By Hector-Roosevelt Ukegbu
I consider this article “War is hell, not a blockbuster,” by Premium Times opinion writer Owei Lakemfa, grossly misinformed. The greatest impetus for the post-World War II formalization of NATO as a military alliance, I admit, was to checkmate the WARSAW PACT. At the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO was not dissolved. Appropriately so. NATO served another purpose aside containing and defeating the Soviet Union: the prevention of another war in Europe that would bring a repeat of the horrific toll, counted in tens of millions of human lives, and widespread destruction of social and economic infrastructure, worth trillions of dollars.
NATO has overwhelmingly succeeded in its mission to keep peaceful co-existence among countries in Europe until Vladimir Putin began his quixotic empire re-building enterprise with attacks on Georgia, then Crimea, then the Dunbas region of Ukraine, and then the whole of Ukraine. Not long ago, Putin griped that the United States did not grant Russia a Marshall Plan after Russia’s defeat in the Cold War. In truth the United States Congress enacted the Marshall Plan in 1948, and granted Germany and some other West European countries $12 billion in aid (in 1949 dollars), equivalent to $100 billion in 2016. The United States also provided similar aid to Axis Power Japan which it had also defeated.
However both Germany and Japan re-wrote their Constitutions and eventually became allies of America and NATO. Russia did none of such. Still, the United States let Russia re-integrate into the Western social, economic and financial system it had not been a part of since the 1930 hell days of Joseph Stalin and Stalin’s Chief of Soviet Security and KGB mastermind Lavrentiy Beria. These two tyrants dispatched millions of Russians to perish in the gulags of Siberia. (Find and read the horrors in the book “Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I wept for days after reading that book many years ago.)
And as for Ukraine, the Kremlin staged a famine in Ukraine in the 1930s that wiped out four million Ukrainians — men, women and children, young and old. This act of genocide is something Ukrainians have never and are unlikely to ever forget.
The United States did not carry out any Nuremberg-type trials of the defeated Soviet leaders that killed millions of their citizens as well as other peoples of Eastern Europe who were held captive under their sway. America and her allies just let them in. So, ironically, as time passed they were subsumed in the West’s financial system. I was right there when President George H. Bush was encouraging American companies to go to Moscow and to help Russian companies transition to a capitalist economy from the communist economy that had ruined them. Chevron and BP were among the first to go there big time. Chevron was in the Caspian basin in the area of Tengiz, Kazakhstan, as well as Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran and Turkmenistan. The Tengiz joint venture included Exxon Mobil and Lukoil. Prior to this the Russian oil industry was a mess. Their oil reservoirs were mismanaged because of obsolete equipment and disgraceful lack of modern technology and personnel skills. Within a generation all that had changed, and the Russian oil industry, backed by Western multinationals, including high-powered oil field equipment suppliers were at par with the rest of the world. But now President Biden and other Western leaders have begun to pull the rug from under Russia’s feet. The sanctions being imposed against Russia will ultimately lead to the implosion of the Russian economy. There’s still more than can be done against Russia, for example the withdrawal from Russia of the Visa and MasterCard credit and payment systems. (Actually announced by the Biden administration earlier today.) That would sow further chaos in Russian banking and financial services sector. Yes, I learned it while researching the study “U.S. Hispanic Banking & Finance” years ago that the first credit card in the world, later named Visa, was created in 1958 by a then regional Californian bank called Bank of America. The bank named it BankAmericaCard. Years later in the wake of the S&L crisis there followed massive consolidation in the American banking industry, including money center banks in Manhattan, such as Chemical Bank, J. P. Morgan, Chase Manhattan Bank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Bankers Trust. The North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) acquired the then San Francisco-based Bank of America which had lost a lot of money following Moscow’s default of its Russian bonds, and took over the name. So, to Russia, know now that America also owns both Visa and MasterCard, and if you continue your Ukraine onslaught they will be taken from you, so you cannot even use your domestic ATM machines which depend on them to process 75 percent of your transactions.
It seems to me that the Western powers are wringing their hands nervously and timidly while Russia runs a rampage over Ukraine, runs roughshod over the lives of Ukrainians, threatens the world with nuclear annihilation as if Russians are immune to nuclear bombs. What America needs to do now is to rapidly construct thousands more Patriot anti-missile batteries and circle them around Russia. Then call Russia’s bluff and bomb to extinction Russia’s vastly inferior Air Force. I remember during the Arab-Israel air war of attrition when crack Israeli Air Force pilots flying F4 Phantoms were wiping out Syria’s MIG fighters and bombers provided by Russia, because the planes were simply inferior. Today, Russia’s SU-25 and MIGs are no match for NATO’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Indeed the F-35B Lightning, which for the Royal Air Force is a successor of the Harrier Jump Jet, it of the Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL), notably used in the Falklands campaign. The F-35B Lightning, a product of Lockheed Martin and partners, is a stealth aircraft, with a combat radius of some 900 miles, can’t be seen by Russian air defenses and can fly in and out of Ukraine airspace undetected. The F35B Lightning is capable of Short Takeoffs and Vertical Landings (STOVL), and can operate from short runways and airstrips. This capability takes cognizance of the inescapable fact that using bombs and missile strikes, Russia has seriously degraded the runways of Ukraine’s airports and airbases in the active war zones of the country.
Putin has declared that any country that provides operational space on ground for warplanes to act against his war he would declare that country as a participant in the war and presumably retaliate. A bluff. Shakara. Well, the world has been arming Ukraine for weeks now and Putin has done diddily squat.
The world as represented in the United Nations has spoken 141-5 to roundly condemn Russia’s unprovoked aggression and ordered the renegade country to immediately withdraw its troops from Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin without a single care about world opinion is there making his own rules as he goes about trying to bombard Ukraine to oblivion, even preventing innocent civilians from escaping.
The United States of America must end this odious appeasement of this ruthless dictator and use ordinary planes armed with ordinary rockets and bombs to destroy Russia’s Air Force planes that target Ukrainian cities, rather now than later. If Putin’s Russia has a problem with that let their war planes fly over the Atlantic or over the Arctic and attack the homeland and be consumed by hellfire that will only be doused when their smouldering parts fall into the ocean.
We have to say to Putin and Russia, enough is enough. Period.
@HectorRUkegbu