Cheer The War

Cheer the war
Olga Rodríguez
Published on 8 March in Diario.es
(Meaning of jalear: Cheer with slaps and expressions [those who dance and sing]. To excite, to
sulk, to make noise.)
The longer a war lasts, the more deaths, the more division, the more pain.
Ukraine has the right to defend itself. But to parade the war without
mentioning its risks would hide part of the reality. The danger of its
perpetuation is enormous.
Behind the altruistic justifications usually presented around international

relations are hidden economic, political and geostrategic interests of
regional and international powers. Geopolitics is imbued with hypocrisy,
and the official explanations offered to us often hide some of the key
causes for taking positions on the global board.
No country invades another or arms a particular group just because it

believes in blue unicorns, justice and world peace. In an idyllic world,
international relations could be guided by those principles. But we are not
in an idyllic world. Russia has invaded Ukraine because it wants to
maintain and extend its orbit of influence beyond its present borders.
After all, Putin's authoritarian system is still governed by imperialism that
longs for the territorial extension of the federation of republics during the
USSR. He wants to set limits on NATO's expansion and show forcefulness
to his people.
A chronicle announced
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a chronicle announced over the
years but not prevented. Both American personalities who held critical
institutional positions and analysts of great stature have known. So they
stated publicly that an expansion of NATO to the Russian borders would
mean a challenge to which Moscow would respond. And yet such increase
was not averted. Does this justify Russia's illegal invasion and
indiscriminate attacks? Not at all. Putin's government, a driving force in its
own country for the persecution of critical thinking, feminist movements,
LGTBI, socialists or communists, close to European far-right organizations,
is showing a show of force to mark its limits, has no qualms about razing
buildings in Ukraine and aims to protect its public image through media
censorship.
1
But is this why the European Union must also apply censorship,
descending into the wrong canons of democracies? In a climate like the
current one, it is essential to create space for calm reflection and ask
ourselves who wins and who loses with the normalization of the closure of
media, however pro-Russian they may be.
Double standards
We must also reflect on double standards. As a journalist who has covered
conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I am
obliged to remind you how different the media and political reactions to
the illegal invasion of Iraq or Israeli attacks on Palestinians were or are
from the current one.
The United States is pushing forward the investigation of Russian war

crimes, which is all very well, given the destructive Russian bombing of
residential neighbourhoods. But it is important to remember, to
understand the dynamics, that Washington had never signed the Rome
Statute, which laid the foundations for the International Criminal Court.
The former US Government issued sanctions against the Criminal Court
when it attempted to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan.
Explaining is not justifying

Five days ago, George Beebe, former CIA official on Russia and former Dick
Cheney adviser, wrote that the US chose war in Ukraine instead of
diplomatically resolving the conflict:
"The choice we faced in Ukraine was whether Russia vetoes Ukraine's
entry into NATO at the negotiating table or on the battlefield" and "We
chose to ensure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, trusting
that Putin would stop or the military operation would fail".
His point of view is not isolated between sectors that in the past stood out
in the US establishment or among current analysts. Jack Matlock,
American ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991, recently wrote an
article in which he argued that this invasion was foreseeable and at the
same time avoidable. Under the title "I was there: NATO and the origins of
the Ukraine crisis", it indicated that in 1997, when the expansion of NATO
towards the Russian borders began to be considered, "I affirmed to the
[US] Senate that this expansion of NATO would take us to where we are
today".
2
Biden's current CIA director, William Burns, wrote from Moscow in 1995
that "hostility towards NATO's early expansion is felt almost universally
across the domestic political spectrum here" and that the measure was
"premature at best and unnecessarily provocative at worst". Burns himself
informed the Bush administration in 2008 that "Ukraine's entry into NATO
is the most prominent of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just for
Putin)". In 2020 Burns wrote about how "the Russians were tormented in
their grievance and sense of disadvantage".
In 2014 Henry Kissinger, the embodiment of the harshest US foreign

policy, argued: "The West must understand that Ukraine can never be just
a foreign country" for Russia. If "Ukraine wants to survive and prosper, it
must not be an outpost of either side against the other, and it must
function as a bridge between them". Instead of joining NATO, Ukraine
"should adopt a position comparable to Finland". It "cooperates with the
West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility towards
Russia".
Stephen Walt, professor of International Relations at Harvard and

columnist for Foreign Policy, has lamented "the black-and-white view of
the situation in Ukraine", and Chicago University Policy Professor John
Mearsheimer believes that "the whole problem started in 2008 when Bush
announced his intentions on Ukraine and Georgia, even though Moscow
had made it clear that these intentions were perceived as a threat".
Katrina van den Heuvel, editor and member of the Council on

International Relations in the US, recently wrote in The Washington Post
that "NATO now exists primarily to manage the risks created by its
existence" and the Ukrainian expert of Kings College Anatol Lieven
proposed a few days ago a neutral Ukraine and a moratorium on its entry
into the Atlantic Alliance to end the war.
According to former intelligence analyst Fiona Hill of the Brookings

Institution, the US secret services opposed the idea of integrating Ukraine
and Georgia into NATO in 2008. Still, President George W. Bush ignored
her warnings, in a move seen today by most experts as a critical turning
point in relations between Washington and Moscow. Other voices in the
US establishment, such as Thomas Friedman, Zbigniew Brzezinski and
3
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, all of whom knew the limits of unilateralism
from their own age, also raised criticisms at the time.
Samuel Charap, a Ukrainian expert with the RAND Corporation (a group of

experts aligned with the Pentagon), considers that the crisis in Ukraine is
"a symptom of [Washington's] runaway success" after the Cold War and
affirms that "Russia is destined to clash again with the United States and
its allies for the status of these former Soviet republics unless all parties
can reach a mutually acceptable agreement for the regional order".
Professor of International Relations Rajan Menon or former National

