Most of our readers are too young to remember the Vietnam War of a half-century ago, but those of us alive who held draft cards classifying us as 1A have a more personal perspective. In 1971, when I received my low draft number, all I could think was that perhaps I, too, would have to participate in the horror that was combat in that wicked war.
The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973—signed a month after I took my military physical—ended direct US involvement, although the US government continued to aid the South Vietnamese until their government and armed forces completely collapsed in April 1975. Today, Vietnam and the US are at peace with each other, but even today, unexploded US bombs continue to blow up and kill innocent people.
Samuel Johnson wrote in 1758:
Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
To put it another way, war breeds lies. Lies gave us Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the Ukraine War. Like it has done with so many wars that have US involvement, the New York Times has first promoted the conflicts it later claims to abhor, and Ukraine is no exception. Popular columnist David French—who has never seen a US war he didn’t support—two years ago visited Ukraine and gushed about the “valor” he saw with the Ukraine people:
This is primarily a Ukrainian story, of course. We know from bitter experience that we can supply “allies” with billions of dollars of American weapons, only to watch them collapse in the face of a determined attack. But Ukrainian valor and resolve are breathtaking. Most Ukrainians I’ve talked to since arriving don’t say “after the war”; they say “after the victory.” But this is also an American story, and at the risk of sounding a bit corny, when I watched the air defenses we helped build intercept Russian hypersonic missiles above Kyiv, I felt proud to be an American.
With the Donald Trump administration now trying to broker a peace, French is not as “proud to be an American” as he was before January 20, and his rage-filled columns are aimed at either Trump or evangelical Christians that don’t share French’s political views. However, even French’s employer is now admitting that President Joe Biden and others in his administration were lying all along about the war, its progress, and the extent of US involvement:
But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who always has said that US involvement was much deeper than Biden and his acolytes were claiming, writes:
The people who quarterbacked the NATO side of the Ukraine war are so pleased with themselves, they can’t keep from boasting about things that will make the average American want to pitchfork the lot of them. (Adam) Entous (of the NYT) describes a tale told “through a secret keyhole” that reveals how America was “woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” (Translation: it was hidden from us.) Sources not only make it clear that the public was lied to on a continuous basis from the outset of the conflict, they describe how we were lied to, apparently thinking the methods clever. Some are small semantic gambits the idiots wrongly believe exculpated their actions, but the main revelation involves one gigantic, inexcusable deception. From Joe Biden down, they all lied about the risk of World War III.
They risked our lives and our children’s lives, knowingly, repeatedly, and for the worst possible reason: politics. Afraid to admit a mistake, they planned individual excuses while letting bureaucratic inertia expand the conflict. Worse, as was guessed at on this site late last year, the Biden administration after last November’s election increased the risk of global conflict by “expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia,” in order to “shore up his Ukraine project.” If you check this “secret history” against contemporaneous statements of American and European leaders, you’ll find the scale of the lies beyond comprehension.
One only can conclude that the US had stepped well over the boundaries of what would be called “acts of war,” and only paying scant attention to the fact that Russia still has nuclear weapons aimed at US cities. According to the NYT:
The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats.
Although the Biden administration claimed this was not a “proxy war,” it was the very definition of a proxy war, with Ukrainian political leaders wanting even more US involvement, making the American advisers a veritable “trip wire” if Russia attacked any Americans. Indeed, it was the major deception known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that brought American ground troops to Vietnam in the first place.
This whole point bears repeating: the Biden administration was willing to risk nuclear war with Russia to promote a war that never needed to be fought in the first place. By pushing NATO to Russia’s borders and using CIA, USAID, and agents from other agencies to destabilize regimes bordering on Russia, the US risked plunging an entire region into pointless warfare. Taibbi writes:
While the Times piece does little to clear up whose fault the military and diplomatic failure was (there were numerous passages of the “mistakes were made” variety), it’s clear we were lied to about everything. Zelensky and his set will no doubt tell their side now, and it’s possible Ukraine’s freelanced heightening of risk to Americans will come out seeming less treacherous. Either way, it’s clear the Biden administration should have cut the cord years ago, to prevent Americans from being dragged into World War by “partners” with every incentive to pull them in. Instead, the administration berated its critics as treasonous cowards who’d have let Hitler swim to London.
Given that most of the political players in this fiasco are out of power, new scrutiny will likely move to the Trump administration’s actions. Yet, while we have “dodged a bullet” (or, better put, “dodged a nuclear missile”), this affair is not over. More than a million people have died, much of Ukraine lies in ruins, and Trump has been unable to broker that elusive cease fire.
None of this had to happen. The Biden administration was full of Samantha Power and David French types that have anxiously awaited the US’s latest “war of liberation.” In the end, of course, there is no liberation, just the death, destroyed cities, and irresponsible international “experts” who already are in search of their next war—until someone stops them.
