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Bob Dylan, Masters of War, and the Ukraine Crisis

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February 23, 2022
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Posted in: Europe, Russia, International Relations, US, War and Peace, Ukraine | 1 comment

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Source: Common Dreams

Photo by Drop of Light/Shutterstock

 

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions—shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Whether or not they know much about such history, American media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now!, Katrina vanden Heuvel—editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert—said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997—“expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era”—the expansion was already happening.

As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”

If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?

 

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” (2006) and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” (2007).

1 comment

  1. avatar
    Antonio Carty February 23, 2022 10:17 am 

    Well said Norman Soloman.

    I think it is reasonable and long overdue to resolve the 8 year breakaway civil wars in Ukraine. It is extreme to use Russia wanting to do so as an excuse to arm and use all of Ukraine to expand into their civil war and make it a proxy war with Russia. It was further USA NATO eastern expansionism into Ukraine through, the fascist method government USA NATO installed in a coup against Ukraine’s democracy in 2014, that instigated the reaction of the breakaway regions and Russia helping them. Ukraine should not be armed and encouraged to fight USA NATOs proxy war with Russia in its breakaway regions and possibly expanding beyond. Russia should be countered in its unilateralism to resolve the 8year breakaway republics situation in Ukraine by multilateralism in solving the ongoing 8year bloody civil war there at last, through return to the Minsk Accords and more objective peace keepers could be UN troops.

    It is not Russia who has been expanding and in danger of now been appeased, Russia has shrunk, it is the 20 times bigger budgeted NATO and USA that has been expanding through Eastern Europe right up to borders of Russia. It is the proxy war hungry cowardly USA NATO planners that must not be appeased by all of Ukraine and Russia going to extreme and an expanding form of war, when it is reasonable and good that an 8year civil war be resolved by negotiations, returning to the already in place Minsk talks framework, to peacefully resolve the bloody consequences of USA’s coup against Ukraine’s democracy in 2014 by Zelensky’s party. Calling Zelensky and his coup party, democratically elected in subsequent elections they ran, is not legitimate enough. To have an unelected forced coup government run elections, and while the country is divided and cut off in an 8year civil war, can not be called legitimate elections.

    It is not a case of the danger of ‘Appeasing Russia’ Russia is not expanding, it is USA NATO expanding for last 30years against its clear good faith promises to Russia that ended the Cold War, by the progressive character of Gorbachev and Russia. Forked tongue USA has gradually gone back on all its arms treaties and promises. We must now have the wisdom not to appease USA NATO and their extreme and duplicitous use of the tragic civil war their coup instigated in Ukraine. USA NATO expansionism and their call to further abuse Ukrainians into now fighting a full war against their once fellow citizens in the breakaway republics, this is what we must not excuse or appease.

    It is reasonable to resolve the civil wars in Ukraine, but of course it should be resolved multilaterally not unilaterally by Russia, but resolving it is a solution to a problem USA NATOs Ukraine coup government caused, if they had not alienated the Russian speaking regions of Ukraine they would not have felt they needed to breakaway and fight for their homes, arming Ukraine to turn all of the country into a bigger all out proxy war for USA NATO is wrong, the situation of breakaway republics can and should be resolved, as Russia also has shown it wants. Expanding the 8year civil war into a bigger war is an excuse USA NATO has obviously been waiting for, and the coup government of Ukraine may now be calling for, but they should not be appeased. Wider Ukraine proxy war by expansionist USA NATO must not be appeased. Peaceful resolution of the breakaway regions with a reasonable and agreed form of Autonomy could be negotiated by return to Minsk Accords or something like it with Russia and Ukraine and Europe not NATO participating, if the USA NATO would be asked to shut up and allow it to succeed. But they obviously want a wider Ukraine civil war and proxy war with Russia, we should not follow or appease them.

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