"The Komodo Dragon of Foggy Bottom"
Goodbye and good riddance to Victoria Nuland
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - "So long Toria! And good riddance. We watched part of the State of the Union address last night. Mr. Biden is a professional politician – with more than 50 years of campaigning experience. Last night, he sounded like what he is…a pro who has gotten old.
Even with the teleprompter in front of him, some things he said didn’t make sense. He was describing his success with the American Rescue Plan, for example, but then said that “every American voted against it.” And some things were just typically dishonest. His administration provided the weapons and approved the massacre in Gaza. Now, he and Vice President Harris are attempting to put themselves on the side of the angels, as defenders of Palestinian lives. Biden began his speech, to a cheering, jackass crowd in a Joint Session of Congress, with an opening line: “If I were smart, I’d go home now.” He was right; he’s not smart enough to do it.
Blood and Misery: Today, we write about people who are smarter…more cunning…and more dangerous than Biden himself…the people who actually run the government. Victoria Nuland was in the news this week; she fell off the ‘glass cliff’ at the State Department. She will probably go to work at some other arm of the Deep State. A think tank most likely. One financed by the ‘defense suppliers’ undoubtedly.
Ms. Nuland is the wife of Robert Kagan. The two are a ‘neo-con power couple’…a pair of big-shot meddlers…spilling treasure, blood and misery wherever they go. And doing it in the name of (what else?) democracy. Ms. Nuland was a foreign policy wonk…and later…advisor to the Clintons…the Bush team…Obama and Biden. The only recent president she didn’t advise was Trump, largely because her husband had made such a public display of disgust with The Donald that his wife was persona non grata.
The problem for Mr. Kagan was that Trump was insufficiently bloodthirsty; he threw his support to the more reliable warmonger, Hillary Clinton. Not that it mattered. Republicans, Democrats…teeters and totters…it didn’t make any difference to Kagan or his wife. Ms. Nuland is a pro, too. Whomever the people elected, it was she who was large and in charge. Swamp Critters ruled; and she was the komodo dragon of Foggy Bottom. Besides, the new president wouldn’t know Donetsk from donuts. Ms. Nuland would guide him.
Like Hunter Biden, Toria had a special regard for the Ukraine. Her family was from there. She spoke Russian and had studied Tolstoi, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky in college. Mostly she had a special affinity – like Madeleine Albright, in whose dreadful footsteps she trod – for the firepower industry, which she and her husband saw as the source of their wealth, power, status…and a better world for everyone.
Professional Warmongers: Some people like war. Old Testament relics, God must speak to them directly. He tells them they can get away with murder…in His name. Robert Kagan argued, just before the invasion of Iraq, that fighting was just part of the US character and its tradition. Unlike the French and Germans, whose diplomatic solutions he despised, “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus,” he wrote.
Every society must have its retards and psychopaths. The real goal of a decent government is to keep them away from power. Instead, in today’s USA, they are invited in. Then, like a gambler in charge of the church treasury, it is just a matter of time until the money disappears.
Ms. Nuland led a privileged life. She went to the very private school, Choate, where the current tuition in $67,000, including room and board, we presume. From there, she entered Brown University and then slipped easily into America’s foreign policy community.
Her career as a shill for the firepower industry probably began in the 1990s, when she worked with Strobe Talbot in the Clinton Administration. Strobe, like Nuland, went to a private school in Connecticut, then to Yale and became a ‘Russia expert.’ (Coincidentally, he was at Oxford – along with Robert Reich, Bill Clinton and our old friend, Jim Davidson…from whom we gained many useful insights). In 1999, voters asked for a change…something new; they picked George W. Bush over Clinton VP Al Gore. Bush promised a more ‘modest’ foreign policy. But what voters got was more of Ms. Nuland.
There are only two key issues in government – how it raises and spends its money…and against whom it goes to war. Everything else is a footnote. But on the two important issues, American voters have almost no say. Foreign policy is determined by the Foreign Policy Establishment, working hand in glove with the rest of the firepower industry’s shills and toadies – the press, the universities, Congress, and the bureaucracy.
Toria’s Agenda: Ms. Nuland had been on the job with the Bush team for only a few months when the 9/11 twin towers got blown up. What luck! This afforded a great opportunity for the warmongers to strut their stuff. The firepower industry had weapons galore. And as Madame Albright had said, what good were they if we couldn’t use them?
But use them on whom? The 9/11 attackers were all dead. Their alleged accomplices were being rounded up…for torture sessions. Where was a worthy enemy? Ms. Nuland was on the case. She, her husband, and her brother-in-law helped steer the Bush team into America’s first and biggest-debacle of the 21st century, its attack on Iraq.
Everybody now knows that the whole war was based on a lie…and was a complete disaster. So, you’d think that a mistake like that – $2.5 trillion down the drain…1 million dead – would set your career back. In Ancient Greece, those who proposed wars…that turned out badly…were executed. Unsuccessful Roman commanders, with a sense of dignity, “fell upon their swords.’ More recently, failed Japanese generals committed suicide in a gruesome ritual…taking our their own intestines until they bled to death.
But in America’s Deep State a failed leader can expect a promotion. Soon, Ms. Nuland was advising Barack Obama. Obama didn’t want to get the US embroiled in a war with Russia. But that was exactly what was on Toria’s agenda. She had a hand in the Maidan revolution – replacing the Ukraine’s elected leader with hacks who were friendlier to the US. She then blocked efforts at diplomacy, putting Vladimir Putin in a corner. The result was war.
But now, after an ill-advised summer offensive promoted by the US “we” are losing that war too. And the deeper Deep State of the Foreign Policy Establishment is tossing Nuland off the cliff. Most likely, they want to get her out of the way so they can settle with Russia…and move on to their next debacle. Whatever the actual cause of her departure, it is a relief to get her off the federal payroll. Stoning would be better. But we take what we can get."
