by Alistair Crooke at Strategic Culture
The sheer size and scope of the western information operations – insisting repeatedly on the imminence of a Russian invasion of Ukraine – has almost dwarfed the western effort mounted in the lead up to the second invasion of Iraq. This latest info-war has been qualitatively different from that earlier episode however, in the way in which supposed intelligence titbits were constantly fed to the press in order to stiffen the narrative spine with a direct sense of being at the very cusp of war.
By last weekend, the U.S. mainstream was indeed in a war frenzy, and it seemed that the narrative was gaining a momentum and energy of its own – moving beyond Washington’s control and picking up support from across the U.S. bi-partisan spectrum.
A sense of this was given by White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, referring to the Ukrainian borders as ‘sacred’ – evoking the 6 January language of viewing the transgression of protestors across the boundaries of the Capitol Building as being an assault on something ‘sacred’ to democracy.
By this week however, the lacunae inherent to the U.S. narrative were obvious: Biden, in his 7 December virtual summit with Putin, had threatened a ‘sanctions Armageddon’ for Russia. But those sanctions were not Biden’s to unilaterally wield (ultimately, they would have to be European sanctions).
And his team had had not got its sanctions ‘ducks’ properly lined up before the threat of catastrophically painful sanctions was uttered.
It has turned out – in the event – that the threatened sanctions would be far from apocalyptic. Europe vetoed any pre-emptive sanctioning of Russia. And the key pillars – Russia’s expulsion from SWIFT financial clearing system; Russian banks’ exclusion from exchanging roubles into Euros, and vice versa; and sanctions on Nordstream2 – were not acceptable to one or more European States.
In this Tuesday’s White House background briefing, the senior U.S. official quoted was still trying to make ‘bricks out of straw’m– suggesting that a ban on Russia selling sovereign debt on international markets would be highly damaging (when Russia sells its debt almost entirely on the domestic market). Overall, the official failed to convince.
Worse – from the Blinken perspective – the State Department and U.S. Treasury had been warning Blinken that the sanctions would hurt America’s European allies more than Russia, and that some mooted sanctions (such on Russian energy supplies), risked even triggering a global financial crisis.
In short, Team Biden was over-hyping the invasion meme…
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