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To understand the root cause of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is helpful to return to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Initially, the official U.S. government story was that the CIA began arming the Mujahadeen forces in Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded the country.
That was a lie. In fact, the CIA began arming the Mujahadeen before the Soviets invaded.
Why did the CIA do that? In order to provoke the Soviets into invading Afghanistan.
Why would the CIA do that? According to U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the reason was to give the Russians their own “Vietnam war.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski
To understand what he meant by that reference, we need to go back to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and the resulting U.S. war in Vietnam. During that war, more than 58,000 American men were killed. Additionally, more than 150,000 were injured, some permanently. The U.S. government had forced many of these men, through conscription, to go to Vietnam, where they were put into a position of kill or be killed. U.S. officials told American troops that they were fighting for “freedom” and to preserve American society from a Red takeover.
On top of the deaths and injuries, the U.S. government spent more than a trillion dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to wage its war in Vietnam.
The war tore apart the social fabric of America, especially with antiwar protests.
We don’t know how many Vietnamese were killed but the number almost certainly was in the millions.
At the end of the war, the U.S. lay defeated, and Vietnam lay in ruins. The Reds won but they never came and took over the United States, as U.S. officials had claimed they would. It had all been one great big lie and one great big racket, one that wreaked untold death, suffering, grief, and destruction.
Thus, that gives you an idea of what Brzezinski meant when he said that the U.S. government provoked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan into order to give them their own “Vietnam war.” The U.S. aim was to have ten of thousands of Russian soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands injured and to have the Soviets spend trillions of dollars of Russian taxpayer money in a deadly and destructive war.
U.S. officials thought that that would be wonderful. I myself believe it actually reflects highly twisted, warped, and perverted minds. After all, keep in mind that most of those Russian soldiers had families — wives, children, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Many of them were left grieving the loss of their loved ones, just like the families of those 58,000 American men who were sacrificed for nothing in Vietnam. Moreover, Russian families were left to care for injured and maimed soldiers with a healthcare system that was much less advanced than that of the United States.
Who would actually celebrate having brought about such a thing? Zbigniew Brzezinski would. And so would his boss, President Jimmy Carter. And every official in the Pentagon and the CIA. They were all extremely proud of and pleased with having provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan and giving the Russians their own “Vietnam war.”
Are you having a hard time believing that U.S. officials would have such a twisted mindset? Are you thinking, “Conspiracy theory, Jacob! Conspiracy theory!”?
Well, the proof comes straight out of the mouth of Zbigniew Brzezinski himself, namely in an interview he gave to a French newspaper. Here is what this man said in part during that interview:
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Here is more of the interview.
Would the Pentagon and the CIA ever do it again? Oh, of course not. Over the years, they have obviously become innocent babes in the woods.
Well, except for their NATO antics, which are a mirror image of what they did to provoke the Russians into invading Afghanistan.
When their Cold War racket suddenly and unexpectedly ended in 1989 and after the Soviet Union dismantled in 1991, U.S. officials should have announced the termination of NATO, an old Cold War dinosaur whose ostensible mission had been to protect Western Europe from a Soviet invasion. After all, by 1991 its ostensible mission had been fulfilled.
Instead, the Pentagon and the CIA used NATO to begin gobbling up former members of the Warsaw Pact, which enabled the Pentagon and the CIA to station their troops and their nuclear missiles ever closer to Russia’s border. In other words, while the Cold War had ended insofar as Russia was concerned, it had not ended insofar as the Pentagon and the CIA were concerned.
When Russia objected to this expansion of NATO and declared that Ukraine was a “red line” for Russia, it fell right into the U.S. trap, just as it did back in 1979. The Pentagon knew that all it would have to do is threaten to absorb Ukraine into NATO and Russia would have no choice but to enforce its “red line” by invading Ukraine. Backing down and conceding that its “red line” wasn’t really a “red line”after all and, even worse, permitting the Pentagon to station its troops and its missiles on Russia’s border would obviously have been unacceptable to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin obviously believed that his “special military operation” in Ukraine would be a cakewalk. But the Pentagon and the CIA were ready for him. They had obviously been planning for the Russian invasion for a long time, with training of troops, planning of war strategy, and the furnishing of highly sophisticated weaponry.
Tens of thousands of Russian troops have now been killed, along with an untold number of Ukrainians. The entire country lies devastated. Putin is now resorting to conscription, just like the U.S. did during its war in Vietnam. But who cares about all that death and destruction? What is important is that Russia has, once again, been “degraded” by being given its own “Vietnam war.”