OMNI
RUSSIA NEWSLETTER #1 (RUSSIA AND UKRAINE). March 23, 2014 (reprinted).
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/03/russia-ukraine-newsletter-1.html
Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
[Note:
in a few years I changed my title from Newsletter to the more accurate Anthologies. I am reprinting Anthology #1 because a
decade later some part of the anti-war position seems to have reached the new War
Lord, and President Trump seems about to end the US-NATO-Ukraine-Russia War!]
What’s
at Stake: The US superpower, imperial propaganda
system is inciting fear and hatred of Russia, as in Cold War days against the
Soviet Union, but alternative views are readily available in numerous
independent print or online magazines; however, few are published by The
Washington Post or CNN.. If
we are to have peace in the world we must be able to see the world as others
see it, as a corrective to official dogma.
[My
newsletters do not give the Corporate/Pentagon/White
House/Congressional/Mainstream Media/Imperia, US National Security State propaganda
system, because it already overwhelmingly dominates mainstream media, it commands
billions of Pentagon dollars via the military-industrial complex to persuade
and purchase agreement to the official line, and publishing that line enriches
the corporations and oligarchs employing anti-communist group think, and, as
these anthologies demonstrate, the corporate-capitalist system wants one ideological
argument, its nationalist/imperialist argument to prevail. My
sources are independent, global, and usually on the edge financially. Also, the old, laudable journalistic rule of
giving both sides is completely absurd in this situation. No sane person would expect critics of US power
to give equal time to perspectives that possess immense resources for
promulgating unjust wars. (So purchase a
subscription to your favorite independents, buy books, subscribe to the journals
you see in these anthologies, study them, and speak up.) --Dick]
Newsletters
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ Index:
http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/
Blog http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/
j.dick.bennett@gmail.com
CONNECTION
BETWEEN US ENCIRCLEMENT OF CHINA AND RUSSIA:
See OMNI’s newsletters/blogs on US Imperialism Westward Pacific/E. Asia
Contents Russia/Ukraine Newsletter #1, 2014
(Plenty
of protest against the pro-war Obama administration and media, but all together
reflecting a comparatively small readership.
If you agree with the analyses of these alternative views that try to
view Russia outside the US
imperial box, then forward this newsletter and notify your contacts.)
Dick, US Empire and Corporate
Media: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Patrick
Smith, US/New York Times Spin
Stephen
Cohen, Anti-Russia Is Old Anti-Soviet
Parry,
Group Think
The Nation Editorial
Alterman,
Cold War Hysteria Revived
How
Russia/Ukraine Look in Beijing
Charles
Pierce, Dick Cheney’s View
Luke
Harding, US
Refuses Crimea Poll
Ray
McGovern, Putin Says No to Regime Change on Its Border
Bruce
Gagnon, Danger of War Following US-led Coup for Gas and Oil
Pilger,
Other Coups, Same Superpower
Robert
Freeman, Ukraine
and WWI over Energy
Mark
Swaney
More
Reading
Via
Historians Against War (HAW)
Via
Common Dreams
Via
FAIR TV
Contact Arkansas Representatives
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
NYT, and
in general from Cohen and Parry: “. . .
American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more
conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia
during the Cold War” (Cohen). The
remaining articles give a variety of background and context. Perhaps the most important context is the
encirclement of Russia
by the West; take a look at a map of the countries that have joined or are in
the process of joining NATO, which are military alliances. Add to that a map of other countries around Russia with which the US has military alliances. And then add a map of all US military bases surrounding Russia. A similar, threatening enclosure has also
been created against China. See my newsletters/blogs, “US Westward
Imperialism, Pacific/E. Asia.”
A perspective we
should hold in mind is that of J. William Fulbright, expressed in all of his
books, particularly in his final book, The
Price of Empire. His last chapter is entitled, “Seeing the
World as Others See It.” Empathy is one
of the foundations underlying Fulbright’s thought, an attitude that usually
eludes imperial superpowers. The
Afterword of this book is entitled “Changing Our Manner of Thinking.” Cohen suggests that not only have our leaders
and their followers not changed their Cold War enmity, they have worsened it.
I have included
information about the credentials of several of the authors, which are
impressive. --Dick
|
DICK: ANTI-RUSSIAN, PRO-WAR ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
I
have assessed a dozen ADG reports
published during the month of March, 2014, with Cohen’s stringent claim in
mind. I did not try
to compare
present US mainstream media reporting on Russia to US mainstream media
reporting of the Soviet Union, because numerous
books and articles have shown the US nationalistic
hostility
toward the Soviet Union during the “Cold
War.” Studies of the continuation of
that hostility
post-Soviet Union are now appearing. There are more: I did a simple search of "Ukraine"
in the box in the top right hand corner--and this is what i came up with:
http://www.arkansasonline.com/search/?query=ukraine
|
During the month of March the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette reported on Russia and the Ukraine
in two main ways: 1) news from The New York Times and from the
Associated Press and 2) editorial ridicule, fear, and hatred of Russia. The news reports were sometimes summarized
by ADG staff. For example, “Russia to Craft Its Own Crimea
Proposals” (3-11-14). This article
derived from the NYT and AP provided many perspectives, and I felt
it tried to give readers a glimpse of a complex history and present politics.
In sharp contrast, the newspaper mounted a sustained, belligerent,
warmongering editorial attack on Russia. At least four cartoons
showed either the Russian Bear victorious over teddy bear Ukraine (no mention
of the coup that overthrew the pro-Russian head of state), or Obama irrelevant
while Putin plans “Countries I’m Going to Invade” (no mention of the countries
the US has invaded) or Putin breaking
through the walls of the US, the EU, and NATO merely my sauntering through in a
suit. Glenn Garvin of the
Miami Herald urged Obama to defeat Putin by developing US oil and gas. Two
columns by Charles Krauthammer presented skilled hatchet jobs against wimp
talkers and appeasers Obama and Kerry versus imperial Putin seeking “national
power, territory, dominion” (“The Wages of Weakness,” 3-10-14). Two Washington
Post guest editorials accused Putin of being out of touch with reality and
urged the West to seek Russia’s
financial ruin. Mark Champion of Bloomberg News (another guest column,
3-11-14) recounted the sufferings of Crimea’s “Muslim Tatars” through the
witness of one victim, to conclude that the West should protect them, and
should aid the Ukraine’s
integration into the EU. But the most
virulent voice is that of the editorial page editor, Paul Greenberg. In “The Cossacks Are Back” (3-5-14) John Kerry is “hapless and hopeless” (not
true), Hagel is cutting the Pentagon’s budget (not true), while contemporary Russia is demeaned as Tsarist
“thuggism” and Putin as “Tsar Vladimir.”
“The more Russia
changes, the more repressive it stays.”
The result of US
appeasement of Russian aggression?
“…chaos, war.”
Thus in Arkansas,
at least, we have been subjected to the White House/mainstream media pro-war
blast. Fortunately, if we seek, we can
find alternative views by people who try to see as Russians see it or who try
to gather a fuller past and present reality than are presented by our
government and mainstream media..
WEDNESDAY, MAR 12, 2014 05:59 PM CDT
Propaganda,
lies and the New York Times:
Everything you really need to know about Ukraine
The media keeps buying the American
spin on what's happening in Ukraine.
Let's cut through the fog
PATRICK L. SMITH
TOPICS: CRIMEA, UKRAINE, PUTIN, JOHN KERRY, F THE EU, VICTORIA NULAND, NEW YORK TIMES, MEDIA CRITICISM,NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)
You need a machete these days to whack through the thicket of
misinformation, disinformation, spin, propaganda and straight-out lying that
daily envelopes the Ukraine
crisis like kudzu on an Alabama
telephone pole. But an outline of an outcome is now faintly discernible.
Here is my early call: We witness an American intervention in the
process of failing, and the adventure’s only yields will be much pointless
suffering among Ukrainians and life for years to come in the smothering embrace
of a justifiably suspicious Russian bear.
Nice going, Victoria Nuland,
you of the famous “F
the E.U. tape,” and your sidekick, Geoffrey Pyatt, ambassador in Kiev. Nice going,
Secretary of State Kerry. For this caper, Nuland and Pyatt should be reassigned
to post offices in the bleak reaches of Kansas,
Khrushchev-style. Kerry is too big to fail, I suppose, but at least we now know
more about what caliber of subterfuge lies behind all those plane trips, one
mess following another in his jet wash.
On the ground, Vladimir Putin continues to extend the Russian
presence in Crimea, and we await signs as to whether he will go further into Ukraine.
This is very regrettable. Viewed as cause-and-effect, however, it is first a
measure of how miscalculated the American intervention plot was from the first.
