Taking the Low Road to War

Washington and the Corporate Media are in Full Propaganda Mode on Ukraine

Unfortunately, self-righteous “exceptionalism” makes the sanctimonious complaints by US leaders plausible to many brainwashed Americans

Biden: If sleaze is a qualification for high political office in the US, he’s fully qualified.

by DAVE LINDORFF

_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).

OpEds: Does Washington want war with Russia?

Kerry sanctimoniously accusing Russia of breaking recent agreements.

BY BILL VAN AUKEN. wsws.org

_Does Washington want a war with Russia? A review of recent US actions surrounding the crisis in Ukraine clearly poses what would have once seemed an unthinkable question. The Obama administration is playing a very dangerous game of Russian Roulette.

In the last 48 hours, the Pentagon has announced the deployment of US paratrooper units to Poland and the three former Baltic republics of the Soviet Union—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—bringing US troops to Russia’s very border. Another American warship has been dispatched to the Black Sea and more US forces are slated to deploy to Ukraine itself this summer under an exercise known as Operation Rapid Trident.

These military moves by Washington are unfolding in the context of an acute crisis within Ukraine that, thanks to the machinations of Washington and its puppets, threatens to erupt into full-blown civil war.

Less than one week after signing a joint statement with Russia, the US and the European Union in Geneva pledging to end all violence in Ukraine and disarm illegal groups, the US puppet regime in Kiev has ordered its military to carry out an “anti-terrorist” crackdown against the restive Russian-speaking population in the country’s industrial southeast. To that end it has dispatched not only troops, tanks and warplanes, but also armed thugs from the neo-fascist Right Sector.

The Putin government in Moscow, which has desperately searched for an accommodation with Washington, appears to be waking up to the deadly seriousness of the situation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned in an English-language interview with the state-run RT television channel Wednesday that his government would treat an attack on Russian citizens in Ukraine as an attack on Russia itself. He raised as a precedent the August 2008 offensive launched by the government of Georgia on Russians in South Ossetia, to which Russia responded by intervening militarily to repel Georgian forces.

Clashes between pro-Russian demonstrators and local police in Donetsk.

The implication that the Russian government would carry out a similar intervention to stop Ukrainian troops from slaughtering Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbas region should be treated with the utmost seriousness.

In the interview, Lavrov also observed, referring to the actions of the government in Kiev, that “the Americans are running the show in a very close way.” This is indisputable. The regime itself is the product of a protracted American intervention in the country’s internal affairs, with some $5 billion in so-called “democracy promotion” funding pumped into Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

These efforts culminated in the fomenting of a right-wing opposition movement to destabilize the Russian-aligned government of President Viktor Yanukovych by means of street violence. When a deal was brokered between the opposition and Yanukovych, Washington ensured that it was scuttled and the elected president overthrown by fascist paramilitary forces.

The prime minister of the regime brought to power by the February 22 fascist-led coup, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was handpicked by US officials, who affectionately referred to him as “Yats.”

The point person for this operation has been US Undersecretary of State for Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a former chief security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and the wife of Robert Kagan, the founding chairman of the Project for a New American Century. She has brought to Ukraine and to Russia itself the same policy of aggressive war that was implemented in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The way in which Washington calls the shots has been demonstrated in an even more sinister fashion with the launching of the first abortive “counterterrorist” operation in the Donbas in the immediate aftermath of a covert trip to Kiev by CIA Director John Brennan, and then its resumption in the immediate aftermath of this week’s visit by Vice President Joseph Biden.

From start to finish, the Ukraine crisis has been instigated by US imperialism. Every action Washington has taken has been directed at exacerbating and intensifying this crisis. The longer this crisis goes on, the clearer it becomes that US policy is directed not so much at Ukraine as at Russia itself. Ukraine, it would seem, is meant merely to provide the pretext for a war with Russia.

Short of that, it would be used to force a humiliating capitulation by Moscow that would only set the stage for redoubled aggression aimed at Russia’s dismemberment and transformation into a powerless semi-colony.

