Photo / David Bacon
Editor’s Note: Santita Jackson, radio host of The Santita Jackson Show, interviews Bryce Green, a writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on May 23, 2022, about the billions of U.S. money going into the war in Ukraine and how we can support peace rather than war. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVVqrYbif4 for the full interview. The interview begins around 36 minutes into the show. What follows are excerpts from the interview.
Santita Jackson, The Santita Jackson Show: Bryce Green, it’s surprising that people say if this were President Trump, the progressives and the left wing, and the Democrats, would be jumping up and down, [saying in relationship to Ukraine] ‘This is unfair what you’re doing.’ I’m wondering if our support for peace, our advocacy for it, is conditional upon who’s in office. So I said, let me reach out to Bryce Green from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and see what he has to say on the [new] $40 Billion war package. Bryce Green says that a peace process is non-existent. Talk to me, Bryce Green!
Bryce Green, Fairness and Accuracy Reporting: The United States has been pushing for the Russians to invade Ukraine for a long time. Had they wanted to avoid war, they would’ve sat down at the negotiation table and addressed Putin’s concerns about NATO expansion, about having hypersonic missiles that close to Moscow, and having NATO troops and bases so close to the Russian border. If the U.S. wanted to avoid war, they would’ve talked about these things, but they refused. [After] Russia invaded. . . Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians seemed open to having peace talks, at least on some level. The U.S. came out in opposition to that and instead decided to send billions and billions of dollars of weapons to the Ukraine in order to escalate the war, which would increase the suffering and decrease the chances of a long and lasting peace. And even now, the U.S. seems to be wanting to escalate the war further. This $40 billion aid package . . . would put the total U.S. amount over the last two or three months at $52 billion. Now that’s an enormous number. It’s hard to conceptualize. A good way to think of it is that this is bigger than the entire state department budget for the entire year. The wing of the U.S. government that’s supposed to be doing diplomacy isn’t being funded nearly as much as all those weapons. All this money flows into defense contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed, in order to escalate the war . . . and what’s really troubling about this $40 billion aid package is that not a single progressive lawmaker in the country has voiced any opposition to it. In fact, they all voted for it unanimously. The only people in the house to oppose the bill were 57 Republicans. Republicans, not AOC, not Ilhan Omar, not Rashida Tlaib. They voted to escalate the war in Ukraine. The progressives are to be a serious challenge to American power, to American corporate interest. I mean, that includes being against the escalation of wars . . . This idea that if the U.S. just poured enough weapons into Ukraine we could beat Russia back and destroy a major adversary is lunacy . . . absolute fantasy thinking. . . Any increase in the weapons would only increase the intensity of the fighting, destroy more homes, take more civilian lives. And for what?
Well, the United States has made it clear why they’re doing this. The head of the Department of Defense, Lloyd Austin, says the U.S goal is to ‘weaken Russia to the point where they could never do anything like this [again].’ Even President Biden, when he announced it back in February, said that it was designed to ‘de-industrialize Russia.’ And so this isn’t about Ukrainians. This is about expanding U.S. power over global markets. This is about defeating a U.S. adversary in a proxy war with Ukraine. And who suffers for that? Not just Ukrainians whose homes are being destroyed, whose home is being invaded, whose country is being flooded with billions and billions of dollars of weapons, which by the way, the U.S. admits that it has no idea where those weapons are going once they cross the Polish-Ukraine border.
So it’s not good for Ukrainians. Their country is being turned into a hellscape. It’s not good for Russians. They’ve been cut off from the Western world. . . . It’s not good for the rest of the world because I’m sure you’ve seen here the food crisis and the gas crisis. Those are connected. The oil crisis fades into the fertilizer crisis. We’re cutting off the world from Russian oil at U.S. orders because we want to harm the Russian economy. Well that increases the gas price for people all around the world. It’s why the Biden administration has tried to sell it by calling it the Putin price hike. But that’s very misleading. The price hike is because the U.S. ordered Europe and all those countries around the world to cease trading with Russia. Now, some countries aren’t doing that because they understand that their self-interest lies above the interest of U.S. empire. But in many parts of the world, we’re seeing a loss of their grain exports. A loss of their oil from Russia and/or Ukraine. They’re going to suffer. Europeans are going to be suffering. Americans are going to be suffering.
If anyone cares about the American people, if anyone cares about the Ukrainian people, if anyone cares about global stability, they would oppose this $40 billion aid package. And they would urge the Biden administration to enter into negotiations with Russia, to encourage, Zelenskyy regarding negotiations with Russia, to change this policy of infinite escalation in order to fuel this proxy war that’s just bad policy. And in 20 years, we’re going to be wondering why Eastern Europe has all these right-wing militias running around and why they have javelins and stingers and all of these, heavy artillery weapons. We can see the building blocks of disaster in Ukraine and this $40 billion aid package seems to be the largest escalation in that disaster.
Santita Jackson:When you say the building blocks of disaster, what do you mean? I mean, how could this $40 billion aid package, delivered to them by the votes of our Congress, American monies, be harmful to Ukraine?
