_When it comes to Ukraine the US and the EU are adopting a holier than thou attitude which, unfortunately, leads them not to worship at the altar of truth.

Take the issue of the fuss made over alleged soldiers wearing Russian uniforms. They are not dressed in the smart fatigues of the unmarked Russian soldiers in Crimea, about which President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged he misled us.

What these soldiers, leading the Russian-speaking revolt, are wearing can be bought in any army surplus store. As for the photos Western intelligence has persuaded much of the media to use as evidence, they are hazy and would not be admissible in a court of law.

The Ukranian Security Agency announced that it captured 20 of its Russian counterparts. But then it reduced the number to 10 and then to 3.  But the last figure received much less highlighting from Western governments and media than the first.

The West isn’t innocent in this crisis

How all this “Russian interference” compares with the post Cold War expansion by Nato forces up to Russia’s borders, senior Western politicians’ (including the US ambassador) provocative support for a revolutionary movement that included a healthy contingent of neo-fascists who now have seats in the Ukrainian cabinet, and the funding of opposition forces and NGOs, is to be wondered at.

I’ve long been surprised at the tolerance for Western NGOs based in Russia and China. Imagine the reverse.

The West has no moral or legal capital

As for international law the US, the UK and France ignore it when convenient.

When in 1980 Iraq’s Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran the US and the UK supplied him with weapons and military intelligence. When the US feared the World Court would find against it for mining the harbours of revolutionary Nicaragua it withdrew from the Court.

When Nato was intent on bombing Serbia and later Kosovo it bi-passed the UN Security Council although, according to the Charter, it is the only body that can legalise offensive military activity.

When the Security Council voted against the US, UK and France launching a second Iraq war they ignored its majority vote against.

When the West won a resolution, with Russian support, to protect civilians in the Libya of Muammar al-Gaddafi, it bent Security Council authority and did not stop air attacks until he was overthrown.

Kosovo and Crimea – the latter at least wasn’t bombed

The Russians were furious. Ironically, when most Western nations decided to recognise Kosovo as a state independent of Serbia against the wishes of Russia and even some EU members such as Spain, they gave a hostage to fortune. Russia is now able to say over Crimea we are only doing what you did over Kosovo.

The trouble with behaving like this is that international law and the Security Council don’t, like an elastic band, return to their original shape when stretched. So when it came to Crimea, where Russia was arguably in the wrong, many influential countries in the world, such as India, China, South Africa, Brazil and Israel kept silent and did not vote to back the Western condemnation. (Neither did they support Russia.)

Self-defeating to lose Russia

Losing Russia through mismanagement of a crisis is not a very clever thing to do.

It means that there will be no more nuclear disarmament for as far into the future as one can see. Trade and financial exchange with Russia’s big and growing market will be hit by sanctions.

Nationalism in Russia, even among the intelligentsia, is rising fast. (Remember how, after 9/11, 80% of Russians supported the US.) Russia and China will become closer.

The US and the EU are shooting themselves in the foot. Former president, Richard Nixon, the author of detente, is presumably turning in his grave. He tried to persuade President Bill Clinton, gung-ho on expanding Nato to Russia’s borders, despite an American promise not to, to go easy.

President Barack Obama, after steering well clear of Clinton-type policy, now is in danger of being dragged down by a similar one. Is he downplaying the many ways Russia cooperates with the West?

Russia provides transport on its rockets to the International Space Station, which no other nation is capable of doing at the moment. It supplies engines to US space rockets. It cooperates with the West in combating Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

It has granted permission for US war materials en route to Afghanistan to use Russian trains. It has given its permission for overflying to Afghanistan. (Russia shares an interest with Nato in Afghanistan since it lost a million men in its own foolish war there.) Russian support is now needed in the next delicate stage of Nato withdrawal.

With Syria it persuaded Bashar Al-Assad to give up its chemical weapons and now has moderated its arms shipments.

Not least, it is a positive diplomatic force in pushing Iran to prove to the world community that it has no program to build nuclear weapons.

Does the West really want to lose Russia?

Jonathan Power is a columnist and associate at the Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research in Lund Sweden.

© Jonathan Power 2014

_The lies, propaganda and rank hypocrisy emanating from Washington, and echoed by the US corporate media regarding events in Ukraine are stunning and would be laughable, but for the fact that they appear to be aimed at conditioning the US public for increasing confrontation with Russia – confrontation which could easily tip over the edge into direct military conflict, with consequences that are too dreadful to contemplate.