Presumably, those in the White House and the Pentagon believe that such a conflict would stop short of a nuclear war, but who knows?

The threat of a US war on Russia is also apparent in the flood of war propaganda being unleashed upon the public. Vladimir Putin is being subjected to the same kind of demonization previously reserved for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, while the State Department and its faithful scribes at the New York Times serve up “photographic evidence” of Russian troops in Ukraine that has all the authenticity of similar “proofs” of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.”

What underlies the US war drive? In the run-up to the Ukraine crisis, Washington had grown increasingly incensed by Moscow’s role in blocking US war plans against both Syria and Iran, not to mention Putin’s granting of asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Earlier, there was the fiasco that Moscow dealt Washington in the US-backed 2008 war launched by Georgia against South Ossetia. The events in Ukraine suggest that US imperialism has embarked on a strategy to eliminate Russia as an obstacle to its drive to assert hegemony over the Middle East and, more broadly, the landmass of Eurasia.

There are also internal factors driving Washington to war. Social contradictions within the United States have reached a dangerous intensity. Masses of working people continue to bear the brunt of the capitalist economic crisis, even as Wall Street recoups its losses from the 2008 collapse and grows richer than ever. More and more fingers are pointing at the super-rich as the party responsible for unprecedented social inequality and misery in America.

As so often in the past, war provides an external outlet for internal social pressures and the danger of domestic unrest. Under conditions of overwhelming popular hostility to military intervention, one thing is certain: a war with Russia would rapidly lead to the shredding of the Constitution, the abrogation of democratic rights, the outlawing of political opposition and a massive escalation of police state measures.

The greatest danger would be to underestimate the threat of war. Even if it is averted or postponed in the immediate instance, the profound contradictions of the imperialist system make the catastrophe of a nuclear Third World War not just a danger, but an inevitability, outside of the working class mobilizing its strength internationally in a unified movement to put an end to capitalism.

Bill Van Auken is a high official in the Social Equality Party, publisher of wsws.org.

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NOTE: The author wishes to distribute the following information:

It is to prepare such a struggle that the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site are holding an International May Day Online Rally on May 4. We urge workers and youth from every country to join in this common forum and discussion on forging the international revolutionary socialist movement that is so urgently needed. Register today at internationalmayday.org.

Shilling for Wall Street

By Mike Krauss

What is at stake in the Ukraine?

The barricades outside the Donetsk regional administration building are plastered with anti-fascist posters. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

_Paul Craig Roberts is a former senior member of the Reagan administration and former editor of the Wall Street Journal who fearlessly exposes the continuing corruption of the government in Washington. He coined a phrase to describe the U.S. corporate dominated media: “presstitute media.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently provided a good example of what Roberts is talking about.

In his column, Friedman explained the crisis in the Ukraine as the failure of the “West” (the U.S. and its European allies) to confront “Putanism” — meaning those Russian “bullies” who Washington says decided to invade and annex parts of the Ukraine when the former and thoroughly corrupt Ukrainian president was, as Friedman put it, “overthrown.”

The implication is that the Ukrainian people were making progress to freedom and democracy which Russia wanted to prevent.

That is a total distortion. And Friedman knows it. He must, because I know it. And all I had to do to know it was read something other than the Washington briefings put out to the national network of talking heads.

With a little reading, Friedman would have known that the former Ukrainian president was no more corrupt that his opposition; that he had been bought by Washington to sign up with the European Union, that he backed out of the deal and that because of that, our “freedom loving” government in Washington organized and financed the coup that overthrew him.

It’s all on tape. Turns out the U.S. isn’t the only government that spies, and European spies published the conversation of the U.S. “diplomats” who were helping to organize the coup.

Why did the corrupt Ukrainian president back out of his deal with the U.S. and the E.U.? Because a lot of Ukrainians did the math: Washington equals Wall Street, equals austerity, equals pension grabs and fire sale asset sell-offs, equals Iceland, Ireland, the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Italy and most famously Greece, equals government of by and for Wall Street and the one percent.