Security Department member Thomas Graham have urged avoiding war
"by accommodating some of Russia's main security concerns" and
formalizing "a declared moratorium on the accession of Ukraine or any
other ex-Soviet republic" to NATO for 25 years.
It could occupy dozens of pages naming more analysts not suspected of

being pro-Russian and advocating diplomatic outings. We have also heard
experts in Spain these past few days pointing out the risks of perpetuating
the conflict and pointing out that it could have been avoided.
The high price of including Ukraine in NATO

Let's face it. Faced with an illegal invasion like the Russian one, terrible in
its attacks, it is necessary to look for solutions with maturity and sanity
without being carried away by the visceral satisfaction of imagining a
defeated Putin tomorrow. It is likely that this objective will only be
achieved at the cost of enormous sacrifice, tens or hundreds of thousands
of lives, pain and disruption in Ukraine and perhaps, at worst, the
extension of the conflict to the whole of Europe, with the entry of more
armies and even the use of nuclear weapons. How important is Ukraine's
entry into NATO? For whom?
The Atlantic Alliance is still taking on the new international stage.

Unilateralism has given way to a multilateralism with other rules and new
emerging actors capable of having their margins of power and regional
influence. In this new reality NATO, led by Washington, has been used as
an instrument of pressure against Russia, favouring American interests
over Europeans and using Ukraine as a confrontation scenario, but
without committing to her in her direct defence. The externalization of
4
the conflict is a model so often repeated by the US in the last two
decades.
Ukraine has the right to defend itself. But to boast of war without
mentioning the risks of war would be to conceal part of the reality. The
plan to arm groups against the invader must be studied in depth.
According to military experts, only heavy weaponry and the direct
intervention of Western powers could move the balance towards a
possible triumph of Ukraine over Russia. Washington and its allies are not
prepared at the moment to engage directly with Russia to defend Ukraine
but to expose Ukraine to a war of attrition with Moscow to continue
marking its orbit of influence. They thus place the defence of their
interests on the backs of Ukrainian men over the age of 18, forced to go to
the war front, and groups of local fighters armed with US money to fight
Russia.
In the service of what and who is the Atlantic Alliance, it is necessary to

consider which actors stand to gain and lose in this conflict. In this
scenario, it is appropriate to analyze what is the role of the European
Union in NATO, a military alliance in which the US has been demanding
more spending on Defense and strategies that are already causing
increases in prices of essential foods and energy (Russia is the first gas
supplier in Europe), as well as growing a regional tension that no one
knows how it will end. As was recalled this week in Tim magazine, Europe
depends much more on Russia than the US. If the war does not stop, this
will have consequences for trade, prices, and tourism.
The longer a war lasts...

Ukraine has become the scene of a vast battle between Washington and
Moscow, in which power is disputed, the orbit of regional influence,
customers in the gas market, and they try to limit the advances of the
adversary. The longer a war lasts, the more wounds challenging to close,
the more deaths, the more divisions, the more pain. In that sense, the risk
of perpetuating war as a tool of wear and tear, on the contrary, is
enormous.
History, the newspaper libraries, remind us of the collective madness

generated by war climates, enemies of calm thought. Tolerance is to
understand that no one deserves to be dehumanized-and even less when
5
hate speech advances so much-neither misrepresented nor stigmatized
for believing in peace. It is urgent to deploy an ample shield against the
atmosphere of quarrel and defend the umbrella of respect and peaceful
ways.
It is necessary to understand the basics of conflict resolution: in war, as in
love, it is necessary to look closely to finish. That war is the cowardly way
out of the problems of peace, as Thomas Mann wrote. Every war is a
destruction of the human spirit. As Martin Luther King pointed out, a
nation that spends more money on military weaponry than social
programs approaches spiritual death.
People never win wars. They are won by the magnates who enrich
themselves with them, the arms companies, the politicians who intend to
make a career at the cost of the lives of others. And they do so through,
among other means, what Susan Sontag called "the lust of public opinion
for mass bombings".
In one of Hollywood's most famous allegations, at the beginning of the

film Gone with the Wind, several men celebrate the war drums before the
astonished look of Scarlett O'Hara. Later the only one who shows doubts -
a sign of weakness still today in this testosteronic context- reflects as
follows: "Wars bring the greatest misfortunes. And when these end, no
one remembers what provoked them".
Today, do we remember what provoked the war in Kosovo, Libya, Syria or

Iraq, from whom they were marked, with what interests? Do we know
who benefited? Who suffers now and possibly continues to do so for
generations? Will we remember in future what was done and what was
not done to prevent greater evils for Ukraine and the whole of Europe?

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Cheer the war

Behind the altruistic justifications usually presented around international

No country invades another or arms a particular group just because it

The United States is pushing forward the investigation of Russian war

Explaining is not justifying

In 2014 Henry Kissinger, the embodiment of the harshest US foreign

Stephen Walt, professor of International Relations at Harvard and

Katrina van den Heuvel, editor and member of the Council on

According to former intelligence analyst Fiona Hill of the Brookings

Samuel Charap, a Ukrainian expert with the RAND Corporation (a group of

Professor of International Relations Rajan Menon or former National

It could occupy dozens of pages naming more analysts not suspected of

The high price of including Ukraine in NATO

The Atlantic Alliance is still taking on the new international stage.

In the service of what and who is the Atlantic Alliance, it is necessary to

The longer a war lasts...

History, the newspaper libraries, remind us of the collective madness

In one of Hollywood's most famous allegations, at the beginning of the

Today, do we remember what provoked the war in Kosovo, Libya, Syria or

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