It would be beyond ironic if, a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of nearly half a century of Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction, during all of which time US and Russian soldiers never fought against each other, we now ended up with soldiers from our two countries actually doing battle with each other, instead of just fighting proxy wars.

For now, perhaps out of sheer unwillingness to accept that dreadful possibility, I’m choosing to look for the humor in this conflict.

When it comes to the US, the laughs are easy to find.

Start with Vice President Joe Biden, a guy who has always been hard to take seriously. I mean, we’re talking about a politician who in 1988 had to quit running for president when he was caught lifting his life story from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Still, Biden outdid even himself on his current visit to Ukraine when he called on Russia to back off in its support of pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine saying that, “No nation should threaten its neighbors by amassing troops along the border.”

This from the man who is one heartbeat from the presidency of a nation that doesn’t just have an army and a navy and an airforce along its southern shore threatening its neighbor Cuba, but actually has its navy based on Cuban territory, which it refuses to leave, despite having long ago run out its lease. And the US doesn’t just threaten. It acts, most recently by attempting to fund a fake Cuban “Twitter” operation called ZunZuneo (Hummingbird Tweet) designed to enable and encourage anti-Cuban government activists to anonymously organize and create chaos.

But Biden’s not alone.

There’s US Secretary of State John Kerry, who famously condemned Russia for supporting the self-determination of residents of Crimea in separating themselves from Ukraine, encouraging a referendum in which the vast majority of that Ukranian state voted to have Crimea leave Ukraine and be annexed to Russia. Kerry called Russia’s actions in Crimea, which involved no significant violence, an “incredible act of aggression,” and then went on to say, “You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”

Whoa! This knee-slapper was said with a dour straight face by the top diplomat of a country that in early years of the current century has already invaded not one but two countries — Iraq and Afghanistan — and bombed the crap out of them, destroying both and killing over a million innocent people. As Kerry surely knows, the United States also routinely sends fighter-bombers and missile-launching drone aircraft to bomb and kill people (often civilians) in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – all countries with which the US is not even at war!

And then there’s our president, Barack Obama, who accuses Russia of “intervening in Ukraine.” Of course, we know that under Obama’s leadership, the US has, through the CIA and USAID, been intervening in Ukraine for years to the tune of $5 billion dollars used to support the people who just recently overthrew that country’s elected government, is actively “intervening” in the same way in Venezuela, seeking to spark a coup against the elected president there, and in fact, considers it America’s “god-given” right to intervene in any country of the world where it doesn’t like the government in power, or where a government shows the least bit of resistance to toeing the US line.

US policies and actions and the official statements defending them have gotten so ridiculous that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you hear these warmongering slimeballs speak.

Sadly, their historically challenged, fatuous and pathetically propagandistic attacks on Russian behavior in Ukraine are reported seriously and without question by this country’s lickspittle corporate media, which are proving to be every bit as much propaganda organs of the state as were Pravda and Izvestia in the old Soviet Union.

Indeed, the corporate media take things even further. Take the New York Times. On Monday, the country’s leading newspaper ran a page-one piece by one of its most shameless hacks, Michael R. Gordon [1], co-authoried by colleague Andrew Kramer. This article breathlessly claimed that analysis of photos obtained by the paper “proved” that Russian special forces soldiers who had been photographed in action in Chechnya and in Georgia years ago could be seen now in eastern Ukraine pretending to be pro-Russian Ukrainians. Never mind that the blurry photos of bearded men in camo displayed as “evidence” could have been almost anyone, or could have been Russians who live in Ukraine or who were Russian military veterans who had gone there as volunteers. Gordon, who earlier played a particularly odious role at the paper in promoting, along with the execrable Judith Miller, the Bush/Cheney lie about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq back in 2002/3, failed to note that there are US mercenaries (mostly former US special forces soldiers) currently working for the Ukrainian “government” — almost certainly on the payroll of one US agency or another.

(The Times editors, in 2004, were forced to publicly rebuke Miller and Gordon for their shoddy propagandistic articles alleging Iraqi WMDs [2], though they didn’t name the two reporters. Miller was eventually forced to leave the paper, but Gordon was allowed to stay on, and apparently continues in his role as staff propagandist).

