US Supplies Cluster Bombs To Ukraine, WMD To Follow

The US is to supply cluster bombs to Ukraine, despite them being banned by more than 100 countries, and despite the US describing their previous use by Russia as a war crime, though its used them itself, as has Ukraine. The war is following its own inevitable reactionary logic, as all such wars do, as Trotsky described in relation to the Balkan Wars, and in relation to Czechoslovakia prior to WWII, and it is sucking the social-imperialist “Left” down into the maelstrom with it.

Two significant things happened, in the last couple of days, that tell us a lot about the thinking of US imperialism, and its NATO front organisation. The first was the announcement that Ukraine's membership of NATO is to be fast-tracked, despite its current policy that no countries engaged in a war can be admitted, because that would mean that NATO itself, under its Article 5, would be bound to engage directly in the fighting. That confirms what was disclosed in the leaked US Defence Department papers that the US and NATO does not see any possibility of Ukraine making any significant headway in retaking Eastern and South-EasternUkraine in the next year.

What is the significance of this? Firstly, its an indication that, despite all of the western propaganda, NATO realises that Ukraine has already effectively lost the real war. That is the war of Russia to annex, the majority Russian areas of Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine, and not the fake war that NATO and the western media have tried to describe, of an attempt by Russia to occupy the whole of Ukraine, which it could not do. What it signifies is that, so long as Russia simply hardens its defences, and consolidates its position in those annexed regions, Ukraine/NATO has lost, because Ukraine does not have the forces and weapons to retake them in what would then be an offensive war, i.e. the much vaunted counter-offensive. NATO/Ukraine needs Russia to engage in the fake war of its propaganda, to occupy all of Ukraine, for that not to be true, but there is no reason Russia would do that, unless NATO can goad it into it, in the same way that former NATO Secretary General, George Robertson admitted they had goaded it into invading Ukraine in the first place.

By publicly declaring that NATO might fast-track Ukraine's membership, its a means of trying to goad Russia into an ill-advised invasion into the rest of Ukraine, in which Ukraine/NATO would have the 3:1 defender's advantage, and the Russian military would be annihilated, opening the door for the much planned and discussed palace coup to replace Putin, which NATO hopes would enable it to put its own stooge in place, but would more likely lead to someone even further to the Right, and more nationalistic than Putin taking over, or else a greater involvement of China in Russia, its important strategic neighbour, and with which it has plans to create a Eurasian politico-economic/strategic bloc. The thinking is that, if Russia thinks that Ukraine might become a NATO member in a matter of months, it will be forced into launching a hasty offensive to pre-empt it, to avoid it facing continued war with a NATO member, and its implications under Article 5, i.e. immediate all-out war with NATO, which means World War III. Its what Britain's top soldier was talking about, some months ago, when he warned UK armed forces families to prepare for their kids to go and fight and die in Ukraine.

As Trotsky wrote, in similar conditions, prior to WWII, when some social-imperialists were talking about defending Czechoslovakia against Germany, on the basis of defending its national independence, and national self-determination,

“It is impermissible to consider a war between Czechoslovakia and Germany, even if other imperialist states were not immediately involved, outside of that entanglement of European and world imperialist relations from which the war might have broken out as an episode. A month or two later the Czech-German war – if the Czech bourgeoisie could fight and wanted to fight – would almost inevitably have involved other states. It would therefore be the greatest mistake for a Marxist to define his position on the basis of temporary conjunctural diplomatic and military groupings, rather than on the basis of the general character of the social forces standing behind the war.”

As Trotsky says, wars have their own dynamic. Marxists understand that dialectic, but the dialectic used by petty-bourgeois moral socialists, is neither that of Hegel, nor that of Marx. It is, as Marx describes in The Poverty of Philosophy, describing its use by Proudhon, the moral dialectic of Kant. As Marx describes the dialectic of Hegel, and his own materialist dialectic is amoral, it has no favoured outcome, but in both cases is an analysis and description of the unfolding process of the resolution of contradictions, of The Idea, for Hegel, of the real world, for Marx. But, for Proudhon, and all other moral socialists, the dialectic amounts to identifying the “good” and the “bad” sides of phenomena, and seeking to promote the good (conservative) side, and removing the bad (revolutionary) side.

This means accepting the need to support a “lesser-evil” to defeat a greater evil, with the task of then dealing with the new contradictions resulting from that later. Its why the moral socialists always seek to have cake and eat it, by supporting or not opposing the “lesser-evil”, whilst washing their hands, like Pontius Pilate, of the inevitable “evil” consequences of the actions of that “lesser-evil”, as though the two can ever be separated. Trotsky had described that mentality in relation to the Balkan Wars, and the way the Second Balkan War, in which the allies of the first turned on each other, flowed inevitably from the First Balkan War, and the real basis on which it was fought.

