Chris Hedges: Russia Was Baited Into War but That Does Not Absolve Its
Criminal Aggression
Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to
understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg
laws, is a criminal war of aggression.
by Chris Hedges
February 28th, 2022
By Chris Hedges Mint Press News
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PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or
Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the
basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the
breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by
Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not
to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe, not to meddle in the
internal affairs of nations on Russias border and the refusal to implement
the Minsk II peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never
have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to
feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to understand is not to condone.
The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of
aggression.
I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is
demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and
Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the
violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who
was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil
Moreno.
I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and
confusion. In a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet
around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure
out where the firing is coming from in the hopes you can avoid being hit.
I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which, years later,
descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me
wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.
I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies
of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not
matter the language. Spanish. Arabic. Hebrew. Dinka. Serbo-Croatian.
Albanian. Ukrainian. Russian. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers.
I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody,
pulpy mass. Gaping holes in stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying,
sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme
sacrifice made for flies and maggots.
I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the
Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if
they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq,
never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without
food, drinking out of mud puddles.
The primary lesson in war is that we as distinct individuals do not matter.
We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes
meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in
wartime is exempt.
We were expendable, Eugene Sledge wrote of his experiences as a marine in
the South Pacific in World War II. It was difficult to accept. We come from
a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself
in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in
loneliness. It is a humbling experience.
The landscape of war is hallucinogenic. It defies comprehension. You have no
concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours. War, in an
instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and
leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of
your life. You cannot comprehend what you see. I have tasted enough of war,
enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always
evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about
liberty and democracy and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor and
courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt
Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their
universe which, on some level, will never make sense again.
War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life familial, economic,
cultural, political, environmental, and social. Once war begins, no one,
even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen,
how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards
suicidal folly. There are no good wars. None. This includes World War II,
which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American
heroism, purity, and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war,
ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by
the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians
to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along
with the crippling sanctions meant to bring down Vladimir Putins
government, is infantile and dangerous. The Russian media narrative is as
simplistic as ours.
There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo when
we were being hit with hundreds or Serbian shells a day and under constant
sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city. It made sense to kill or be
killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar, Srebrenica
had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the
gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians and the wholesale rape of
women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from
the poison of violence, the soul-destroying force that is war. I knew a
Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the
outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A
delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he
found the bloody remains of a 12-year-old girl. His daughter was 12. He
never recovered.
Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony,
of the god-like power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes, and
fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries
with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has
earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop
Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems, and
L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn
them billions more.
The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase
weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for
2022. The Biden administration has asked Congress to provide $6.4 billion in
funding to assist Ukraine, supplementing the $650 million in military aid to
Ukraine over the past year. The permanent war economy operates outside the
laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in
the Middle East. It is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants
of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank
accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict, one that now flirts with
the nuclear holocaust that would terminate life on earth as we know it.
The dangerous and sadly predictable provocation of Russia whose nuclear
arsenal places the sword of Damocles above our heads by expanding NATO was
understood by all of us reporting in Eastern Europe in 1989 during the
revolutions and the break-up of the Soviet Union.
This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles
from Russias border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made
geopolitical sense. This does not, however, excuse the invasion of Ukraine.
Yes, the Russians were baited. But they reacted by pulling the trigger. This
is a crime. Their crime. Let us pray for a ceasefire. Let us work for a
return to diplomacy and sanity, a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine
and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. Let us hope for an
end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all.
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