Today, the Times had to publish – albeit shyly buried on page 9 – an article backing away from its day-earlier page-one “exclusive,” [3] conceding that the photographic evidence of Russian special forces operating in Ukraine was actually nothing of the sort. In fact, one key picture, alleged on Tuesday to have been taken in Russia, purporting to show camo-clad fighters later photographed operating in eastern Ukraine, was actually taken in Ukraine too, thus proving nothing. The freelance photographer who had taken the alleged Russian image came forward to announce where the venue actually was, and to complain that his work had been appropriated without his permission (by the US State Department, which was pushing this particular disinformation campaign).

There has of course been no apology or retraction from Gordon and Kramer (in fact, at the end of their Wednesday back-down piece, they tossed in the unverifiable assertion by State Department flak Jen Psaki, that “there was considerable classified and unclassified information that had led the United State and its Western allies to charge that Russia had intervened in eastern Ukraine.”) Nor has Secretary of State Kerry, who had been promoting the photographic “evidence” of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, apologized.

Neither have Kerry or President Obama apologized for claiming, on the basis of some poorly forged leaflets in eastern Ukraine calling on local Jews to register with the local government, that there was a Nazi-like registration of Jews underway, now that that ugly story has also been proven to be the work of right-wing Ukrainian provocateurs (probably working on the US payroll).

As I said, this deception and clumsy disinformation would all be laughable, except that what these lying thugs in Washington and in America’s newsrooms are doing is trying to prep Americans for military action in Ukraine, which is a country right on Russia’s southern border. And remember we’re talking about military action against Russia — a country that has a formidable nuclear missile force, land and submarine-based, which approximates our own in its deadly power.

Let’s step back a moment and think about this objectively. Suppose there were a rebellion in Cuba, supported by billions of dollars covertly provided by Russia, and that the government of Raul Castro, which has been trying to reach some rapprochement with the US, was overthrown by a pro-Russian coup. Suppose too that the US managed to encourage some Cubans living in the vicinity of the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay to secede from Cuba, and to vote to have their towns annexed by the US. How do readers suppose the US would react if Russia then complained in the UN Security Council and to the Organization of American States that the US was sneaking armed special forces into Cuba to try and get another two-thirds of the island to secede from Havana? How about if Russia also offered “non-lethal aid” to the new coup government and also sent a few warships to patrol in the strait between Cuba and Florida in a “show of resolve”?

Yeah, the US position in Ukraine is laughable, but it is also frightening in its absurdity, because if this Big Lie tactic works and people take it seriously, it could lead to the ultimate disaster: a nuclear war between the two countries that actually have the ability to destroy each other, and the rest of the world with them.

Ha ha. Some joke.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

_There is a joke that I should be bored with by now but I’m going to write it once again, for two reasons. One is that humor receives a better reception than pedantry. The second is that I can’t find a simpler way of expressing the idea.

Man on the street interview:

Q) What do you think is responsible for the ignorance and apathy of the American citizen?

A) I don’t know and I don’t care!

Particularly in the area of foreign policy, Americans seem to display the degree of knowledge and involvement epitomized in the above answer. We know what makes the joke funny, and, I add, we cannot easily dismiss it because we also know it touches on something truthful —  and that leads to another question. Why don’t you know, and why don’t you care?

The best answer seems to be, because my country knows for me, and my country cares for me also.

Trust! It’s a question of trust.

True or False: If you can’t trust your own government, what can you trust?

OK. This isn’t really a true or false proposition, but the answer is, you can trust something else. In the spirit of anarchism, you might trust anything else before submitting to authority. Why? Because authority never gives a damn about you, for one thing, and, for another, because trusting authority is contagious. You’ll soon be trusting everything you see, read, and hear.

If you’ve been reading newspapers, watching television news, or even if you’ve just seen a few political cartoons, you probably know a few things about Vladimir Putin. He’s scheming, iron-fisted (the curtain), and aggressive. What would you expect from a former KGB?

Barack Obama, by contrast, is above board, conciliatory, and anything but aggressive (the Peace Prize). This you know just because you live here.

For those that find Putin’s attitude, in general, and his actions in Crimea, in particular, unfounded and indefensible, there are some things to consider. Such as deeply entrenched government planning policy and historical facts.

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere….We continue to recognize that collectively the conventional forces of the states formerly comprising the Soviet Union retain the most military potential in all of Eurasia; and we do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reincorporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and possibly others….The U.S. must…protect a new order…for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

These words were not intended for public release. They are from the leaked version (before it was softened for public consumption) of the Defense Planning Guidance, published by the New York Times on March 7, 1992. They were read and understood by every Russian involved in foreign policy.

