States Act Like States, Aggressing, and Statesmen Lie Routinely

States aggress when their leaders feel like it, or “judge” such aggression to be in their “interests”. They aggress against their own citizens. They aggress against foreigners. Not everywhere, not always, not all the time, but when it suits them.

The U.S. aggressed in Iraq, massively. It’s aggressing right now in many places worldwide and domestically. This is what states do.

Is Russia aggressing against Ukraine? I do not know. Russia has leased a naval base in Sevastopol until 2042. My comments above are not prompted by Russia’s actions. They are prompted by this statement made by John Kerry : “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretexts in order to assert your interests.” The context is Russia and Ukraine, but what specifically is most noteworthy to me is that Kerry is condemning his own state, the U.S. It has top priority for me because the Bush adminstration, acting for the U.S., invaded Iraq on phony pretexts to assert its interests, and it did the same in Afghanistan. Then Obama repeated this in Libya and several other countries. Kerry, speaking for Obama and the U.S., has no moral or legal credibility in condemning Russia for what many states do routinely, domestically and in foreign affairs, and for what the U.S. has done and is doing. It doesn’t matter how many other governments he can rally against Russia or how many U.N. resolutions he can get on false premises or how many statements he can elicit from world “leaders” or organizations like NATO as he threatens trade sanctions, travel freezes and asset seizures. He is threatening further aggressions. Does anyone believe that these threats are for the moral reason that Kerry has presented, that “you just don’t invade another country”? That’s impossible, given that this is the usual behavior of states and the U.S. It’s impossible since the U.S. lets pass all sorts of other aggressions, such as that of Israel against Palestinians and Saudi Arabia against Syria. It has to be the case that Kerry’s and Obama’s agenda is something entirely different. The dangerous game they are playing is called “beat up on Russia”. Keep Russia down. Push against Russia. Confine Russia. Contain Russia. Prevent Russia from reconstructing an empire along the lines of the U.S. empire, that is, one based on invisible strings, pacts, alliances, aid packages, arms shipments, and so on. Keep Russian ships bottled up if at all possible. And by all means undermine Russia’s source of revenues via its oil and gas sales.

The rhetoric of Kerry and Obama is the furthest thing from believable in this foreign affair, and if it is not believable in this matter, why should we also not strongly suspect that their rhetoric for their domestic aggressions is likewise false and far from conveying the real purposes of their laws and activities? Statesmen lie routinely because they aggress routinely and they then attempt to cover up the actual nature of their aggressions.