Darrell Castle talks about the threatened war between Russia and Ukraine with the possible involvement of NATO including the United States. Transcription / Notes ANOTHER WAR OF INTELLIGENCE Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is the 18th day of February in the year 2022 and I will be talking with you about the threatened war between Russia and Ukraine with the possible involvement of NATO including the United States. There are, as usual, a lot of hills to die on this week including Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau invoking the Emergency Act to put down with force a peaceful act of civil disobedience. We also have rising inflation with 7.5% in January the worst in 42 years resulting in Americans getting poorer each day as their wages are stolen by inflation, and soaring rates of violent crime. I have decided, however, to turn my attention to the plains of Russia and Ukraine which have been fought over for centuries and are threatening the world again. The world is tired of war, and it collectively groans at the thought of yet more blood and treasure expended for no good reason. If we have war, it will again be a war of intelligence because the brave leader must rally the people to sacrifice to defeat yet another blood thirsty dictator. Last week I told you that intelligence is provided to the president or leader from a variety of sources. Those sources know what the President wants to do, and their intelligence has a way of reaffirming and bolstering that decision. They gather it for him, and he briefs Congressional leadership to get them on board and then the people are rallied. Even the New York Times is aware of this tendency, so allow me to quote from the Sunday February 13 edition. “Intelligence agencies prodded by the White House, have declassified information, which in turn has been briefed to Congress, shared with reporters and discussed by Pentagon and State Department spokesman. But the disclosures are complicated by history. Before the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration released intelligence that officials said justified pre-emptive action, including purported intercepts of Iraqi military conversations, photos of mobile biological weapons labs and statements accusing Baghdad of building a fleet of drones to launch a chemical attack on the United States. The material was all wrong, reliant on sources who lied, incorrect interpretations of Iraq’s actions and senior officials who looked at raw intelligence and saw what they wanted to see.” The Times goes on to point out that this time its different because we have such things as satellite imagery, and so on and so forth. If you count the 15 years we were involved in Vietnam, then Desert Storm with the intervening 10 years of no-fly zone enforcement with the 18 years in Afghanistan we have been at war for something like 45 years and as the times points out it was based for the most part on a pack of lies. I won’t go into the complete history of this dispute except to say that the Reagan- Gorbachev agreement that ended the cold war and broke apart the Soviet Union pledged that NATO would not expand into the border regions of Russia. That agreement was not honored and in 2008 NATO invited Ukraine, but it declined. That was something Mr. Putin could not accept and now he is pushing back.  The problem is that Ukraine’s location on Russia’s border makes it an existential threat to Russia. Estonia in the North and Ukraine in the south have Moscow surrounded. Hitler had to cross a thousand-mile frontier with a supply line 2500 miles long to get to Moscow, but the Ukrainian border is only 300 miles from Moscow. Putin can’t and won’t tolerate Ukraine in NATO or even a western dominated Ukraine. Would we tolerate a Russian dominated Mexico with Russian troops and missiles there?  Will Putin invade Ukraine thus possibly triggering the fall of dominos similar to the start of World War l?