In case anyone is still wondering, the planning doctrine also served notice that, “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”

The neoconservatives behind the planning doctrine are receding from memory and, although they slanted Republican, the doctrine of maintaining American primacy by any means necessary is embraced by the Democratic party as well. It is a fixture of American foreign policy and foreign policy decisions are inexplicable without taking this into account.

The U.S. spent its “peace dividend” from the dissolution of the Soviet Union by doubling down, world hegemony now being a realistic goal. These were heady times for Defense and State. No strong enemies. No strong rivals. How to keep it that way?

Enter NATO (a military alliance), which is best understood by a simple equation, NATO = U.S., because without U.S. funding and direction there would be no NATO. When the Soviet Union was dissolving, a promise was made to Mikhail Gorbachev by the George H. W. Bush administration that, besides a re-unified Germany being allowed to remain in it, NATO would not be extended “one inch to the East”. This was the assurance that the U.S. would not take advantage of the situation and would respect the independence of Moscow’s former allies and republics. This hasn’t quite been the case, but what would you expect from a former CIA?

The year 1999 saw the addition of Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic. In 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were added. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009, bringing the total in the military alliance to 28 member countries.

Long prized by the U.S. for NATO membership are Georgia and especially Ukraine, countries that share Russia’s southwestern border. Ukraine under deposed President Viktor Yanukovych leaned West, but wouldn’t break. It balked at joining NATO, preferring only to cooperate with it on a certain level. This naturally made it pro-Russian.

That affront to American primacy (euphemistically known as “democracy”) led to the U.S. backed February 22 coup that ousted him, and, with the help of the muscle from neo-Nazi militias from western Ukraine’s Right Sektor and Svoboda parties, set up pro-Western Oleksandr Turchynov as interim leader. Some of these militias are now part of “National Guard”, under the auspices of the national security ministry run by four far-right Ukrainian nationalists.

The White House is downplaying references to neo-Nazis in the new government as just so much Russian propaganda. This is something else you probably know. Russians use propaganda. Washington is understandably sensitive about this neo-Nazi business.

NATO is pressing on Russia’s border and Putin is supposed to regard this as a spreading of democracy? A sign of respect for Russian sovereignty and Russian regional interests? Recall the U.S. reaction when Soviet missiles were headed for Cuba, practically igniting nuclear war. We are ringing Russia with military bases little by little.

Putin reacted rationally to the provocation by annexing Crimea, otherwise his Black Sea naval base would become an unprotected pawn. If the U.S. is acting rationally, it could be luring Russia into a war.

James Rothenberg can be reached at: jrothenberg@taconic.net

_On Friday, April 18, President Obama voiced his righteous indignation over anti-Semitic fliers pasted on synagogue walls in the pro-Russian eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk.  The fliers, calling on all Jews to register or face expulsion, had appeared the day before and were instantly denounced by Donetsk leaders as a gross provocation and a forgery. here

The next day, however, Obama “expressed his disgust quite bluntly”.  At least, that is what his hawkish national security advisor, Susan Rice, told the public. “I think we all found word of those pamphlets to be utterly sickening, and they have no place in the 21^st century,” she declared.

This presidential reaction occurred 24 hours after the pamphlet in question had been thoroughly denounced as a fake, not only by the Donetsk leader, Denis Pushilin, who said his signature on the document had been forged, but by local Jewish community leaders and even byThe New Republic, which cannot be accused of indifference to anti-Semitism.

Scarcely had the fake document been glued to a wall than Secretary of State John Kerry mounted his habitual high horse to declare resoundingly that: “In the year 2014, after all of the miles travelled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable, it’s grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable.”

(It is an essential part of the Imperial rhetoric to assert on every such occasion what is or is not acceptable in “the second American century”.)

Now let’s be logical. When John Kerry denounces this document before the ink is dry, when President Obama and Susan Rice publicly endorse this forgery after it has been amply exposed in world media as disinformation, we must logically conclude that this propaganda morsel was a deliberate part of the US strategy to destabilize Ukraine by slandering pro-Russian anti-fascists as anti-Semitic. The purpose is clearly to drown out news of the pro-Nazi sympathies of the Svoboda party and the Right Sector that the US has chosen as anti-Russian allies.  How can top US leaders be perfectly aware of what is written in Ukrainian on a piece of paper glued to a synagogue in Donetsk, and not know what was written in Haaretz and The New Republic?  These endorsements are strong evidence of complicity in the forgery, since it is not credible that Kerry, Rice and Obama were too innocent to suspect a forgery.