Bryce Green: So the thinking in a lot of American circles is that Ukraine needs more weapons so they can repel this Russian attack. Russia will be defeated and have to withdraw. Ukraine will not have to give up Crimea . . . [and] the Donbass region . . . But what this ignores is that if there are more weapons flooded in instead of peace and negotiations, that will only escalate the war that will only intensify the fighting. That will only encourage Russia to step up this attack. Even the New York Times admits that Russia has been largely subdued; they’ve been restrained in their attack . . . they haven’t destroyed infrastructure all around the country. They haven’t destroyed electricity. They haven’t destroyed water treatment and things like that, [which] by the way [is what] the U.S. did in its invasion of Iraq . . . Sending in more weapons will run the risk of intensifying the fighting, will run the risk of more destruction, more death, more demolitions of cities. And does anyone want that? Anyone who cares about the Ukrainian people would want to negotiate settlement first and foremost, but no one, no one is talking about that. The only people who I hear talking about that are on the far right. I’ve heard Marjorie Green talk about it and she’s insane. She is not our friend.
Santita Jackson: Why is it that these people are the only ones talking about a rational solution? I’m listening to Rand Paul and saying, you’re right! But the people with whom I’m allied with are about everything else. I’m like, where are you? To me . . . matters of war and peace are trans-partisan. . . I will support my country and engage in love and critiques. . . . Reverend Jackson led the biggest march in the world in 2003 against the Iraq invasion in Hyde Park. It wasn’t an anti-U.S. speech. It was ‘don’t do this.’ So my question is why is it that these 57 Republicans voted against giving this money to Ukraine? Why is it that the conservative Republicans are . . . over here saying we shouldn’t be over there doing this and Democrats, including the progressives, are saying you need $40 billion more. . . I mean, you have the president today who slipped for the third time and said, we will involve ourselves militarily with Taiwan against China. There are more Chinese people in the world than anybody. They’re not going to run out of people to put in their military. I’m like, are you crazy? Most of us are too fat to be in the military. In the United States we can’t even pass the physical . . . We can’t even get COVID relief through. If we don’t get COVID relief through, people who signed up for healthcare on the ACA exchange are going to see a spike of, in some cases, 53% in their premiums for healthcare. I can’t afford that. So why is it that the Republicans are lining up with me on a same proposition and Democrats, including progressives, are supporting this war effort. They’re not demanding, Okay, I need strings attached to this $40 billion. Okay. I get it. That’s politics. But what I need you to do is to outline the pathway to peace. . .
Bryce Green: Republicans are not truly antiwar. [It’s] really rhetoric. Trump did very little to stop the military complex. He did get us out of Afghanistan. Good. But he almost started several wars elsewhere. In this case, now that Biden is president, it seems that Republicans are trying to score an easy point by criticizing him on something that he is doing very wrong. Now, if they were the party in power, I don’t know if they’d be behaving any differently, but it seems like they’re full of opportunities without any principled objection to Biden’s hand because they’re not going to pass bills helping people cope with disease, they don’t care about baby formulas, they don’t care about most of the people in America. The Democrats, I suspect they’ve been taken over by the same fever that’s taken over America. They believe that this war for Ukraine is a righteous war that America is getting involved in because it’s against our own democracy. That’s how it’s been sold by the administration. That’s how it’s been sold by the media. It’s easy for you decide as Russia has been the boogeyman ever since the story about Trump and Putin colluding in the election. . . . And so this war in Ukraine, it seems is tailor made to tug on liberal hearts, on ideas of America democracy in order to get their support for an aggressive policy against Russia. And so it doesn’t even seem like there’s questioning and thinking like, ‘Hey, maybe flooding weapons through an active war zone is not the best way to go to peace. . .’
Santita Jackson: Well, hold on . . . Gwendolyn [a caller] has a question. She said, ‘Does this [guest] recognize that Russia invaded Ukraine?’
Bryce Jackson: Yes. I’m very well aware that Russia invaded Ukraine. And if you would like this war to stop, the question should be, how can we best negotiate? The U.S. invaded countries all the time. [Nothing] exceptional has happened on the world stage. . . The U.S. has never been sanctioned by the rest of the world. The U.S. has never been cut out from the world market. And in this case, the invasion of Ukraine has historical roots. I recommend that you guys read my article from January. It discussed what you really need to know about Ukraine. And it goes into this history about how the US has tried to force Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence through the overthrowing of the government in 2014, through pouring money into the country in order to change its politics. Billions and billions of dollars have been invested in changing Ukraine. And even the U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 2008 recognized that if we continued our policy in Ukraine, the country might start a civil war and Russia will be forced to intervene. And this is exactly what happened. We overthrow the government in 2014, there was a civil war . . . And it is only now that, as the U.S. has increased their involvement in the Ukraine, that Russia actually invades. . . But there are many chances along the way where we could have altered our policy and tried to negotiate with Russia . . . That could have prevented this invasion.
Santita Jackson: Well, we’re going to continue to have this conversation because look, I want peace. I’m trying to figure out how it is that we can get bombs to Ukraine, but we can’t get bottles to our babies. You have four companies that control 90% or just about that, of the formula supply in the United States. That’s the debate I want. That’s the discussion I want to have today. We don’t have endless supplies of money and we don’t have endless supplies of goodwill. We can’t, we can’t continue on like this. And if we follow President Zelenskyy, he said, you got to negotiate your way into peace. That’s the only way we’re going to get there. Think about it. . . .