Pretending innocent horror now is a waste of time. The Ukraine
tragedy is real estate with many names on the deed. This must not get lost in
the sauce.
On the diplomatic side, the big charge now is intransigence. Washington calls Moscow
intransigent because Vladimir Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov,
decline to talk to the self-appointed government in Kiev, which Putin refuses to recognize. Moscow calls Washington
intransigent because Kerry declines to meet Lavrov unless the latter agrees
first to meet the Kiev
provisionals.
The American line: The provisionals are legitimate, they are
democrats worthy of support, and there was no coup when they hounded President
Viktor Yanukovych from office Feb. 21. The protesters behind them with clubs,
pistols and bottle bombs are democrats, too.
The Russian line: The provisionals are illegitimate, they took
power in a coup driven in considerable part by nationalist fanatics with a
fascist streak evident in their ranks, they are now dependent on same, and they
merit neither support nor recognition.
This is it as of now, simplified but not simplistic, story and
counter-story.
It is difficult but not impossible to interpret these narratives.
The first step, admittedly hard for many Americans, is to drop all Cold War
baggage and see beyond the West’s century-and-a-half habit of demonizing Russia
as the emblematic power of the inherently autocratic East. “Oriental despotism”
was a passing fad conjured by a scholar-stooge named Karl Wittfogel in the late
1950s. It died a deserved death — around the time of hula hoops, I think — but
the prejudice lingers, remarkably, in many Western minds.
Here comes the bitter bit. The Russian take in the Ukraine crisis is more truthful than the artful
dodge Washington
attempts. The above forecast of the outcome rests on the thought that the dodge
is simply too flimsy to last.
You cannot make a call such as this without looking closely. So
let’s.
Putin and Lavrov are open to negotiations with the U.S.
and the European Union. Putin commits to supporting Ukrainian elections set for
May and backs the agreement struck between Yanukovych and his opponents just
before the latter abandoned it and deposed him, even as Putin did not like it
at the time. No, Moscow does not recognize the
provisionals in Kiev, with sound reasons, but it
does not require that Washington
drop its support before getting to the mahogany table.
In the climate our media have generated, I almost feel the need to
apologize for this but will refuse: I cannot locate the intransigence in this.
Now to Kerry and President Obama. Last week Lavrov invited Kerry
to Sochi for
face time with Putin, and Kerry considered it. Then he abruptly declined on the
argument that the Russians must first commit to talks with the new crowd in Kiev. Here is the problem:
Kerry’s demand does not hold up as a precondition; it is logically a point of
negotiation. Set it as a precondition and you have, so far as I can make out,
intransigence.
What is the preoccupation with a Moscow-Kiev gathering, anyway?
This gets interesting, and you have to recall the dramatis personae in the
Nuland tape of Feb. 7.
Insisting on direct talks between Russia
and the provisional government in Kiev
is to insist the former recognize the latter, a trap Putin cannot possibly be
stupid enough to fall into. Recognition, in turn, would complete the
Nuland-Pyatt project to gift Ukrainians with a post–Yanukovych puppet
government. This is Kerry’s unstated intent.
It is remarkable what a good road map the Nuland tape has proven.
She mentioned three names in her exchange with Pyatt: Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh
Tyahnybok and Vitali Klitschko. The first, Nuland’s favorite, is now prime
minister; Tyahnybok was running ahead of Yanukovych in polls at the time Nuland
was taped and remains the vigorously anti-Russian head of Svoboda, a
power-balancing party of rightists; Klitschko is not in the government but
plans to run for president in the May elections.
This is precisely the constellation Nuland described as her work
in progress: Yatsenyuk in, the others more useful outside for now. As a measure
of Washington’s unseemly haste to lend
legitimacy, Obama meets Yatsenyuk in Washington
as I write — an unelected leader of who knows whom sitting in the White House.
Just for good measure, Nuland also mentioned one Robert Serry, a
U.N. official Washington arm-twisted Ban
Ki-moon into sending to Kiev
to give a veneer of multi-sided consensus. And there was Serry in the news last
week — when Crimeans chased him across their border at gunpoint. They must be
reading the papers carefully, those Crimeans.
At writing, the Obama scrum is debating whether to impose swift,
cutting sanctions on the Russians (the political people) or ease off for fear
of self-inflicted damage (the trade and business people). Leading the charge
for tough stuff are none other than Nuland and Pyatt.
Maybe they are scared of getting sent to Kansas if the project does not come good.
The more I scrutinize it, the more the American case on Ukraine
is held together with spit and baling wire. Were I Obama or Kerry, I would be
looking for an out by now, cutting losses on a commitment to intervention that
was sheer hubris from the first.
Significantly in this connection, the contorted logic of just who
is running things in Kiev
is soon to fail, in my view. Washington
is all out in denying the character of the protest movement and the
provisionals, casting Putin as a paranoid in his characterizations. It is
wishful thinking. Incessantly repeated untruths never transform into truths.
The decisive influence of ultra-right extremists, some openly
committed to an ideology of violence, some whose political ancestors sided with
the Nazis to oppose the Soviets, is a matter of record. Svoboda and Right
Sector, the two most organized of these groups, now propose to rise into
national politics. Right Sector’s leader, Dmytro Yarosh, intends to run for
president. The New York Times just described him as “an expert with firebombs”
during the street protest period.
These people are thugs by any other name. One cannot see how this
can be in question — or why the Times suggests that Russia’s descriptions of them as
such amount to “a fun house mirror.”
And it is no good pretending their influence does not continue.
They remain in the street and maintain the barricades, and they are happy to
tell you (as one told a network correspondent last week) that they could take
down the new government, too, if they so chose. You can stop wondering why the
provisionals show zero interest in conducting promised investigations into the
origins of the violence that toppled Yanukovych. Washington seems to have lost track of that
idea, too.
On the other side of the piles of tires, ultra-rightists hold
three portfolios in the 18–member provisional cabinet. Yarosh is deputy
director of the security council. (I suppose he would be assigned to
investigate the violence were anyone to get the job.) It is near to
preposterous that Kerry would insist that Moscow
officials meet with this man or others like him.
I read Ukraine
as a case of what happens when so much of policy, in all kinds of spheres, is
conducted in secret. Ordinary citizens cannot see events and are left to judge
them blind. And the media are not going to help you. However, there have been
notable exceptions to the media’s cooperation in keeping things from us instead
of informing.
Earlier this week, Leslie
Gelb let loose with a vigorous blast in the Daily Beast, calling on the Americans (and others) to
“stop their lies and self-destructive posturing or pay costs they’re loath to
admit.” Gelb is a longtime presence in foreign policy cliques — former Times
columnist, former State Department official, now president emeritus at the
Council on Foreign Relations. The critique reveals a significant breach in the
orthodoxy.
Not to root for the home
team, but Nicholas Davies just published in Salon an inventory of 35 cases
wherein Washington
has split the sheets with fascists in the interest of intervention. Read it. Splendidly timed, it demolishes all argument that what is in
front of our eyes is somehow not. History so often does the job, I find.
Elsewhere, things go from bad to execrable. Here I have to single
out Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian, who froths at the mouth in a three-part
blog series published by the New York Review of Books. This guy should be
brought up on charges under toxic waste laws.
You get lies: Yanukovych refused to sign the February compromise
with his opposition. (It was signed in his office so far as I understand.) You
get bent logic: The new cabinet includes three Jews, proving (somehow) it is
legitimate. The ultra-right has only three cabinet posts. (Only? That is 16
percent of it. Why any?)
And you get radical miscalculations. Snyder compares Putin with
Hitler — unwise given the composition of the government and the barricades
people he wants to say are fine. In trying to persuade us that the extremist
bit is Moscow’s
propaganda, he produces lengths of propaganda, some of it — no other word —
extremist.
I carry no hatchet for
Snyder, though the Yale professorship causes me to wonder. But in bravely
defending every aspect of the Washington
orthodoxy, Snyder gives a faithful map of all its fault lines. So it is useful
reading, here, here and here, providing you know what you are getting.
Next Sunday Crimeans will vote in a referendum as to whether they
wish to break with the rest of Ukraine
and join the Russian
Federation. The semi-autonomous region’s
parliament has already voted to do so, and good enough that they put the
thought to a popular vote.
But no. Self-determination was the guiding principle when
demonstrators and pols with records as election losers pushed Yanukovych out
and got done via a coup (I insist on the word) what they could not manage in
polling booths. But it cannot apply in Crimea’s
case. The Crimeans are illegitimate and have no right to such a vote.
Simply too shabby. I cannot see how it can hold much longer.
