15 September 2024, by Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
UPDATE #4 (to my September 13th “Biden might decide today whether to initiate WW3 against Russia.”):
On September 14th, Britain’s Financial Times headlined “Biden indicates shift in Ukraine’s deployment of Storm Shadow missiles: Washington had feared that using weapons risked escalating conflict with Russia”, and reported:
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer left Washington after talks with President Joe Biden on Friday amid signs the US may be prepared to shift its position on the use of long-range missiles by Ukraine in the coming days.
Although the meeting between the two leaders ended without an announcement, there were indications that Biden might be willing to let the UK and France allow Ukraine to use their Storm Shadow missiles, which rely on American navigational data and other technology.
Also on September 14th, Russia’s RT News headlined “Russia warns NATO of ‘direct war’ over Ukraine”, and reported:
Granting Kiev permission to use Western-supplied long-range weapons would constitute direct involvement in the Ukraine conflict by NATO, Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has said.
Moscow will treat any such attack as coming from the US and its allies directly, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, explaining that long-range weapons rely on Western intelligence and targeting solutions, neither of which Ukraine is capable of.
NATO countries would “start an open war” with Russia if they allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons, Nebenzia told the UN Security Council on Friday.
“If such a decision is made, that means NATO countries are starting an open war against Russia,” Moscow’s envoy said. “In that case, we will obviously be forced to make certain decisions, with all the attendant consequences for Western aggressors.”
Read more: Putin issues new warning to NATO
“Our Western colleagues will not be able to dodge responsibility and blame Kiev for everything,” Nebenzia added. “Only NATO troops can program the flight solutions for those missile systems. Ukraine doesn’t have that capability. This is not about allowing Kiev to strike Russia with long-range weapons, but about the West making the targeting decisions.”
Russia considers it irrelevant that Ukrainian nationalists would technically be the ones pulling the trigger, Nebenzia explained. “NATO would become directly involved in military action against a nuclear power. I don’t think I have to explain what consequences that would have,” he said.
As the FT had pointed out on the 14th, long-range missiles of both UK and France in Ukraine cannot function over Russian territory without relying on “American navigational data and other technology” (and especially upon their usage of U.S. military satellites for guidance) and, therefore, America’s President is the ultimate person to make this decision. As-of now, he has made the decision to continue refusing them permission for those missiles to be fired into Russia.
This means that both Macron of France and Starmer of UK want WW3 to start as soon as possible, but Biden does not.
On September 15th, Britain’s Independent headlined “Ed Davey joins calls to let Ukraine use Storm Shadow missiles in Russia: The Liberal Democrat leader joined a growing chorus calling for a shift in stance”. In other words: now the heads of all three UK political Parties are on record as unanimously wanting World War Three to start now, not later. That newspaper opened by saying, “Sir Ed Davey has said Ukraine should be allowed to use Western weapons to strike inside Russia, becoming the latest senior figure to urge a change of course from Sir Keir Starmer.” Its report ignored the fact that Biden had turned down that idea from Starmer. Why would a newspaper do this, other than to hide the fact that Starmer is actually powerless over this matter, and so to embarrass their country’s current head-of-state — i.e., for purely domestic political reasons? All of the mainstream ‘news’-media throughout the U.S. empire are keeping the public ignorant of what’s really happening, and of the fact that the world has never before been as near to a WW3 as it now is.
U.S. President Biden, and his intended successor Harris, and her political opponent Trump, have all been publicly silent on this crucial matter — that the world has never so close to a global nuclear war at it now is. World War Three would kill-off at least half of the human population within two years from the explosions, over 5 billion dead “at the end of year 2”. In the United States and throughout its empire (which the U.S. and its colonies insist upon further expanding to include also such countries as Russia, China, Iran again, Venezuela again, and North Korea), the contesting politicians and ‘news’-media are silent about this matter, as-if it weren’t even significant, at all. The public are to make their voting selections on the basis of an imposed-from-above blindness and deafness regarding the overriding political question in our time, which is:
I had proposed this question personally to ABC’s David Muir, the chief moderator at the Trump-Harris debate, prior to that debate, to ask of both candidates, but it was not asked; and, so, on this, the most critically important issue in our time and perhaps of all time, in this country that brags about being a ‘democracy’ and that calls all countries it wants to conquer (i.e., to “regime-change”) “authoritarian” or “dictatorial,” the most critically important public issue is instead being kept a secret from the voters, and the media throughout the U.S. empire are not discussing and debating it — not at all — at this critically important time. The voters are kept entirely “out of the loop” about it, in such ‘democracies’.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.