So while the U.S. was busy organizing a coup that put another corrupt president in power in the Ukraine, who immediately signed off on a Western “aide” package — meaning expensive loans to be paid back in austerity — those Ukrainians with ties to Russia ran back to Mother Russia, or in this case, daddy — that nasty Putin.

And what Friedman also knows is that Putin didn’t even have to ask. Ukrainian politicians organized a referendum in that part of the Ukraine that had always been Russian, got the vote they expected and turned up on Putin’s door step with a done deal.

This made Wall Street very unhappy. Mind you, looting the Ukrainians is not going to produce the really big bucks looted from Americans and Western Europeans. But a billion here and a billion there — it adds up.

So Washington immediately turned up the heat, moving fighter jets from Italy to Poland (minutes from Moscow, you understand) and taking other aggressive moves, all the while complaining of Russian aggression that never happened.

Meanwhile, back in the Ukraine, the guy Washington put in power turns out to be not only as corrupt as his predecessor, but also a Nazi thug. But, hey, you work with what you have, and Ukraine’s central bank dutifully raised interest rates almost fifty percent. Why? Economic reform? Oh, please.

This gave Wall Street another place to invest, as opposed to the low interest American market, which the Fed keeps at low interest to protect Wall Street’s income from municipal swaps. Now Wall Street has another puppet state to loot by lending some part of the almost interest free trillions it got from the Fed.

This is the kind of information that a reasonably able reader can come across, except perhaps in the New York Times.

It gets better. Those freedom loving Ukrainians that Washington bought for Wall Street are in line for another $1 billion and even more “economic reform.” Lucky them. While those that went back to Russia just had their pensions — Social Security — increased.

Let’s simplify the math for the reading challenged pundits like Friedman: Washington equals Wall Street and the Western banking cartel, equals the looting of any nation they can get their hands on, any way they can.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Krauss is a thirty-year veteran of international logistics and distribution and is a director of the Public Banking Institute:www.publicbankinginstitute.org .

Author of the forthcoming novel “Pursuits of Happiness,” a director of the Public Banking Institute and chairman of the Pennsylvania Project. Mike is an international transportation and logisics executive with broad experience in U.S. government and politics. Mike has lived in the first world and the third world, traveled widely and done business on five continents.

Author’s Website: www.papublicbankproject.org

Obama Endorses a Forgery

The Smoking Pop-Gun

Kerry shooting his self-righteous lying mouth off.

Kerry shooting his self-righteous deceiving mouth off.

by DIANA JOHNSTONE

_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.
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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”.

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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

Ukraine: Trying Not to Give Peace a Chance– Again

By Ray McGovern

_The trust between President Obama and President Putin helped avert a U.S. war on Syria and got Iran to agree to limit its nuclear program, but the neocon-driven crisis in Ukraine has dashed hopes of building on that success for a more peaceful world, Obama needs to tell the neocons within his own administration — as well as John Kerry — to cease and desist with their inflammatory rhetoric and their demands for confrontation

Simulpost with Consortium News

President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomes President Barack Obama to the G20 Summit at Konstantinovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 5, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The unnecessary and regrettable conflict between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine brings to mind sad remembrances of important junctures at which I watched — as a citizen and a CIA analyst — chances for genuine peace with Russia frittered away.

How vividly I recall John Kennedy’s inaugural address when he bid us to ask not what our country could do for us, but rather what we could do for our country. Then and there I decided to put in the service of our government whatever expertise I could offer from my degrees in Russian. So I ended up in Washington more than a half-century ago.

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P. Greanville
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The planned mousetrap, shown for example in Dulles’s own handwriting on paper found in his study after his death, didn’t work. Kennedy had warned Dulles emphatically that he would not send U.S. armed forces into the fray. He stuck to that decision, and thereby created a rancid hatred on the part of Dulles, whom Kennedy fired, and from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Kennedy should also have fired. The top generals, whom Deputy Secretary of State George Ball described as a “sewer of deceit,” had been in on the cabal.