Patrick
Smith is
the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” was the International Herald
Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he
also wrote “Letter from Tokyo”
for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed
frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other
publications.
BASHING
PUTIN
Stephen
Cohen, “Distorting Russia.” The
Nation (March 3, 2014).
Distorting Russia
How the American media
misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine.
Stephen F. Cohen
February 11, 2014 | This article appeared in the March 3,
2014 edition of The Nation.
(Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA
Novosti/Pool)
The degradation of mainstream
American press coverage of Russia,
a country still vital to US
national security, has been under way for many years. If the recent tsunami of
shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading
newspapers and magazines—particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and,
unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin—is an indication, this media malpractice
is now pervasive and the new norm.
There are notable exceptions, but
a general pattern has developed. Even in the venerable New
York Times and Washington
Post, news reports, editorials and commentaries no longer adhere
rigorously to traditional journalistic standards, often failing to provide
essential facts and context; to make a clear distinction between reporting and
analysis; to require at least two different political or “expert” views on
major developments; or to publish opposing opinions on their op-ed pages. As a
result, American media on Russia
today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less
ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.
The history of this degradation
is also clear. It began in the early 1990s, following the end of the Soviet
Union, when the US media adopted Washington’s narrative that almost everything
President Boris Yeltsin did was a “transition from communism to democracy” and
thus in America’s best interests. This included his economic “shock therapy”
and oligarchic looting of essential state assets, which destroyed tens of
millions of Russian lives; armed destruction of a popularly elected Parliament
and imposition of a “presidential” Constitution, which dealt a crippling blow
to democratization and now empowers Putin; brutal war in tiny Chechnya, which
gave rise to terrorists in Russia’s North Caucasus; rigging of his own
re-election in 1996; and leaving behind, in 1999, his approval ratings in
single digits, a disintegrating country laden with weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, most American journalists still give the impression that Yeltsin was an
ideal Russian leader.
Since the early 2000s, the media
have followed a different leader-centric narrative, also consistent with US
policy, that devalues multifaceted analysis for a relentless demonization of
Putin, with little regard for facts. (Was any Soviet Communist leader after
Stalin ever so personally villainized?) If Russia under Yeltsin was presented
as having legitimate politics and national interests, we are now made to
believe that Putin’s Russia has none at all, at home or abroad—even on its own
borders, as in Ukraine.
Russia today
has serious problems and many repugnant Kremlin policies. But anyone relying on
mainstream American media will not find there any of their origins or
influences in Yeltsin’s Russia
or in provocative US
policies since the 1990s—only in the “autocrat” Putin who, however
authoritarian, in reality lacks such power. Nor is he credited with stabilizing
a disintegrating nuclear-armed country, assisting US
security pursuits from Afghanistan
and Syria to Iran
or even with granting amnesty, in December, to more than 1,000 jailed
prisoners, including mothers of young children.
Not surprisingly, in January The
Wall Street Journal featured
the widely discredited former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili,
branding Putin’s government as one of “deceit, violence and cynicism,” with the
Kremlin a “nerve center of the troubles that bedevil the West.” But wanton
Putin-bashing is also the dominant narrative in centrist, liberal and
progressive media, from the Post, Times and The New Republic to CNN, MSNBC and HBO’s Real
Time With Bill Maher, where Howard Dean, not previously known for
his Russia expertise, recently declared, to the panel’s approval, “Vladimir
Putin is a thug.”
The media therefore eagerly await
Putin’s downfall—due to his “failing economy” (some of its indicators are
better than US ones), the valor of street protesters and other right-minded
oppositionists (whose policies are rarely examined), the defection of his
electorate (his approval ratings remain around 65 percent) or some welcomed
“cataclysm.” Evidently believing, as does the Times, for example, that
democrats and a “much better future” will succeed Putin (not zealous
ultranationalists growing in the streets and corridors of power), US
commentators remain indifferent to what the hoped-for “destabilization of his
regime” might mean in the world’s largest nuclear country.
Certainly, The
New Republic’s lead writer on Russia, Julia Ioffe, does not
explore the question, or much else of real consequence, in her nearly
10,000-word February 17 cover story. Ioffe’s bannered theme is devoutly
Putin-phobic: “He Crushed His Opposition and Has Nothing to Show for It But a
Country That Is Falling Apart.” Neither sweeping assertion is spelled out or
documented. A compilation of chats with Russian-born Ioffe’s disaffected (but
seemingly not “crushed”) Moscow acquaintances and titillating personal gossip
long circulating on the Internet, the article seems better suited (apart from
some factual errors) for the Russian tabloids, as does Ioffe’s disdain for
objectivity. Protest shouts of “Russia
without Putin!” and “Putin is a thief!” were “one of the most exhilarating
moments I’d ever experienced.” So was tweeting “Putin’s fucked, y’all.” Nor
does she forget the hopeful mantra “cataclysm seems closer than ever now.”
* * *
For weeks, this toxic coverage
has focused on the Sochi Olympics and the deepening crisis in Ukraine. Even before the Games
began, the Times declared the newly built complex a
“Soviet-style dystopia” and warned in a headline, Terrorism
and Tension, Not Sports and Joy. On
opening day, the paper found space for three anti-Putin articles and a lead
editorial, a feat rivaled by thePost.
Facts hardly mattered. Virtually every US report insisted that a record
$51 billion “squandered” by Putin on the Sochi Games proved they were
“corrupt.” But as Ben Aris ofBusiness
New Europe pointed out, as much as $44 billion
may have been spent “to develop the infrastructure of the entire region,”
investment “the entire country needs.”
Overall pre-Sochi coverage was
even worse, exploiting the threat of terrorism so licentiously it seemed
pornographic. The Post, long known among
critical-minded Russia-watchers asPravda on the Potomac,
exemplified the media ethos. A sports columnist and an editorial page editor
turned the Olympics into “a contest of wills” between the despised Putin’s
“thugocracy” and terrorist “insurgents.” The “two warring parties” were so
equated that readers might have wondered which to cheer for. If nothing else,
American journalists gave terrorists an early victory, tainting “Putin’s Games”
and frightening away many foreign spectators, including some relatives of the
athletes.
The Sochi Games will soon pass,
triumphantly or tragically, but the potentially fateful Ukrainian crisis will
not. A new Cold War divide between West and East may now be unfolding, not in Berlin but in the heart of Russia’s historical civilization.
The result could be a permanent confrontation fraught with instability and the
threat of a hot war far worse than the one in Georgia in 2008. These dangers have
been all but ignored in highly selective, partisan and inflammatory US media
accounts, which portray the European Union’s “Partnership” proposal benignly as
Ukraine’s chance for democracy, prosperity and escape from Russia, thwarted
only by a “bullying” Putin and his “cronies” in Kiev.
Not long ago, committed readers
could count on The New York Review of Books for factually trustworthy alternative
perspectives on important historical and contemporary subjects. But when it
comes to Russia and Ukraine,
the NYRB has
succumbed to the general media mania. In a January 21 blog post, Amy Knight, a
regular contributor and inveterate Putin-basher, warned the US government
against cooperating with the Kremlin on Sochi security, even suggesting that
Putin’s secret services “might have had an interest in allowing or even
facilitating such attacks” as killed or wounded dozens of Russians in Volgograd
in December.
Knight’s innuendo prefigured a
purported report on Ukraine
by Yale professor Timothy Snyder in the February 20 issue. Omissions of facts,
by journalists or scholars, are no less an untruth than misstatements of fact.
Snyder’s article was full of both, which are widespread in the popular media,
but these are in the esteemed NYRB and by an acclaimed academic. Consider
a few of Snyder’s assertions:
§ ”On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship.” In
fact, the “paper” legislation he’s referring to hardly constituted
dictatorship, and in any event was soon repealed. Ukraine is in a state nearly the
opposite of dictatorship—political chaos uncontrolled by President Viktor
Yanukovych, the Parliament, the police or any other government institution.
§ ”The [parliamentary]
deputies…have all but voted themselves out of existence.” Again, Snyder is
alluding to the nullified “paper.” Moreover, serious discussions have been
under way in Kiev
about reverting to provisions in the 2004 Constitution that would return
substantial presidential powers to the legislature, hardly “the end of
parliamentary checks on presidential power,” as Snyder claims. (Does he dislike
the prospect of a compromise outcome?)
§ ”Through remarkably large and
peaceful public protests…Ukrainians have set a positive example for Europeans.”
This astonishing statement may have been true in November, but it now raises
questions about the “example” Snyder is advocating. The occupation of
government buildings in Kiev and in Western Ukraine, the hurling of firebombs
at police and other violent assaults on law enforcement officers and the
proliferation of anti-Semitic slogans by a significant number of
anti-Yanukovych protesters, all documented and even televised, are not an
“example” most readers would recommend to Europeans or Americans. Nor are they
tolerated, even if accompanied by episodes of police brutality, in any Western
democracy.