I call this the smoking pop-gun.

And meanwhile, while the US neocons try to smear the Eastern Ukrainian anti-fascists as anti-Semites, Benyamin Netanyahu is trying to cozy up to Putin.  The Israeli leader is clever enough to bow out of a losing game.  All those US leaders who constantly pledge their allegiance to Israel are outraged at such disloyalty.

Never before have U.S. leaders been quite so reckless in asserting falsehoods as in this Ukrainian operation.  They have a scenario and they are carrying it out, despite revelations that Victoria Nuland personally selected the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk, that the Kiev snipers who facilitated the putsch the put Yats in office were hired by the pro-Western rebels, that their “freedom fighters” this time are Hitler fans and that about half the population of Ukraine identifies with Russia.
_____________________
Even pro-Israel media denounce the forgery

The following excerpt is from Israelnationalnews.com

Anti-Semitic document a forgery?

But responding to the incident, Denis Pushilin, the pro-Russian protest leader whose signature was on the documents, strenuously denied that he had anything to do with the demands.    

“The documents were handed out in our name but this was a provocation. My signature was forged,” Pushilin said at a press conference on Friday.

Senior Jewish leaders in the region seemed to accept that the appearance of the anti-Semitic literature was likely designed to inflame tensions in Kiev’s shadowy struggle against the eastern separatists.

“What happened of course smells of a provocation. As to who is behind it – that is an open question,” the region’s chief rabbi Pinkhas Vyshedski said.

But reports of the anti-Semitic tracts sparked international concern with US Secretary of State John Kerry branding the distribution of the pamphlets as “grotesque”.

________________
.

Never mind, the show must go on.  They are counting on the vast, bottomless ignorance of the American masses concerning the rest of the world to allow them to get away with anything. The public doesn’t need to know anything about Ukraine, all they need is to be persuaded that it is Goldylocks being threatened by a big bad bear.

But the whole world is not that ignorant.

Notably not the Germans.

All Is Not Quiet on the Eastern Front

German media, who, like other NATO satellites, have been largely following the anti-Putin Russophobe line laid down by Washington, are being besieged by complaints from readers and television spectators.  The German public seems to know where Ukraine is located and what is happening.

Just as John Kerry was reminding the world of US moral leadership in the 21^st century, three hundred German intellectuals addressed a respectful and supportive letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Directly answering Putin’s request for understanding from the German people, the letter recalled that “the Soviet Union had made the decisive contribution to freeing Europe from National Socialism, at an incomparable loss of life,” and was ready in 1990 “to support German reunification, to dissolve the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and to accept united Germany’s membership in NATO”. But the West had failed to honor its agreement, and had rewarded Gorbachev’s generosity by aggressively expanding NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep.

It is fully documented, the letter notes, that “the United States has taken advantage of the justified protests of the Ukrainian population for its own aims”, along the model of other countries such as Serbia, Libya, etc.

Under these circumstances, with some thousand US military bases worldwide and US control of straits and the resulting danger to the Russian Black Sea fleet, the German signatories see the secession of Crimea as “a defensive measure with a clear message: up to here and no farther! The decisive difference with the declaration of independence of Kosovo is that for the latter the precondition was an illegal bombing campaign by NATO – unfortunately with German participation.”

The U.S. Purpose

The German letter recalls that Putin has called for economic cooperation in a “Common European House” from Lisbon to Vladivostok, in which Ukraine could act as an “ideal bridge” for future cooperation between the European Union and a Eurasian Union.

“We are convinced that the purpose of the United States’ massive seizure of influence is to make this bridge function impossible.”

Observing that recent polls show that a majority of Germans understand the Russian reaction to Ukraine events and reject any confrontation with the Russian Federation, the signatories promise, despite the foreseeable difficulties, to do what they can to prevent the splitting of Europe.  They close with personal wishes to Putin for strength, perseverance, wisdom and good luck.

We are certainly not there yet, but it would be some sort of poetic justice if the final historic outcome of the land-grabbing caper by Victoria Nuland, John Kerry, Susan Rice and Samantha Power were to gain control of a divided, quarrelsome and bankrupt Ukraine… and lose control of Germany.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr