The extraordinary Seymour Hersh, now 86 and still more worth reading than the entire output of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Time, Newsweek, and the farcical PBS news coverage combined, has just released another enormous scoop on his personal sub stack. It appeared there, of course, because none of our Wonderful, Fearless, Proud, Independent and Brave, Globally Revered News Media dared to touch it.
Hersh cites a US intelligence official as telling him that the recent vague, US-planned and directed two-day international peace summit on Ukraine in Saudi Arabia – which in reality turned out to be a mortal humiliation for the United States – had been planned by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who attended it, as a crushing humiliation and diplomatic annihilation for Russia after the most recent Ukrainian “counter-offensive” had destroyed what was left of the Russian army.
“Jeddah was Sullivan’s baby,” the official told Hersh. “He planned it to be Biden’s equivalent of [President Woodrow] Wilson’s Versailles. The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election.”
As if all this was not bizarre enough, the official told Hersh, “The jewel in the crown was to be [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive. They were even planning a Nuremberg type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more fuck-up, but who is counting?”
It is easy to see why the US and British media collectively ignored any hint of this context for the Jeddah ‘Peace’ Summit. For the Ukrainian counter-offensive, as we and many others have observed, documented and analyzed turned out to be a catastrophe for the Kiev regime and the Ukrainian people.
At least 50% of the attacking Ukrainian forces so far have been killed, seriously wounded or are otherwise missing in action. Multiple thousands more Ukrainians have had their limbs blown off.
New solid evidence indicates the Ukrainian authorities in reality are planning to bury hundreds of thousands more combat dead.
On Tuesday, August 15, US military analyst, former outstanding armor combat commander and leading military tactician Colonel Douglas Macgregor updated his estimate of total Ukrainian combat dead to at least 400,000.
And the Intel Republic source reported new satellite images showing at one Ukrainian cemetery alone – Matveevskoye in Zaporozhye, in Kiev-held Eastern Ukraine – 104,000 square meters more grave space has been dug. In seven more state cemeteries, there are already 123,000 fresh graves. Officially, Zelenskyy’s regime, backed by the United States and NATO acknowledges only 2%, or one fiftieth of that potential death toll.
In these columns, on April 15, 2023, I compared the loudly promised Zelenskyy-regime’s “counter-offensive” would prove to be a repeat of the 1916 Battle of the Somme – in which half a million British young men died for nothing – close to the banks of the River Dnieper.
In far less time than even I feared that nightmarish vision has been totally fulfilled.
As former CIA analyst and noted blogger Larry C. Johnson has rightly noted, total Ukrainian war dead in a year and a half is now as great as total US war dead through the four years of World War II.
Yet the population of the United States during World War II was over 130 million. Even before the current hostilities began on February 24, 2022, Ukraine’s total population was only 20 million, down from its thriving 50 million when it became independent of Russia at the end of 1991.
The horrific annihilation that the Biden administration and its supine allies, especially in Britain’s Conservative government, have brought on the innocent Ukrainian people in the past year and half is more terrible than anything the peoples of Europe have suffered since the days of Hitler and Stalin. Yet in the long run, the amazing idiocy and blindness of Jake Sullivan and his fellow masterminds in the Biden administration may be even more disastrous and frightening.
For how could Sullivan and his colleagues possibly have imagined that the “spring counter-offensive” by the latest desperate scrapings at the bottom of Ukraine’s demographic barrel could possibly smash the Russian army? Or even scratch it? Who told them this? What military advice were they listening to?
Could this really have been approved by the top commanders of the US Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
Are we back in the days when Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and his 1,500 handpicked “analysts” totally failed to anticipate Iraqi popular revolt against US occupation and did not have a clue for years how to stop the needless destruction of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, blowing the limbs of thousands of American soldiers with old fashioned low tech anti-personnel mines – grandly retitled by Feith’s analysts as IEDs – Improvised Explosive Devices.
At age 86, Sy Hersh, who revealed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam all those years ago when no-one else had the guts to do it, has opened up another can of stinking worms.
Hersh has revealed that the top policymakers of the Biden administration are so stupid, so arrogant, so ridiculously blind and incompetent that they cannot see what is in front of their own eyes. They have led close to half a million young Ukrainians to destruction and maiming in a battle, an offensive and a war that could never have been won and should never have been fought.
Yet like all the Fools so vividly described in the Bible’s Book of Proverbs, Sullivan, and his colleagues remain in their own imaginations wise above all others. And that is never going to change: No matter how many more innocents have to die.
Reprinted with the author’s permission from NewKontinentUSA.
Martin Sieff is the former Chief Foreign Correspondent of The Washington Times and former Managing Editor, International Affairs and Chief News Analyst for United Press International. He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for International Reporting and so far has published seven books on current affairs and history. Sieff is currently a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow and has been for more than a decade a regular op-ed contributor to the China Daily, one the largest circulation news platforms and newspapers in the world.. He is the author of several books.