§ ”Representatives of a minor group
of the Ukrainian extreme right have taken credit for the violence.” This
obfuscation implies that apart perhaps from a “minor group,” the “Ukrainian
extreme right” is part of the positive “example” being set. (Many of its
representatives have expressed hatred for Europe’s
“anti-traditional” values, such as gay rights.) Still more, Snyder continues,
“something is fishy,” strongly implying that the mob violence is actually being
“done by russo-phone provocateurs” on behalf of “Yanukovych (or Putin).” As
evidence, Snyder alludes to “reports” that the instigators “spoke Russian.” But
millions of Ukrainians on both sides of their incipient civil war speak
Russian.
§ Snyder reproduces yet another
widespread media malpractice regarding Russia, the decline of editorial
fact-checking. In a recent article in the International New York Times,
he both inflates his assertions and tries to delete neofascist elements from
his innocuous “Ukrainian extreme right.” Again without any verified evidence,
he warns of a Putin-backed “armed intervention” in Ukraine after the Olympics and
characterizes reliable reports of “Nazis and anti-Semites” among street
protesters as “Russian propaganda.”
§ Perhaps the largest untruth
promoted by Snyder and most US
media is the claim that “Ukraine’s
future integration into Europe” is “yearned
for throughout the country.” But every informed observer knows—from Ukraine’s
history, geography, languages, religions, culture, recent politics and opinion
surveys—that the country is deeply divided as to whether it should join Europe
or remain close politically and economically to Russia. There is not one Ukraine
or one “Ukrainian people” but at least two, generally situated in its Western
and Eastern regions.
Such factual distortions point to
two flagrant omissions by Snyder and other US media accounts. The now
exceedingly dangerous confrontation between the two Ukraines was not “ignited,”
as the Times claims, by Yanukovych’s duplicitous
negotiating—or by Putin—but by the EU’s reckless ultimatum, in November, that
the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country choose
between Europe and Russia. Putin’s proposal for a tripartite arrangement,
rarely if ever reported, was flatly rejected by US and EU officials.
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But the most crucial media
omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that
the struggle for Ukraine is
yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s
eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside
Russia, a US-NATO military
outpost in Georgia and
missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding
Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December
financial offer to save Ukraine’s
collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s “civilizational” proposal, for
example, includes “security policy” provisions, almost never reported, that
would apparently subordinate Ukraine
to NATO.
Any doubts about the Obama
administration’s real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the
recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official,
Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused
on the source of the “leak” and on Nuland’s verbal “gaffe”—“Fuck the EU.” But
the essential revelation was that high-level US officials were plotting to
“midwife” a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing
its democratically elected president—that is, a coup.
Americans are left with a new
edition of an old question. Has Washington’s
twenty-year winner-take-all approach to post-Soviet Russia shaped this degraded news
coverage, or is official policy shaped by the coverage? Did Senator John McCain
stand in Kiev
alongside the well-known leader of an extreme nationalist party because he was
ill informed by the media, or have the media deleted this part of the story
because of McCain’s folly?
And what of Barack Obama’s
decision to send only a low-level delegation, including retired gay athletes,
to Sochi? In
August, Putin virtually saved Obama’s presidency by persuading Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad to eliminate his chemical weapons. Putin then helped to
facilitate Obama’s heralded opening to Iran. Should not Obama himself have
gone to Sochi—either out of gratitude to Putin,
or to stand with Russia’s
leader against international terrorists who have struck both of our countries?
Did he not go because he was ensnared by his unwise Russia
policies, or because the US
media misrepresented the varying reasons cited: the granting of asylum to
Edward Snowden, differences on the Middle East, infringements on gay rights in Russia, and now Ukraine? Whatever the explanation,
as Russian intellectuals say when faced with two bad alternatives, “Both are
worst.”
Stephen F. Cohen
February
11, 2014 | This article appeared in the March 3, 2014 edition of The
Nation.
Robert Parry | The 'We-Hate-Putin' Group Think
Consortium News, Reader Supported News, March 8,
2014
Parry writes: "Across the ideological spectrum, there is rave
support for the coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected president - and endless
ranting against Russian President Vladimir Putin for refusing to accept the new
coup leadership in Kiev and intervening to protect Russian interests in
Crimea."
READ
MORE
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22448-the-we-hate-putin-group-think
CONTEXTS, ALTERNATIVE VIEWS
Time for Realism and Common Sense
on Ukraine
The international community
should be pushing for compromise to prevent this fragile and bitterly divided
country from breaking apart.
The Editors
March 6, 2014 | This article appeared in the March 24,
2014 edition of The Nation. [The article I read in the 3-24 issue
is entitled “Ukraine
in Crisis.” --Dick]
·
Share
·
Armed servicemen wait in Russian
army vehicles in the Crimean town of Balaclava,
March 1, 2014. (Reuters/Baz Ratner)
The escalating crisis in Ukraine
has set off reckless missile-rattling in this country. As Harvard’s Stephen
Walt tweeted on March 2: “Public discourse on #Ukraine situation hitting new hghts
in hyperbole. (‘New Cold War, WW III,’ etc.) Rhetorical overkill not helpful.”
He may have been thinking of neocon Charles Krauthammer, who in his Washington
Post column called
for the United States to
ante up $15 billion for Ukraine
and send a naval flotilla to the Black Sea.
The same paper headlined that the crisis “tests Obama’s focus on diplomacy over
military force,” quoting Andrew Kuchins of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies decrying President Obama’s “taking the stick option off
the table.”
The Obama administration has
responded to the crisis by flexing its own rhetorical muscles. When Russian
President Vladimir Putin ignored Obama’s warning that “there will be costs” if
Russia sent troops into Crimea, Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the
“brazen act of aggression,” vowing that “Russia is going to lose, the Russian
people are going to lose” and suggesting “asset freezes…isolation with respect
to trade and investment,” while promising “economic assistance of the major
sort” for whatever government emerges in Kiev.
European governments were far
more measured, with many condemning Russia’s Crimean invasion but most
of them clearly reluctant to impose economic sanctions. Their economic ties to Russia are much closer than America’s, of course, but they also
understand that diplomacy will be more effective. Among the cooler heads at
home was Jack Matlock, ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan, who
described the administration’s warnings to Putin as “ill-advised” and argued
that “whatever slim hope that Moscow might avoid
overt military intervention in Ukraine
disappeared when Obama in effect threw down a gauntlet and challenged him. This
was not just a mistake of political judgment—it was a failure to understand
human psychology—unless, of course, he actually wanted a Russian intervention,
which is hard for me to believe.”
We should take a deep breath—and
a sober look—before committing treasure and prestige to a still-unsettled new
leadership in a country on Russia’s border, one that has had a fragile
independent existence for barely two decades. Some history would also serve us
well if we’re to understand fast-moving developments. We are reaping the bitter
fruit of a deeply flawed post–Cold War settlement that looks more like Versailles than Bretton Woods, a settlement inflamed by
the shortsighted American decision to expand NATO eastward and pursue other
policies aimed at isolating Russia
and ignoring Russian interests.
Russia’s
dispatch of military forces to Crimea is a
clear violation of international law. Putin justifies the invasion as necessary
to protect Russian citizens and allies, but this is a fig leaf. The Obama
administration is right to condemn it, although much of the world will grimace
at the irony of Secretary Kerry denouncing the invasion of a sovereign country
even as the United States
only now winds down its “war of choice” against Iraq, which is thousands of miles
away from US borders. Crimea, of course, not only abuts Russia but houses its Black Sea Fleet, which, by
treaty agreement between Ukraine
and Russia,
is set to remain there until at least 2042. Crimea historically was part of Russia until 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine
in what many viewed as a gesture of good will.
Viktor Yanukovych was corrupt and
unpopular, but he was the democratically elected president of Ukraine. He had been steering the
country toward an association agreement with the European Union last fall when
he reversed course after Russia
offered
$15 billion in financial aid to
the all-but-bankrupt country. That led to the street demonstrations—spurred in
part by the EU and the United
States—that eventually sent Yanukovych
packing.