The failed invasion prompted Castro to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union, which in turn led to the Cuban missile crisis of October of 1962. I watched with particular attention that seminal event unfold, since I had orders to report to Army Infantry Officer Orientation School at Fort Benning on Nov. 3, 1962. (When we began our training, we had to postpone the segment on highly touted, relatively new weapons — grenade launchers, almost all of which had been scooped up and taken to Key West a few weeks before.)

As James Douglass details in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy’s “failure” to send forces to rescue the paramilitary group on the beach at the Bay of Pigs was a sign of cowardice in the eyes of Allen Dulles; his brother, former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; and the Joint Chiefs.

The peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis disappointed Air Force General Curtis LeMay and colleagues on the Joint Staff who wished to use Moscow’s adventurism as a casus belli — not only to achieve regime change in Cuba, but also to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union itself. Yes, madness — but real enough. (And there’s still some of it around today.)

Kennedy and Khrushchev were acutely aware of how close they had come to incinerating much of the world — and decided to find common ground in order to prevent a re-run of the near-calamity. In a stunningly conciliatory speech at American University on June 10, 1963, Kennedy appealed for a re-examination of American attitudes towards peace, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, famously remarking, “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity.”

The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. on Aug. 5, 1963, and further improvement in relations was expected — and strongly opposed by the cold warriors among the Joint Chiefs. For them it was the last straw when President Kennedy issued two Executive Orders for a staged withdrawal of virtually all U.S. troops from Vietnam. They joined forces with Allen Dulles and others with feelings of revenge or fear that Kennedy was too soft on Communism.

And so, according to the persuasive case made by Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable, they joined in a plot to kill Kennedy and derail for a generation the chance for real peace.

Chance #2 — Reykjavik, 1986

By the next high-profile opportunity for a comprehensive peace in 1986, I had spent most of my CIA career focusing on Soviet foreign policy and was able to tell the senior U.S. officials I was briefing that Mikhail Gorbachev, in my view, was the real deal. Even so, I was hardly prepared for how far Gorbachev was willing to go toward disarmament. At the 1986 summit with President Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, Gorbachev proposed that all nuclear weapons be eliminated within 10 years.

Reagan reportedly almost rose to the occasion, but was counseled to reject Gorbachev’s condition that any research on anti-ballistic missiles be confined to laboratories for that decade. “Star Wars,” the largest and most wasteful defense-industry corporate welfare program, won the day.

I know the characters who, for whatever reason, danced to the tune of “Star Wars” — Reagan’s wistful wish for an airtight defense against strategic missiles, which the most serious engineers and scientists have said from the start, and still say, can always be defeated, and cheaply.

The naysayers to peace included ideologues like CIA Director William Casey and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, windsocks like CIA Deputy Director Robert Gates and one of his proteges, Fritz Ermarth, a viscerally anti-Russian functionary and former Northrop Corporation employee who was a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Soviet and European Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) during Reykjavik.

According to author Jim Mann, several years after Reykjavik, Ermarth reflected on how he had been wrong in being overly suspicious of Gorbachev and how the intuition of Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz had been more perceptive.

As for “Star Wars,” Jack Matlock, whom Ermarth replaced at the White House and NSC, attributed the President’s refusal to compromise on anti-ballistic missile work beyond the laboratory to a mistaken belief that the proposed restrictions would be detrimental to the program. Matlock argued that the restrictions would have had little effect on research that was still in its very early stages. Matlock, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, remains among the most widely respected specialists on Russia since George Kennan.

A career Foreign Service officer, Matlock missed the opportunity that Ermarth had to be initiated into the ethos of defense contractors like Northrop. According to its website: “From detection to tracking to engagement, Northrop Grumman is bringing its entire suite of expertise in systems integration, high-tech weaponry, and domain knowledge to bear on the challenge of a layered missile defense capability.”

