Nikki Haley may need to find another war to run on (There’s always Gaza!) to keep her Military Industrial Complex (MIC) Campaign Cash Flowing. Ukraine is losing, Russia is winning, and the only players who don’t want Peace are in NATO. But Peace is in the Air, and it’s been a bad week for the MIC.
Ukraine lost the “strategically paramount, fortified city of Avdiivka,” after which Russia launched an unstoppable border-wide offensive. Two days ago, the CIA used the New York Times to burn all of its “secret” assets in Ukraine, and today, we learn that Russia and Ukraine were both in Saudi Arabia in immediate succession in hopes that the Saudis can negotiate Peace.
This morning, the Jerusalem Post covered the fast-moving story headlined, “Ukraine’s Zelensky holds talks with Saudi prince to push for peace plan with Russia.”
Peace plan! According to the article, on Tuesday Zelensky and a team of Ukrainian support staff went to Saudi Arabia to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and a whole lot of other Saudis.
The Saudis gave Zelensky the royal treatment. Literally, in this case. The day before, on Monday, the Saudis coincidentally hosted a delegation of Russian officials.
The timeline suggests there would have been just enough time to put the two meetings together if the Ukrainians started working on it late last week, either after the New York Times story broke on Wednesday or possibly right after CIA Director Burns’ visit. Either way, the Ukrainians are now seeking a peace deal from the Russians through one of its closest allies and new BRICS member, Saudi Arabia.
Not Peace through strength or Peace through war but Peace through … Peace. Zelensky likely sent his opening terms – which means a bunch of things he knows he won’t get, a few he likely can – last week after losing Avdiivka the previous week (and does this make him a Putin apologist?). Russia is all over his eastern front, and giving 61 billion to US arms manufacturers in the name of Ukraine isn’t going to help anyone but Defense contractors, not that the US doesn’t need to restock the sorts of things a nation might toss downrange in a conflict (but we have a budget/appropriations process for that and it’s one of the few Congress actually got done).
Feel free to speculate on the cascade of failures, but the CIA one is the most interesting.
First, longtime CIA watcher Mike Benz agreed with me that the 34-page Times’ article was an obvious CIA plant, but one paragraph convinced him the disclosure was actually just an effort to pressure Congress to pass the $61 billion Ukraine aid package by selling what terrific work the CIA was doing in Ukraine and how it needs funding to continue.
I disagree with Mike for four reasons.
One: the CIA could have much more easily assigned an attractive analyst with a compelling pair of visual aids to directly persuade Speaker Johnson (and anyone else in Congress) in a classified briefing without burning its network; it does that kind of thing all the time. Second, the CIA, like cockroaches, never do their scurrying out in the open. The network is useless to the CIA now its cover is blown, so there is no longer any need for CIA funds. Third, Ukrainian officials seemed deeply upset by the disclosures, rather than salivating over chances for a new plane-load of cash pallets. Fourth, though the reporters tried to squeeze the disclosures into a strappy dress, they wound up looking more like a balding, middle-aged, trans NATO general trying to pull off a tight skirt look.
Childers further posits with prompting from a reader that even the CIA might be afraid they can’t stop Trump, and it’s time to bury all the bodies before there’s something for which there’s no plausible deniability. But there’s still a lot of Joe and Hunter Biden stink and plenty of Obama’s, too (Joe was his point man in Ukraine). His people were there, did things, as things, hid things, tried to impeach Trump for asking about them (and succeeded), and then pushed the NATO thing that started the war.
They must have had a lot to hide besides secret Biolabs and secret CIA infrastructure (like the massive laundromat for taxdollars that became war funding). If Peace comes, expect the uniparty to try to launder recovery dollars through Ukraine to keep the train rolling until the last possible moment. Elections, after all, can be stolen. And if you did it once, you can do it again, though not in Delaware. A judge just struck “down a law allowing early voting and unlimited mail-in voting because those things were barred by the plain language of the state’s constitution.”
If judges in a few more states can find their constitutions before November, who knows what the CIA might have to consider.