Ukraine is
deeply divided. As David Speedie, director of the US
global engagement program at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International
Affairs, says, “In simple terms, half the people in Ukraine
look to Russia
and the other half look to the West.” As Nicolai Petro details in his March 3
report at TheNation.com, the new leaders in Kiev include right-wing ultranationalists
who, in one of their first acts, repealed the 2012 law allowing Russian and
other minority languages to be used locally. (That measure was reversed, but
not before arousing deep mistrust and fear in semiautonomous Crimea and many
other parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, which are populated
largely by Russian speakers.) It is also worth noting that one party in the new
government, holding key cabinet posts as well as central leadership positions
in Parliament and law enforcement, is Svoboda, which the European Parliament
has condemned for its “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views.” Even further
to the right is the neofascist Right Sector, which dominates the Maidan, or Independence Square,
the heart of the rebellion, which has refused to disband and exerts significant
influence over the new regime’s policies.
Yanukovych’s decision to postpone
the EU’s association agreement was not irrational. It would have forced Ukraine to decide between Russia and the EU, flatly rejecting Putin’s
offer of a tripartite arrangement that would allow the country to sustain its
ties with Russia.
Quite apart from Putin’s December offer of financial rescue, Ukraine is heavily dependent economically on Russia,
which supplies and subsidizes much of its energy and is its largest trading
partner. The EU and the United
States, for all their bluster, are not about
to replace that deep connection with Western aid and trade. Americans across
the political spectrum will not be enthusiastic about sending billions to a
country on the other side of the world while we are cutting back on vital investments
at home. The EU, dominated by Germany,
has inflicted brutal austerity on its own troubled members like Greece, Spain
and Portugal.
There’s every reason to think the EU, with or without the IMF, would impose an
equally harsh regime on Ukraine
as the price of financial aid. Any responsible government in Kiev should examine very carefully the level
of support offered by these Western institutions, as well as the conditions
attached to it.
In the Western media’s passion
play, which largely disdains or distorts context and history, Putin is the
designated villain. But Ukraine
is central to Russian security, and Russia
is far less concerned about its next-door neighbor’s economic relations with
the EU (Russia
itself is a major source of energy for the Europeans) than the further
extension of NATO to its borders. A hostile Ukraine
might displace Russian bases on the Black Sea, harbor the US fleet and provide a home to NATO
bases. This isn’t an irrational fear. Despite promises by George H.W. Bush not
to extend the West’s Cold War military alliance after Germany was united, eight
former Warsaw Pact nations and three former Soviet republics have been
incorporated into NATO, with the United States and NATO even setting up a
military outpost in Georgia. And the EU association agreement, advertised as
offering free trade, in fact had military clauses that called for integrating Ukraine
into the EU military structure, including cooperation on “civilian and military
crisis management operations” and “relevant exercises” concerning them. No one
should be surprised that Putin reacted negatively to such a prospect. It’s
difficult to imagine any American administration accepting a decision by Mexico to join a military alliance with Russia.
US foreign policy needs a strong
dose of realism and common sense. It’s absurd to scold Obama for “taking the
stick option off the table”: the unavoidable fact is that the United States has no stick in relation to Ukraine.
Americans have no desire and no reason to go to war with Russia over Crimea,
and the EU and the United States are not about to supplant Russia’s economic
influence in Ukraine. Washington is not going
to provide the aid, the trade or the subsidized energy Ukraine needs, and the EU—which is still mired
in its own deep economic crisis—doesn’t have the means to offer Ukraine
much beyond painful austerity. Its new government is not elected, not
legitimate and not at all settled. The international community should be
pushing hard for compromise before this fragile and bitterly divided country
breaks apart.
Frustrated cold warriors filling
armchairs in Washington’s outdated “strategic”
think tanks will continue to howl at the moon, but US policy should be run by the
sober. The president should work with the EU and Russia
to preserve Ukraine’s
territorial unity, support free elections and allow Ukraine
to be part of both the EU and the Russian customs union, while pledging that
NATO will not extend itself into Ukraine. It is time to reduce
tensions, not draw red lines, flex rhetorical muscles and fan the flames of
folly.
Read Next: Eric Alterman on the American
right wing’s reaction to the situation in Ukraine. P. 10
The Editors
March 6, 2014 | This article appeared in the March 24,
2014 edition of The Nation.
How Crimea plays in Beijing
Global Network [globalnet@mindspring.com]
GN List
Serve [globenet@yahoogroups.com]
Thursday, March 20, 2014 12:49 PM
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-02-200314.html
THE ROVING EYE
How Crimea plays
in Beijing
By Pepe Escobar
"We are paying very close attention to the
situation in Ukraine.
We hope all parties can calmly maintain restraint to prevent the situation from
further escalating and worsening. Political resolution and dialogue is the only
way out."
This, via Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li
Baodong, is Beijing's quite measured, official
interpretation of what's happening in Ukraine, tailored for global
consumption.
But here, in a People's Daily editorial, is what
the leadership is really thinking. And the focus is clearly on the dangers of regime change, the
"West's inability to understand the lessons of history", and
"the final battlefield of the Cold War."
Yet again the West misinterpreted China's abstention from the UN Security Council
vote on a US-backed resolution condemning the Crimea
referendum. The spin was that Russia
- which vetoed the resolution - was "isolated". It's not. And the way
Beijing plays
geopolitics shows it's not.
Oh, Samantha …
The herd of elephants in the (Ukraine) room, in terms of global opinion, is
how the authentic "international community" - from the G-20 to the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) - who has had enough of the Exceptionalist Hypocrisy
Show, has fully understood, and even applauded, that at least one country on
the planet has the balls to clearly say "F**k the US". Russia under President Vladimir
Putin may harbor quite a few distortions, just like any other nation. But this
is not a dinner party; this is realpolitik. To face down the US Leviathan,
nothing short of a bad ass such as Putin will suffice.
NATO - or shorthand for the Pentagon dominating
European wimps - keeps issuing threats and spewing out
"consequences". What are they going to do - launch a barrage of ICBMs
equipped with nuclear warheads against Moscow?
Furthermore, the UN Security Council itself is a
joke, with US
ambassador Samantha "Nothing Compares to You" Power - one of the
mothers of R2P ("responsibility to protect") - carping on
"Russian aggression", "Russian provocations" and comparing
the Crimean referendum to a theft. Oh yes; bombing Iraq,
bombing Libya and getting to
the brink of bombing Syria
were just innocent humanitarian gestures. Samantha The Humanitarian arguably
gives a better performance invoking Sinead O'Connor in her shower.
Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin was polite
enough to say, "these insults addressed to our country" are
"unacceptable". It's what he added that carried the real juice;
"If the delegation of the United
States of America expects our cooperation in
the Security Council on other issues, then Power must understand this quite
clearly."
Samantha The Humanitarian, as well as the whole
bunch of juvenile bystanders in the Obama administration, won't understand it. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov
gave them a little help; Russia
didn't want to use the Iranian nuclear talks to "raise the stakes",
but if the US
and the EU continue with their sanctions and threats, that's what's going to
happen.
So the plot thickens - as in a closer and closer
strategic partnership between Tehran and Moscow.
Secessionists of the world, unite?
Now imagine all this as seen from Beijing. No one knows what
exactly goes on in the corridors of the Zhongnanhai, but it's fair to argue
there's only an apparent contradiction between China's
key principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states,
and Russia's intervention in
Crimea.
Beijing has identified very clearly the sequence
of affairs; long-running Western interference in Ukraine via NGOs and the State
Department; regime change perpetrated with the help of fascists and neo-nazis;
a pre-emptive Russian counterattack which can be read as a by-the-book Samantha
The Humanitarian R2P operation (protecting Russians and Russian speakers from a
second coup planned in Crimea, and thwarted by Russian intelligence.)
On top of it Beijing well knows how Crimea has
been essentially Russian since 1783; how Crimea - as well as a great deal of
Ukraine - fall smack into Russian civilization's sphere of influence; and how
Western interference directly threatened Russia's national security interests
(as Putin made it clear.) Now imagine a similar scenario in Tibet or Xinjiang. Long-running
Western interference via NGOs and the CIA; a take over by Tibetans in Lhasa or Uighurs in
Kashgar of the local administration. Beijing
could easily use Samantha's R2P in the name of protecting Han Chinese.
Yet Beijing
(silently) agreeing to the Russian response to the coup in Kiev
by getting Crimea back via a referendum and without a shot fired does not mean
that "splittists" Tibet
or Taiwan
would be allowed to engage in the same route. Even as Tibet, more than Taiwan, would be able to build a
strong historical case for seceding. Each case bears its own myriad
complexities.
The Obama administration - like a blind Minotaur
- is now lost in a labyrinth of pivots of its own making. A new Borges - that
Buddha in a gray suit - is needed to tell the tale. First there was the
pivoting to Asia-Pac - which is encircling of China
under another name - as it's well understood in Beijing.