Also, in contrast to Matlock, Robert Gates was elected a director of Northrop Grumman on April 24, 2002, during one of his private-sector breaks between top jobs in the national security apparatus.

So, the Reykjavik summit was another blown chance for real peace that would have been beneficial for the world — but for Northrop Grumman, not so much.

Chance #3 — The Soviet Union Falls Apart

By the late 1980s and early 1990s with the crumbling of the Soviet bloc and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, another opportunity for genuine peace and nuclear disarmament presented itself, but blowing such chances had become predictable.

The failure of the Communist regimes in the U.S.S.R. and in Eastern Europe brought with it a unique opportunity to create the kind of peace that Europe had not seen in modern times. It was an historic moment. President George H. W. Bush sensed this, even before the Berlin Wall fell, when he told a German audience in Mainz on May 31, 1989, “the time is ripe for Europe to be whole and free.”

To his credit, President Bush, the elder, refused to gloat over the historic concessions being made by Soviet President Gorbachev. Bush said he would not dance in celebration of the Berlin Wall coming down and assured Gorbachev that he had “no intention of seeking unilateral advantage from the current process of change in East Germany and in other Warsaw Pact countries.”

In early February 1990, Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev there would be “no extension of NATO’s forces one inch to the East,” provided that the Russians agreed that a united Germany could become a member of NATO.

As historian Mary Elise Sarotte has pointed out, “Such statements helped to inspire Gorbachev to agree, on Feb. 10, 1990, to internal German unification” — a bitter pill to swallow when earlier 20th Century history is taken into account. The undertaking not to push NATO east was in the nature of a gentlemen’s agreement; nothing was committed to paper, and as the years went by, so did the gentlemen.

While U.S. media have generally ignored this sordid history, one can find chapter and verse in Steve Weissman’s recent article, “Exposing the Cold War Roots of America’s Coup in Kiev.” And Der Spiegel published an even more detailed account in November 2009 in “Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?”

Double-Cross?

It didn’t take long, however, for Official Washington’s “triumphalism” to take over. “Free-market” experts were dispatched to Moscow to apply “shock therapy” to the Russian economy, a process that gave rise to a handful of well-connected “oligarchs” plundering the nation’s wealth while poverty spread among the masses of the Russian people.

With similar arrogance, the U.S. government cast aside Russian objections to NATO expansion. On March 12, 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO. On March 29, 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia also became NATO members. (Albania and Croatia joined on April 1, 2009.)

In a major speech in Munich on security policy on Feb. 2, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was reasserting Russian self-respect, was blunt:

“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation to the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”

In no way impressed by Putin’s protestations, and having already added 12 countries on or near Russia’s borders, NATO leaders kept on looking east. On April 3, 2008, at a summit in Bucharest, the heads of state of the alliance issued a declaration that included this relating to NATO plans for Ukraine:

“NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

Though the timing was left up in the air, Russia reacted strongly to the prospect, as anyone with an ounce of sense could have predicted.

Regarding Ukraine, the last straw came almost six years later when the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, neocon prima donna Victoria Nuland, along with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Piatt and others with an interest in stirring up trouble in Ukraine, helped precipitate a putsch that placed U.S. lackeys in charge of a new government for Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014.

In a major speech 10 days later, Putin said:

“Our colleagues in the West … have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. … It happened with the deployment of a missile defense system. …”They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner. … But there is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line. … If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. … Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria and refute the rhetoric of the cold war. … Russia has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.”

Quotes Around Russia’s National “Interests”

Putin’s speech riled those who run the editorial section of the neocon Washington Post, who on March 20 denounced “Putin’s expansionist ambitions” and reviled those who are “rushing to concede ‘Russian interests’ in Eurasia.” The Post lamented that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were among those who have said they recognize such “interests” in Ukraine.