“If you don't see the link between today's disgrace and yesterday's 'glory', that's because you imagine that in the Balkans somebody is conducting a policy and answering for its reasonableness. In actual fact, policy is making itself down there, just like an earthquake. It was precisely the first war, the 'war of liberation' that reduced to insignificance, to a negligible quantity, all the factors of calculation and political discretion. Blind, unthinking spontaneity came into its own – not the benign spontaneity of awakened mass solidarity, which already has so many good deeds to its credit in history, but malign spontaneity, the resoluteness of which is only the other side of blind despair.”

(Trotsky, The Balkan Wars,p 327)

The second thing that happened in the last couple of days is this announcement by the US that it would be supplying Ukraine with these illegal cluster bombs. What does this tell us. It is again an admission that, despite all the propaganda, NATO recognises that Ukraine has lost the real war, i.e. the war to annex Eastern and South-Eastern Ukraine, symbolised by its failure to first launch the much vaunted counter-offensive, and, then, when it did, for it to be a damp squib, in which its lost thousands of troops, and dozens of the newly supplied, high-tech NATO tanks and so on.

The cluster bombs are intended to be used to clear the many mine fields that are just one of the barriers to Ukrainian troops engaging in any kind of effective assault. The cluster bombs are intended to be used to clear large areas at a go of mines. There are two problems with that, to deploy them requires aircraft to drop the bombs, aircraft of which Ukraine is in short supply, and secondly, to get into a position where the bombs can be dropped opens those attacking aircraft up to being taken out by Russian aircraft, or Surface to Air Missiles (SAM's). The second problem is that the cluster bombs themselves are not reliable. Around 6% do not immediately explode. That is six bombs for every cluster dropped, which would mean that attacking troops could also be taken out by these unexploded munitions rather than the mines they were intended to destroy.

Birth Defects Caused By Depleted
Uranium 

Of course, one reason that they are banned under international law – though as with much international law the US is not a signatory to it – is that these unexploded bombs are a danger to civilians, including children. The apologists for US imperialism/NATO/Ukraine argue that, its okay because they will be dropped on Ukrainian soil, and so it is Ukrainians and Zelensky that will have to own the responsibility for it! Of course, it will not be Zelensky or other members of the corrupt Ukrainian regime, or its oligarchic ruling class that will be losing life and limbs from it, but unfortunate Ukrainian civilians, men, women and children, just as it has been such civilians elsewhere that have suffered from the consequences of NATO's use of depleted uranium munitions.

But, of course, what that really means is that, as with the Ukrainian military firing HIMAR missiles at the Nova Khakovka Dam, NATO's blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines, and the attempts by Ukraine to blow up the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, and blame Russia for it, this is a scorched earth program by Ukraine and NATO, which again recognises that it has lost the real war in Eastern Ukraine. Saying its Ukrainian soil, is a bit of sophistry for propaganda purposes, but, the reality is that its currently Russian soil, and likely to remain so, and consequently its ethnic Russians, and remaining Ukrainians in those areas that will suffer from the flooding caused by the destruction of the dam, the lack of water and power, and so on. The provision of cluster bombs is an inevitable aspect of that policy. Its similar to the provision of chemical and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, by US imperialism, and its NATO allies, to fight Iran, in the Iran-Iraq War, which was another proxy war fought by US imperialism, using an entire population as its human battering ram to further its global strategic aims.

The provision of WMD to Saddam by the US, and its NATO allies was based on the fact that it was losing against Iran, just as, today, Ukraine has lost the real war in Eastern Ukraine. The social-imperialists have demanded that Ukraine be given the weapons required to win, but that inevitably means that it has to be provided with ever more destructive and indiscriminate weapons, just as happened with the Iran-Iraq War. As Ukraine inevitably continues to make little headway in the annexed regions, the logic of the social-imperialists argument is to defend the supply of cluster munitions, and, next to argue for the supply of WMD to Ukraine, up to and including tactical nukes, as the proxy war moves ever closer to World War III. As Trotsky put it presciently in relation to The Balkan Wars, and the role of liberal interventionism, as the prelude to WWI,

“But the majority of politicians, while quite properly refusing the Great Powers the right to make any claims on the Balkans, desire at the same time that Russia should help, arms in hand, the Balkan peoples to reorganise the Balkans as these leading political personalities would like the Balkans to be. This hope, or this demand, may become the source of great mistakes and great misfortunes. I say nothing about the fact that this approach to the question transforms the Balkan War into a conscious provocation to a measuring of strength on the all-European scale, which can mean nothing short of a European War. And, however dear to us the fate of the young Balkan peoples, however warmly we wish for them the best possible development of cultured existence on their own soil, there is one thing we must tell them plainly and honestly, as we must tell ourselves: We do not want, and we are unable to put our own cultural development at risk. Bismark once said that the whole Balkan Peninsula was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. We too can say today: If the leading parties of the Balkans, after all their sad experience of European intervention, can see no other way of settling the fate of the Balkans but a fresh European intervention, the results of which no one can foreordain, then their political plans are indeed not worth the bones of a single infantryman from Kursk. That may sound harsh, but it is the only way that this tragic question can be seen by any honest democratic politician who thinks not only of today but also of tomorrow.”

(Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, p 153-4)