Then came the pivoting to Persia - "if we are not going
to war", as that Cypher in Search of an Idea, John Kerry, put it. There
was, of course, the martial pivoting to Syria,
aborted at the last minute thanks to the good offices of Moscow diplomacy. And back to the pivoting to
Russia, trampling the
much-lauded "reset" and conceived as a payback for Syria.
Those who believe Beijing strategists have not carefully
analyzed - and calculated a response - to all the implications of these
overlapping pivots do deserve to join Samantha in the shower. Additionally,
it's easy to picture Chinese Think Tankland hardly repressing its glee in analyzing
a hyperpower endlessly, helplessly pivoting over itself.
While the Western dogs bark …
Russia and China
are strategic partners - at the G-20, at the BRICS club of emerging powers and
at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Their number one objective, in
these and other forums, is the emergence of a multipolar world; no bullying by
the American Empire of Bases, a more balanced international financial system,
no more petrodollar eminence, a basket of currencies, essentially a
"win-win" approach to global economic development.
A multipolar world also implies, by definition,
NATO out of Eurasia - which is from Washington's
point of view the number one reason to interfere in Ukraine. In Eurasian terms, it's as
if - being booted out of Afghanistan
by a bunch of peasants with Kalashnikovs - NATO was pivoting back via Ukraine.
While Russia
and China are key strategic
partners in the energy sphere - Pipelineistan and beyond - they do overlap in
their race to do deals across Central Asia. Beijing is building not only one but two New Silk Roads -
across Southeast Asia and across Central Asia, involving pipelines, railways
and fiber optic networks, and reaching as far as Istanbul,
the getaway to Europe. Yet as far as
Russia-China competition for markets go, all across Eurasia,
it's more under a "win-win" umbrella than a zero-sum game.
On Ukraine
("the last battlefield in the Cold War") and specifically Crimea, the
(unspoken) official position by Beijing
is absolute neutrality (re: the UN vote). Yet the real deal is support to Moscow. But this could
never be out in the open, because Beijing
is not interested in antagonizing the West, unless heavily provoked (the
pivoting becoming hardcore encirclement, for instance). Never forget; since
Deng Xiaoping ("keep a low profile") this is, and will continue to
be, about China's
"peaceful rise". Meanwhile, the Western dogs bark, and the
Sino-Russian caravan passes.
- Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized
World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a
snapshot of Baghdad
during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble
Books, 2009).
Global
Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/
(blog)
Charles
Pierce, The Well-Known Zombie War Criminal Dick Cheney. Esquire , Reader Supported News, March 10, 2014
Pierce writes: "The producers
decided that who the country really needed to hear from concerning the
situation in the Ukraine was well-known zombie war criminal Dick Cheney."
READ MORE
US Will Not Recognize Crimea Poll
Luke Harding, Guardian UK, Reader
Supported News, March 10, 2014
Harding
writes: "America's ambassador in Kiev said the US would refuse to recognise next Sunday's 'so-called referendum' in Crimea, and
said Washington would take further steps against Russia if it used the poll to
legitimise its occupation."
READ MORE
[Harding is the author of the new excellent
new book, The Snowden Files, which
recounts the suspenseful story of Snowden’s disclosure of the NSA files, but
gives dramatic, clear explanations of the various institutions Snowden dealt
with, from the NSA to The Guardian
magazine. This book is worth far more
than its price. –Dick]
Published on Sunday, March 2, 2014 by Consortium News, Common
Dreams 3-11-14
Ukraine: One
‘Regime Change’ Too Many?
by Ray McGovern.
Common Dreams, March 19, 2014.
Is
“regime change” in Ukraine
the bridge too far for the neoconservative “regime changers” of Official
Washington and their sophomoric “responsibility-to-protect” (R2P) allies in the
Obama administration? Have they dangerously. . .over-reached
by pushing the putsch that removed duly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych?
Russian President Vladimir Putin
has given an unmistakable “yes” to those questions – in deeds, not words. His
message is clear: “Back off our near-frontier!”
President Barack Obama discusses Ukraine
during a meeting with members of his National Security Staff in the Oval
Office, Feb. 28, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Moscow
announced on Saturday that Russia’s
parliament has approved Putin’s request for permission to use Russia’s armed forces “on the territory of the Ukraine
pending the normalization of the socio-political situation in that country.”
Putin described this move as
necessary to protect ethnic Russians and military personnel stationed in Crimea
in southern Ukraine,
where the Russian Black Sea Fleet and other key military installations are
located. But there is no indication that the Russian parliament has restricted
the use of Russian armed forces to the Crimea.
Unless Obama is completely bereft
of advisers who know something about Russia, it should have been a
“known-known” (pardon the Rumsfeldian mal mot) that the Russians would react
this way to a putsch removing Yanukovich. It
would have been a no-brainer that Russia
would use military force, if necessary, to counter attempts to use economic
enticement and subversive incitement to slide Ukraine into the orbit of the West
and eventually NATO.
This was all the more predictable
in the case of Ukraine,
where Putin – although the bête noire in corporate Western media – holds very high
strategic cards geographically, militarily, economically and politically.
Unlike ‘Prague Spring’ 1968
Moscow’s advantage was not
nearly as clear during the short-lived “Prague Spring” of 1968 when knee-jerk,
non-thinking euphoria reigned in Washington and West European capitals. The
cognoscenti were, by and large, smugly convinced that reformer Alexander Dubcek
could break Czechoslovakia
away from the U.S.S.R.’s embrace and still keep the Russian bear at bay.
My CIA analyst portfolio at the
time included Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe, and I was amazed to see
analysts of Eastern Europe caught up in the
euphoria that typically ended with, “And the Soviets can’t do a damned thing
about it!”
That summer a new posting found
me advising Radio Free Europe Director Ralph Walter who, virtually alone among
his similarly euphoric colleagues, shared my view that Russian tanks would
inevitably roll onto Prague’s
Wenceslaus Square,
which they did in late August.
Past is not always prologue. But
it is easy for me to imagine the Russian Army cartographic agency busily
preparing maps of the best routes for tanks into Independence Square in Kiev,
and that before too many months have gone by, Russian tank commanders may be
given orders to invade, if those stoking the fires of violent dissent in the
western parts of Ukraine keep pushing too far.
That said, Putin has many other
cards to play and time to play them. These include sitting back and doing
nothing, cutting off Russia’s
subsidies to Ukraine,
making it ever more difficult for Yanukovich’s successors to cope with the
harsh realities. And Moscow has ways to remind
the rest of Europe of its dependence on
Russian oil and gas.
Another Interference
There is one huge difference
between Prague
in 1968 and Kiev 2014. The “Prague Spring” revolution led by Dubcek enjoyed
such widespread spontaneous popular support that it was difficult for Russian
leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin to argue plausibly that it was
spurred by subversion from the West.
Not so 45-plus years later. In
early February, as violent protests raged in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and
the White House professed neutrality, U.S. State Department officials were, in
the words of NYU professor emeritus of Russian studies Stephen Cohen, “plotting
a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.”
We know that thanks to neocon
prima donna Victoria Nuland, now Assistant Secretary of State for European
Affairs, who seemed intent on giving new dimension to the “cookie-pushing” role
of U.S.
diplomats. Recall the photo showing Nuland in a metaphor of over-reach, as she
reached deep into a large plastic bag to give each anti-government demonstrator
on the square a cookie before the putsch.
More important, recall her
amateurish, boorish use of an open telephone to plot regime change in Ukraine
with a fellow neocon, U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. Crass U.S. interference in Ukrainian
affairs can be seen (actually, better, heard) in an intercepted conversation
posted on YouTube on Feb. 4.
Yikes! It’s Yats!
Nuland was recorded as saying:
“Yats is the guy. He’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.
He’s the guy you know. … Yats will need all the help he can get to stave off
collapse in the ex-Soviet state. He has warned there is an urgent need for
unpopular cutting of subsidies and social payments before Ukraine can improve.”
And guess what. The stopgap
government formed after the coup designated Nuland’s guy Yats, Arseniy
Yatsenyuk, prime minister! What luck! Yats is 39 and has served as head of the
central bank, foreign minister and economic minister. And, as designated pinch-hitter-prime-minister,
he has already talked about the overriding need for “responsible government,”
one willing to commit “political suicide,” as he put it, by taking unpopular
social measures.
U.S. meddling has been so obvious
that at President Barack Obama’s hastily scheduled Friday press conference on
Ukraine, Yats’s name seemed to get stuck in Obama’s throat. Toward the end of
his scripted remarks, which he read verbatim, the President said: “Vice
President Biden just spoke with Prime Minister [pause] – the prime minister of Ukraine to assure him that in this difficult
moment the United States
supports his government’s efforts and stands for the sovereignty, territorial
integrity and democratic future of Ukraine.”
