https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/walking-the-precipice

Diverse European voices are desperately warning that with the Ukraine project spiralling towards débacle, a humiliated West is left with little choice but to escalate drastically, and bring NATO -- in some form, whether limited or not -- into the fight.

The former British (Conservative) MP Andrew Bridgen states that this strategic shift (whose speed caught the Europeans unawares), is forcing Europe to face war with Russia.

In fact, Bridgen warns: ‘We (Britain), are ‘already at war’ with Russia. This is the real reason, he explains, why Rishi Sunak has called an early election -- he refuses to be a ‘war time president’. He is effectively handing over ‘the baton’ to Keir Starmer (probably to fly away to California after 4 July -- voting day). “The Generals” have warned Sunak that the order ‘had come down’ for war with Russia. And Sunak does not wish to be part of it.

Whether Bridgen is right or not on the specifics, there is undoubtedly a chorus out there saying the same thing. Is this cacophony of sudden war warnings merely that which (Matt Taibbi calls) an example of the ‘Elephant Erasure Project’? By which we are constantly being instructed not to see the elephants in the room.

And there are a lot of them: Open borders; plunging standards of living; high prices; runaway debt and dropping ratings for Biden. Add to that, the White House is continuing to arm the Israelis and green-light the Rafah military operation -- at the very moment that the ICJ has ordered destruction of lives stopped. A plain oxymoron.

Of course, Team Biden is ‘not for turning’ on its “ironclad” support for the Israelis, yet the only thing that is clear is that the war-warning is not necessarily literally true -- except in wanting to truly scare and divert us from the ‘Elephants’.

“The 'informing class' now no longer even has the decency to tell us who, or what they are”. When one reads ‘news’, we have no idea whether it is an off-grid White House ‘briefing’, or one of those aggressive releases of intelligence, telling us yet again that truly Russia is on the ropes, and about to collapse.

The NYT did warn what might be coming in their pages as “America sought to match Putin and 'beat the master' at his own information warfare game”. That formal Times launch of the “full-fledged information battle,” went so far as to have Jake Sullivan explaining that the problem with the [Iraqi] WMD episode was not that spreading an intelligence-concocted lie “from this very podium” was wrong, but that it was done for the wrong reasons, i.e. to start rather than stop a war:

So which is it? Is the narrative of being on the precipice of real war with Russia ‘deception’ designed to divert us from the herd of elephants grazing quietly for now, though with their presence likely to loom large as the election campaign reaches full-spate?

On the one hand, the very idea that Europe is equipped or capable to fight a real war is absurd. But equally, there are enough idiots around, hyped on delusions of long-past grandeur, to do something stupid. Interestingly, former British MP Andrew Bridgen implicitly acknowledges this risk, but adds that thank goodness it is Putin who stands on the other bank!

While on the other hand, everything in the West today revolves around the manipulation of narratives, and crafting the winning meme. The ‘other’ narrative to ‘coming war’ (according to Reuters) is that President Putin wants a Ukraine ceasefire ASAP -- and on current contact line frontlines -- because he is terrified at the prospect of having to launch a further mobilisation to finish the Special Operation.

This is pure disinformation, yet might it serve as the conjunct narrative to the fear narrative of the West resolving to walk the very edge of the precipice of war with Russia? And might this tight-rope policy be allowing the Biden Campaign to assert it is ‘winning’ in Ukraine; Putin is portrayed as trembling before the threat of war versus the Behemoth of the combined economic and military power of the West. A partial western Ukraine will indeed survive, according to this narrative, to become a future NATO and EU member.

What this war narrative isn’t is news. “The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it,” Taibbi quotes Walter Kirn saying, “is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class.”

Two questions arise: First, is Sullivan about stopping WW3, or starting it?