F-16s Bring War, Not Peace

 F-16s are not defensive weapons. Indeed, they exist to attack cities far from where the generals and colonels are drinking coffee and strutting about. They bring death and then more death. Giving them to a military drunk on its own glorification is akin to putting an alcoholic in the driver’s seat of a big pickup truck with a bottle of whiskey next to him and a tank full of gas. No matter what the stated promises of Kyiv are, the fact is giving these planes to its military is a drastic escalation of a conflict that would have most likely never have started if it weren’t for Washington’s endless meddling and provocation. Even if one believed that Kyiv was fighting a just war when the current round began in February 2022, denying that this is now a war between the NATO Axis and Russia requires some very intentional blindness to the facts. Unfortunately, that blindness is epidemic.

Originally designed and built by the General Dynamics corporation—a company whose only business is war ever since its development of the Gatling gun in the 19^th century, the planes are now produced only for foreign sale by the world’s biggest weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Although the US no longer purchases new F-16s, it continues to fly them in training missions, especially with the Air National Guard. Indeed, it was only after the Air National Guard base near Burlington, Vermont received several F-35s that the F-16s they previously used for training were moved elsewhere.

According to the defense industry website Defenseone.com, F-16 training specifically for foreign pilots usually takes place in Phoenix at Luke Air Force Base. However, the training for Ukrainians “will likely happen entirely in Europe.”(5/19/23) Of course, this doesn’t mean that some pilots might also be trained in the US. Nor does it mean that NATO pilots will not be flying these planes along with Ukrainians in country. Indeed, given the quick turnaround the war planners seem to be hoping for, the likelihood of joint NATO-Ukrainian teams does not seem far-fetched at all. Either way, this escalation increases the possibility of a greater war, with no guarantee of a victory for Kyiv. Despite the stories in the US media about Russia’s military incompetence, the truth of the matter is that Moscow has been able to answer every escalation by Kyiv./NATO. This is one reason why the war is stalemated. The fact that so many armchair warriors in the US (and European) media are cheering this escalation seems to illuminate that they do not know what they are talking about. However, it does show the effectiveness of the US propaganda machine in promoting war. Those columnists, reporters and talking heads who repeat the stories put out by the war machine’s propaganda wing are little more than Pentagon pawns. They are certainly not journalists in any genuine sense of the word.

Beyond the gifting of F-16s, there is also the ongoing increase in military aid to Kyiv by the United States. In what I can only consider to be a piece of accounting trickery akin to Donald Trump’s financial malfeasance inside his own companies, the Pentagon recently came up worth another $3 billion to provide weapons and ammo for Ukrainian forces. The story the Pentagon is telling the American people is that they overcharged for earlier shipments, writing down the munitions’ current value as opposed to the original purchase value. The actual facts are pretty much irrelevant, given that the war machine never seems to suffer no matter how the US economy is doing. This extra three billion means that US taxpayers will have given Kyiv an average of over $93 million dollars a day since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Not only has this money been provided with barely a peep of dissent in Congress (and that from right-wingers whose true motives are always questionable), but with an almost complete shutdown of opposing voices in the public sphere. On a deeper note, this grotesque spending on war while budget cuts for health care, food assistance, veterans services and education are being considered prove that Washington’s dependence on the war industry is like that of an opiate addict shooting up on the back streets of Manhattan or any other inner city. Neither even knows how strung out they really are.

Regarding that almost universal stifling of dissenting voices in the US, ever since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, those who oppose it have been labeled as tools of Putin. This charge is almost always a lie. It is is the modern equivalent of red-baiting. In reality, most people who oppose the war also oppose Russia's invasion. This is reminiscent of the nonsense people pulled on antiwar voices when we opposed the war in Vietnam, the US wars in Central America and the wars in Iraq. We are not tools of Putin, but comrades of those around the world who oppose the war—from Russia to Ukraine to Berlin to China and beyond. If anyone is a dupe of one of the warring powers, it would be those who echo the words of Washington, Brussels, Bonn, London and Kyiv as those capitols bring us closer to the threat of a much larger European war.