Dear Editor,
With no end in sight, the Russia-Ukraine war has cost South Carolina taxpayers, and the 160 million other taxpaying Americans, about $100 billion.
You certainly would have no difficulty in tracing the transfer of funds from your bank accounts—coming to about $625 for each taxpayer. Just follow the wet drops of blood to the Military Industrial Complex’s front-porch mansion mats. (As a Lockheed Martin and RTX board member, Nikki Haley may have a couple glistening red drops on her welcome mat, as well.)
And if you think Vladimir Putin is the sole target of due blame for the Russia-Ukraine war, think again.
After her self-righteously hammed-up departure during the Trump years, Victoria Nuland returned to the State Department in 2021 as undersecretary of state for political affairs. In 2023, she was named acting deputy secretary of state.
Ms. Nuland’s foreign-service career spans over three decades, having served in virtually every presidential administration since Bill Clinton’s. Notably, Ms. Nuland steered Vice President Dick Cheney’s international agenda from 2003 to 2005, acting as his chief foreign-policy advisor. The United States, of course, invaded Iraq in March 2003 on the concocted grounds that its President, Saddam Hussein, possessed a potentially devastating inventory of chemical weapons.
The Iraq War that Ms. Nuland influenced spanned eight years. It cost three quarters of a trillion dollars, nearly 4,500 American servicemen were killed, and over 32,000 were wounded. On the Iraqi side, 200,000 perished. Now 2024, against the wishes of the Iraqi government and a majority of the population, the United States continues its increasingly tense occupation there.
In one form or another, Victoria Nuland has dipped her fingers in multiple calamitous foreign blunders, including 2011’s brutal removal of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and America’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Prior to Gaddafi’s death, Libya arguably enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa. Now, according to Libyans urgently fleeing in boats across the Mediterranean, life there is “hell.” In Afghanistan, too, following the United States’ sudden withdrawal in 2021, during which Afghanis desperately embraced the wings of evacuating military planes, the Taliban immediately assumed governmental control and instituted Sharia law, whose criminal punishments include amputation and stoning.
More recently, seemingly seeking the glory of a coup d’état that was singularly her own, Ms. Nuland in 2014 orchestrated the removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych.
Ms. Nuland took advantage of widespread Ukrainian protests on the heels of President Yanukovych’s rejection of a comprehensive association agreement with the European Union, choosing instead to pursue an economically beneficial bond with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Antagonistic to this relationship, Ms. Nuland allied with fanatical nationalists and neo-Nazis to topple the Yanukovych regime and install her own hand-chosen, anti-Moscow president, Arseniy Yatsenyuk. She apparently gave little thought to the agendas of these groups with whom she collaborated, who sought a eugenically pure Ukraine, devoid of the east and south’s ethnic Russians.
Despite President Yanukovych’s attempt to quell the Nuland-stoked uprising by agreeing to a hastened presidential election and interim reforms, neo-Nazis overtook government offices and compelled Mr. Yanukovych to flee, in avoidance of the grisly fates that befell previous leaders in the Nuland sphere of dethronements.
Ms. Nuland successfully installed her Ukrainian puppet-president, who would compliantly enact the neoconservative program inimical to all things Putin; consequently, Ukraine’s economy plummeted, unemployment skyrocketed, and civil war erupted in the east, with persistent fighting in the Donbas region between Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military. This prolonged conflict’s bloody escalation finally prompted Russia’s concentrated intervention in 2020.
Victoria Nuland certainly does not stand alone in her hubristic interventionist exploits. The State Department has a long line of jingoists who joyfully set out to upend regimes. They feign solicitude for oppressed foreign citizenry and pose as democracy’s gladiators opposing tyrants. Most recently, we have seen Hillary Clinton, Mike Pompeo, and Antony Blinken at the messianic helm, each with their own distinctive bloodbaths and societal annihilations about which to gloat.
Victoria Nuland’s monomaniacal chutzpah looms above an estimated half million dead Ukrainians and Russians. But Ms. Nuland is merely one virulent cell of the neoconservative malignancy. Is it not time, South Carolina, to cut the cancer out of D.C.?