And the Post gave space to former Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley who wants NATO to “restate its commitment of the 2008 Bucharest Communiqué to ultimate NATO membership to Ukraine,” and to “roll back the takeover of Crimea.”

Oddly, abutting Hadley’s drivel was an op-ed penned by former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. After excoriating “Russian aggression [and] Putin’s thuggish tactics,” and comparing him to “a Mafia gangster,” Hitler and Mussolini, Brzezinski nonetheless concluded: “The West should reassure Russia that it is not seeking to draw Ukraine into NATO.”

Henry Kissinger, no peacenik he, wrote the same thing in a Washington Post op-ed of March 5, 2014: “Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.” Such suggestions from seasoned hands are not new. George Kennan, the author of the post WWII “containment policy,” was a fierce opponent of the eastward expansion of NATO.

If today’s Ukraine crisis is not to spin further out of control, President Obama needs to tell the neocons within his own administration — as well as Secretary of State Kerry — to cease and desist with their inflammatory rhetoric and their demands for confrontation.

If the objective of these hardliners was to poison U.S.-Russian relations, they have done a good job. However, if they had illusions that Russia would stand for Ukraine being woven into NATO, they should take a course in Russian history.

Or is it possible that some of the administration’s hawks are offended that Putin provided a path away from a near U.S. military assault on Syria last summer by getting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to agree to surrender his chemical weapons?

In a highly unusual Sept. 11, 2013, op-ed in the New York Times, “A Plea for Caution From Russia,” Putin recalled that our countries “were allies once, and defeated the Nazis together,” adding, “My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust.” [For more on this question of Obama-Putin cooperation, see Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

Not Rising to the Bait

The good news, if there is any coming from the Ukraine mess, is that Putin has avoided returning the personal invective hurled at him. He does not want to burn any bridges. It would hardly be surprising, at this stage, were Putin to badmouth Secretary Kerry, but Putin has shown some restraint, while still putting Kerry in his place.

At a news conference on March 4, Putin was asked about Kerry’s harsh attitude and whether it might be time to recall the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Putin replied:

“The U.S. Secretary of State is certainly an important person, but he is not the ultimate authority that determines the United States foreign policy. … [Recalling our ambassador] would be an extreme measure. … I really don’t want to use it because I think Russia is not the only one interested in cooperation with partners on an international level and in such areas as economy, politics and foreign security; our partners are just as interested in this cooperation. It is very easy to destroy these instruments of cooperation and it would be very difficult to rebuild them.”

Putin also fielded a question from six-year-old Albina toward the end of his marathon “Direct Line” TV conversation on April 17. She asked, “Do you think President Obama would save you if you were drowning?”

Putin:

“I sure hope this doesn’t happen, but you know that there are personal relationships as well as relations between governments. I can’t say that I have a special personal relationship with the U.S. President, but I think he is a decent man and brave enough. So, I think he definitely would.”

However, as for that “growing trust” with President Obama — and the chance for more progress toward a more peaceful world — the U.S. hardliners who exacerbated the political situation in Ukraine, turning it into an international confrontation, appear to have succeeded in blocking the latest best hope for U.S.-Russian cooperation.

But there remains an obvious solution to at least prevent matters from getting worse. The beneficiaries of “regime change” in Kiev, who now find themselves in power at least for the nonce, need to make clear that Ukraine will not attempt to join NATO; and NATO needs to make clear that it has no intention of folding Ukraine into NATO. (Polling shows a lack of enthusiasm among Ukrainians for NATO, in any case.)

This is the most important step to be taken to rebuild trust — or at least prevent the further deterioration of trust — between Obama and Putin.

At his press conference on March 4, President Putin complained about “our Western partners” continuing to interfere in Ukraine. “I sometimes get the feeling,” he said, “that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing. Why do they need to do this?”

Putin has taken some pains to hold the door open to a restoration of trust with President Obama. From the U.S. side, this might be the right time to close down the lab where all those destructive “regime change'” experiments take place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). His website is raymondmcgovern.com