its knight and give back the Russians their position on the board?

Put even more bluntly, is this Ukraine thing worth a sacrifice of cities, destroyed with nuclear missiles? The Russians will be ready to go to that level when their survival is on the line, as it is here.