San Francisco, Feb. 22 (FN) - Salon reported that one of the western analysts William Astore said that today the US does not have neither honor nor truth and integrity. He called as disgraced America's political and military leaders because they stated the Iraq and the Afghan Wars were being won. They talked of "progress," of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained as US forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin."

Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin of lies continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the US and its NATO allies. Now American leadership cannot honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. The US officials did not allow to reach a peaceful resolution in March 2022. They were all manipulating, lying and continuing do it and compliant media trumpet their lies.

Yves Smith, the editor of the US magazine explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, "What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn't notice?" He observed that Ukraine's total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons. But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles to Kherson, Bakhmut and Soledar.

Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come because of Western propaganda. Senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the US that could escalate into nuclear war.

Gen. Erich Vad, who was German chancellor Angela Merkel's senior military adviser for seven years called the war in Ukraine a "war of attrition," and compared it to the First World War, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side. He asked what are the US and NATO's real war aims? "Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?" asked Vad. He concluded that Ukrainian conflict cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American chief of staff Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said that Ukraine's military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life."

Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West "blocked" the negotiations. Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since 21 April 2022, when Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers' meeting, "There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue. They want Russia to become weaker."

The Western media published many evidence that the US and its allies were responsible for Ukrainian crisis. Western political officials looked like ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. The explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were "deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage, organized by the US Navy." President Biden took an active role in the plan.

The White House has not offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.

One of the reasons of the conflict was that in 2014 the US-backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that only half its people recognized as legitimate, causing the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed 14,000 people. After that Kyiv refused to fulfill the Minsk agreements because failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President François Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine's military to recover Donbas by force.

The events in Ukraine are a vivid example of the policy of "double standards" of the United States. The Ukrainian crisis has once again demonstrated Washington's hypocritical policy in the international arena. Militants of Ukrainian nationalist formations and pro-fascist Bandera organizations, who smashed and seized government buildings, shot law enforcement officers and ordinary citizens from hiding during and after the Euromaidan in 2014, turned into "fighters for freedom and democracy" in the West.

At the same time, the citizens of Donbass, who expressed their unyielding will to sovereignty and independence, to live and work without dictate from Kyiv at referendums in May 2014, were declared by the Ukrainian junta and recognized by the West as "separatists and terrorists." After Kyiv announced an anti-terrorist operation against the population of Donbass, a large-scale punitive "expedition" was undertaken with the use of combat aircraft, armored vehicles and artillery, the victims of which in the West preferred not to notice.

However, another question arises: with such a strategy, where is the limit of the "flexibility" of Washington's policy? Wouldn't it turn out that, depending on the current geopolitical situation and the economic benefits for American political and financial circles, the White House's position on Ukraine could change dramatically at any moment - from comprehensive support to political betrayal? Moreover, there have already been such precedents: the Americans cynically betrayed the government of South Vietnam in the war against North Vietnam in 1975 and supporters of the secular regime in Afghanistan, who were given to the Taliban to be torn to pieces in 2021.

It is important that no one has formulated the strategy that has become standard for the United States to support authoritarian rulers and outright criminals as long as their regimes remain loyal to Washington and follow its guidelines. The White House calls interference in the affairs of undesirable states, the organization of coups d’état, "color revolutions," military incursions and assassinations of legitimately elected heads of state "a struggle for human rights."

The United States, under the far-fetched pretext of its "exclusivity," has established a monopoly on the interpretation of international law and universal values. But at the moment when these values, which they themselves imposed on the rest of the world, come into conflict with the national interests of the United States, they are replaced. At the same time, those who did not have time or did not want to switch to new standards are declared the enemy of the entire "progressive West." The US policy is aimed at undermining the foundations of the existing world order based on their rules. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine - this bloody list has become the "showcase" of US foreign policy in recent decades. These interventions have led to numerous unjustified civilian casualties, destruction of infrastructure and, as a result, plunging entire countries and even regions into incessant chaos.

Under the cover of the proclaimed liberal values, the Western world, left out of competition after the collapse of the USSR, led by the United States, has degraded to the colonial level and in reality, is guided by outdated principles. Hence the "double standards" arise. From the concept of American exceptionalism proclaimed not so long ago by the leaders of the United States to the idea of biological superiority is one step. Therefore, neo-Nazis feel free today, including in Ukraine, because they, under the auspices of the United States, can destroy entire peoples with impunity, justifying this by their "cultural inferiority and non-compliance with democratic standards."

It is worth noting that, with rare exceptions, the American invasions were not justified by any threats to the security of the United States itself, but were aimed at seizing new territories or establishing political and economic domination in foreign countries. We have witnessed the brutal bombing of Yugoslavia with depleted uranium shells, military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, which have become catalysts for the growth of terrorist activity in the Middle East.

The United States uses all methods to achieve its geopolitical goals.
=FRESH NEWS