Obama doesn’t usually stumble
like that – especially when reading a text, and is normally quite good at
pronouncing foreign names. Perhaps he worried that one of the White House
stenographic corps might shout out, “You mean our man, Yats?” Obama departed
right after reading his prepared remarks, leaving no opportunity for such an
outburst.
Western media was abuzz with the
big question: Will the Russians apply military force? The answer came quickly,
though President Obama chose the subjunctive mood in addressing the question on
Friday.
Throwing Down a Hanky
There was a surreal quality to
President Obama’s remarks, several hours after Russian (or pro-Russian) troops
took control of key airports and other key installations in the Crimea, which
is part of Ukraine, and home to a large Russian naval base and other key
Russian military installations.
Obama referred merely to “reports
of military movements taken by the Russian
Federation inside of Ukraine”
and warned piously that “any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and
territorial integrity would be deeply destabilizing.”
That Obama chose the subjunctive
mood – when the indicative was, well, indicated – will not be lost on the
Russians. Here was Obama, in his typically lawyerly way, trying to square the
circle, giving a sop to his administration’s neocon holdovers and R2P
courtiers, with a Milquetoasty expression of support for the
new-Nuland-approved government (citing Biden’s assurances to old
whatshisname/yatshisname).
While Obama stuck to the
subjunctive tense, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk appealed to Russia to recall its forces and “stop provoking
civil and military resistance in Ukraine.”
Obama’s comments seemed almost
designed to sound condescending – paternalistic, even – to the Russians.
Already into his second paragraph of his scripted remarks, the President took a
line larded with words likely to be regarded as a gratuitous insult by Moscow, post-putsch.
“We’ve made clear that they
[Russian officials] can be part of an international community’s effort to
support the stability of a united Ukraine
going forward, which is not only in the interest of the people of Ukraine and the international community, but
also in Russia’s
interest.”
By now, Russian President
Vladimir Putin is accustomed to Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, National
Security Adviser Susan Rice, et al. telling the Kremlin where its interests
lie, and I am sure he is appropriately grateful. Putin is likely to read more
significance into these words of Obama:
“The United
States will stand with the international community in
affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine
… and we will continue to coordinate closely with our European allies.”
Fissures in Atlantic Alliance
There are bound to be fissures in
the international community and in the Western alliance on whether further
provocation in Ukraine
is advisable. Many countries have much to lose if Moscow uses its considerable economic
leverage over natural gas supplies, for example.
And, aspiring diplomat though she
may be, Victoria Nuland presumably has not endeared herself to the EC by her
expressed “Fuck the EC” attitude.
Aside from the most servile
allies of the U.S.
there may be a growing caucus of Europeans who would like to return the
compliment to Nuland. After all does anyone other than the most extreme neocon
ideologue think that instigating a civil war on the border of nuclear-armed Russia
is a good idea? Or that it makes sense to dump another economic basket case,
which Ukraine
surely is, on the EU’s doorstep while it’s still struggling to get its own
economic house in order?
Europe has other reasons to feel
annoyed about the overreach of U.S.
power and arrogance. The NSA spying revelations – that continue, just like the
eavesdropping itself does – seem to have done some permanent damage to
transatlantic relationships.
In any case, Obama presumably
knows by now that he pleased no one on Friday by reading that flaccid statement
on Ukraine.
And, more generally, the sooner he realizes that – without doing dumb and
costly things – he can placate neither the neocons nor the R2P folks (naively
well meaning though the latter may be), the better for everyone.
In sum, the Nulands of this world
have bit off far more than they can chew; they need to be reined in before they
cause even more dangerous harm. Broader issues than Ukraine are at stake. Like it or
not, the United States can benefit from a cooperative relationship with Putin’s
Russia – the kind of relationship that caused Putin to see merit last summer in
pulling Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire on Syria, for example, and in helping
address thorny issues with Iran.
© 2014 Consortium News
Ray
McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he
prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National
Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals.
UKRAINE,
RUSSIA, FOSSIL FUELS, US/NATO ROLE
Global Network [globalnet@mindspring.com]
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
1:11 AM
LIGHTING THE
FIRES FOR CHAOS IN UKRAINE
A couple of
people have wondered if I exaggerated the possibility of war with Russia over Ukraine. I don't think so -
in fact I would suggest that the proxy war is already underway.
Two of the first things that happened following the US led coup d'etat in Ukraine was the
"new government" declaring that the Russian language would be
outlawed in the country (which has millions of Russians in it) and that the ban
on Nazi symbols and ideology would be lifted. It cannot be said often
enough that many of the violent agitators in Kiev
were in fact the ultra-nationalist descendants of those Ukrainian Nazi
sympathizers who supported Hitler's invasion of the former Soviet
Union during WW II.
But there is even more. NSNBC International reports the following:
Being one
of the most reliable sources of information about the activities of Turkey’s
intelligence service MIT and Turkey’s armed forces, Aydinlik Daily quotes
a “source that has spoken with the newspaper”, alleging, that an intelligence
unit linked to Turkey’s intelligence service MIT has headed to the Ukrainian
Autonomous Republic Crimea to provoke Crimean Turks to act against the ethnic
Russian majority and Russian interests in the autonomous republic. The
source reported that the deployment of the Turkish unit has been coordinated
with both the USA
and EU.
Translated this essentially means that for all the moralistic talk coming from
the Obama administration about how Russia should not be intervening in Crimea,
the US-NATO are, and have been, deeply embedded in the drive to take over
Ukraine.
Russian intelligence obviously is aware that this "low intensity"
warfare is now being directed by US-NATO. That is why Putin asked his
governing body for permission to move Russian forces into the Crimea
to stabilize the situation.
I am indeed a lifelong peace activist. I don't support war. But I
also have always believed that someone under attack has the right to defend
himself or herself. Whether they were the Native Americans; people in Nicaragua being attacked by the US
funded and trained Contras; the Syrian government now under attack by a CIA and
Saudi Arabian funded and trained Al Qaeda forces; or anywhere else - they have
a right to defend their lands.
This morning I watched a bit of mainstream TV news just to get a feel for what
the talking heads were saying. Here are some of the things I heard:
- We must put economic sanctions on Russia
- Putin does "not care" what the US thinks
- We must "roll back this Russian invasion"
- Putin is not in touch with reality
- It's almost like we are dealing with North Korea
- Putin is "unstable"
- There is "confusion in Moscow"
- Putin is clumsy
- There could be a military collision
- US should help bail out Ukraine
The video of Victoria Nuland speaking last December, on a
stage decorated with the logos of ExxonMobil and Chevron, is particularly
important as she reveals that the US "invested" $5 billion in this
coup d'etat. There can be no doubt that the US-NATO have pulled this
stunt and is that not a violation of international law to destabilize and
overthrow an elected government? (Even if you don't approve of it?)
Is that not an act of war toward neighboring Russia
and would not Russia
have the right to take measures to stabilize the situation?
Yesterday I watched a video from a news conference where Ukrainian Navy Rear
Admiral Berezovsky (who had just been appointed to that post by the "new
revolutionary government" in Kiev) had come to Crimea and announced that
he was not going to support the coup d'etat and instead pledged himself to the
Crimean government, which is allied to Russia. The mainstream American
media this morning was spinning that story by saying Berozovsky had
"surrendered" to Russia.
As you can see on the map above this whole situation is about natural gas and
oil. Russia's huge
supplies of natural gas are shipped to Europe and other locations by pipelines
that run throughout Ukraine.
ExxonMobil, Chevron and other western oil majors want control of these
resources. Like we've seen in Iraq,
Libya, Venezuela and other places that
have natural resources, Mr. Big is quite willing to destabilize and go to war
if necessary to grab these resources. This is a long-term project by the
US-NATO and they are just getting started.
Mr. Big is a bully and when anyone stands up to
the bully they will be demonized.
Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/
(blog)
John Pilger: The Forgotten Coup - and How the Same Godfather
Rules From Canberra to Kiev
Tuesday,
18 March 2014 09:51 By John Pilger, Truthout | News Analysis
Ukrainian police
with riot gear guard the regional administration building from pro-Russia
demonstrators in the center of Kharkiv,
Ukraine, March
16, 2014. With thousands of heavily-armed Russian troops occupying the
perennially embattled peninsula, the voters of Crimea went to the polls in a
public referendum on secession from Ukraine that Western leaders have
declared illegal and vowed to punish with economic sanctions. (Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York
Times)
Since 1945, dozens of governments,
many of them democracies, have met a fate similar to that of the elected
government of the Ukraine,
usually with bloodshed, says John Pilger.
Washington's role in the fascist
putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those
who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens
of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with
bloodshed.
Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth
with fewer people than Wales,
yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s, it was regarded in Washington as a
"strategic threat." The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the
leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck?
The great game of
dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US "ally." This is
demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington's
coups - in Australia.
The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments
that believe a "Ukraine"
or a "Chile"
could never happen to them.
Australia's deference to the United States makes Britain, by comparison, seem a
renegade. During the American invasion of Vietnam - which Australia had pleaded
to join - an official in Canberra voiced a rare complaint to Washington that
the British knew more about US objectives in that war than its antipodean
comrade-in-arms. The response was swift: "We have to keep the Brits
informed to keep them happy. You are with us come what may."
This dictum was rudely set aside in 1972 with the election of
the reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Although not regarded as
of the left, Whitlam - now in his 98th year - was a maverick social democrat of
principle, pride, propriety and extraordinary political imagination. He
believed that a foreign power should not control his country's resources and
dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to "buy back the
farm" and speak as a voice independent of London
and Washington.
On the day after
his election, Whitlam ordered that his staff should not be "vetted or
harassed" by the Australian security organization, ASIO - then, as now,
beholden to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned
the Nixon/Kissinger administration as "corrupt and barbaric," Frank
Snepp, a CIA officer stationed in Saigon at
the time, recalled: "We were told the Australians might as well be
regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators."
Victor Marchetti,
the CIA officer who had helped set up Pine Gap - a joint US-Australian
satellite tracking station in the center of Australia - later told me a
"threat to close Pine Gap caused apoplexy in the White House. Consequences
were inevitable . . . a kind of Chile
was set in motion."
The CIA had just
helped General Pinochet crush the democratic government of another reformer,
Salvador Allende, in Chile.
In 1974, the
White House sent Marshall Green to Canberra
as ambassador. Green was an imperious, very senior and sinister figure in the
State Department who worked in the shadows of America's "deep state."
Known as the "coupmaster," he had played a central role in the
1965 coup against President Sukarno in Indonesia - which cost up to a
million lives. One of his first speeches in Australia was to the Australian
Institute of Directors and was described by an alarmed member of the audience
as "an incitement to the country's business leaders to rise against the
government".
Pine Gap's
top-secret messages were decoded in California
by a CIA contractor, TRW. One of the decoders was a young Christopher Boyce, an
idealist who, troubled by the "deception and betrayal of an ally,"
became a whistleblower. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated the
Australian political and trade union elite and referred to the Governor-General
of Australia, Sir John Kerr, as "our man Kerr."
MORE
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22527-the-forgotten-coup-and-how-the-same-godfather-rules-from-canberra-to-kiev
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
John
Pilger is an Australian-born, London-based journalist, filmmaker and author.
For his foreign and war reporting, ranging from Vietnam
and Cambodia to the Middle
East, he has twice won Britain's
highest award for journalism. For his documentary films, he won a British
Academy Award and an American Emmy. In 2009, he was awarded Australia's human rights prize, the
Sydney Peace Prize. His most recent film, Utopia,
will be broadcast at 10:35 PM December 19, 2013, on ITV in Britain and will open in Australia in January 2014.www.johnpilger.com
Ukraine Is About Oil. So Was World War I
Robert Freeman, Common Dreams, Reader Supported News, March 8,
2014
Freeman writes: "Ukraine
is a lot more portentous than it appears. It is fundamentally about the play
for Persian Gulf oil. So was World War I. The
danger lies in the chance of runaway escalation, just like World War I."
READ
MORE
MARK SWANEY
(leader of Arkansas’
Green Party)
ANALYSIS
BY MARK SWANEY 3-9-14
Dr. Bennett,
I am certainly no expert on the situation; however, of course, I
do have some ideas on what I read from both the mass media and the
opposition. Here it is. First, there are factors other than the
familiar argument that this conflict is about resources, specifically natural
gas pipelines. I don’t discount
that. The oil and gas companies, the carbon energy industry, are always
interested in whatever carbon resources may become available to them – that is
true wherever there are carbon resources (everywhere), whatever the situation.
In addition the driving factors in this particular, current
“crisis” in Ukraine and Russia
are two.
One – politics. Putin seeks to restore Russia to its previous position
before the breakup in 1990. He, and every other future leader of Russia,
will (foolishly) want to do that like water wants to run down hill. And, just as naturally, the USA, foolishly, will seek to inhibit Russia
from regaining its’ “lost” territory. Also, there is the tattered remains
of the principal of not using force to change national boundaries, and instead
resorting to the UN to settle problems. The USA is trying (in this case) to
defend that principal. However, after Iraq,
Libya, Afghanistan, Panama,
Grenada, and so on, the USA
has lost its claim to righteousness in this area, so Kerry’s fulminations fall
on deaf ears overseas, even among our allies. That might be a good thing.
Two – ethnic conflict. This is the triggering cause.
Ukraine is not ethnically
homogenous, and in eastern Europe (think the former Yugoslavia) ethnic differences are
taken very, very, seriously, and for the good reason that such differences have
resulted in huge amounts of bloodshed in the past when one group dominated the
government and generally abused the other group(s) in the country. So,
for political reasons, the USA
is backing one side of an ethnic conflict. Those people we are backing
are not necessarily protesting, engaging in an uprising/revolution, because
they are being, or have been, oppressed by Russia. They want to rule the
roost, they were outvoted in the last election in 2010, and they wanted to, and
have, reversed that election. I think that the real motives of the
“western” Ukrainians was demonstrated when you note that they voted to outlaw
the Russian language. This was highly provocative, and I think was an
important factor in the counter-revolution that Russia
has taken to “defending” in Crimea.
What should we be advocating? Well, I think we should
advocate a UN solution. That won’t likely happen because the UN can be
stymied by the veto of Russia
in the Security Council, nevertheless, there should be an effort made through
the General Assembly. I think also that the actual real, and practical
solution has already happened and can’t be reversed, and should not be, and
that is that Russia keeps
the Crimea. That is what the majority of
the people there want, so why is it a problem? There will be a referendum
in Crimea that Russia
will win, why challenge it, especially since there is nothing that we can do
about it?
We should advocate against sanctions against Russia. No blood has been
spilled in Crimea, the Russians have not
killed people. With some cooler heads prevailing, (they will have to
since we have no other option) the status of Crimea should be allowed to remain
as it is – Crimea should be recognized as part of Russia. Sanctions against
this action of Putin’s are overkill, will hurt us and Russia, may cause a new
“cold war” that is in no one’s interest, and sanctions are in any case not
going to be effective. Putin should not have acted in the precipitous
manner that he did. It was clumsy, typical of Russia. He could have gotten
all that he wanted without the drama, but the Russians are nothing if not
clumsy and dramatic. The USA
should not have turned the situation into an “us vs them” type of issue – the
ethnic aspirations of the western Ukrainians are just not worth it.
I see no reason that Russia
and the USA
should not be allies. Putin is a thug, a gangster, and a crude
fellow. In other words, a typical world leader. We should make a
deal with Russia, as it will
strengthen our ability to influence the Russian public opinion, which will make
it harder, not easier, for Putin to gain support inside Russia itself. All we are
doing now with these histrionics of Kerry and Obama (mostly for domestic
politic considerations), is to strengthen Putin in the eyes of the average Russian,
something that is not in our interest. We are, again, shooting ourselves
in the foot.
Mark
[haw-info] HAW Notes 3/13/14:
Links to recent articles of interest
haw-info-bounces@stopthewars.org on behalf of
Jim O'Brien [jimobrien48@gmail.com]
Links to Recent Articles of Interest
"Ukraine Between
'Popular Uprising for Democracy' and 'Fascist Putsch'"
By David Mandel, MRZine, posted March 12
"America's Dien Bien Phu
Syndrome"
By John Prados, History News Network, posted March
12
"We're Just Not That
Special: What the Crisis with Russia Reveals about USA's Age-Old
Self-Obsession"
By Andrew J.
Bacevich, Politico
Magazine, posted March 5
The author teaches history and international relations at Boston University.
"Ukraine, Putin, and the
West"
By "The
Editors" (of n + 1 magazine), posted March 5
An in-depth article steeped in history. The website lists the
editors as Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, and Nikil Saval.
“Ukraine–A Fight We Can’t Win
and Russia Can’t Lose”
By John A. Mazis, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, posted March 5
The author teaches history at Hamline University.
THE
FOLLOWING WERE SENT TO ME BY COMMON DREAMS MARCH 8, 2014
THE
FOLLOWING WERE SENT TO ME BY FAIR TV ON MARCH 8, 2014
