{"id":25507,"date":"2015-01-04T03:52:04","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T02:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/norkhosq.net\/?p=25507"},"modified":"2015-01-04T03:52:04","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T02:52:04","slug":"the-crazy-us-%e2%80%98group-think%e2%80%99-on-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/?p=25507","title":{"rendered":"The Crazy US \u2018Group Think\u2019 on Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Russian<\/a>Russian President Vladimir Putin laying a wreath at Russia\u2019s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on May 8, 2014, as part of the observance of the World War II Victory over Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

consortiumnews.com<\/a> – December 18, 2014<\/p>\n

Exclusive: <\/strong>Congress has voted to up the ante in the showdown with Russia over Ukraine,\u00a0embracing a new Cold War and the neocon scheme for \u201cregime change\u201d in Moscow. But \u2013 amid the tough-guy-ism \u2013 there was little consideration of the\u00a0risks from destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia, writes Robert Parry.<\/p>\n

By Robert Parry<\/p>\n

Has anyone in Official Washington thought through the latest foreign policy \u201cgroup think,\u201d the plan to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia? All the \u201csmart\u201d people, including the New York Times editors, are rubbing their hands with glee over the financial crisis being imposed on Russia because of the Ukraine crisis, but no one, it seems, is looking down the road.<\/p>\n

This reckless strategy appears to be another neocon-driven \u201cregime change\u201d scheme, this time\u00a0focused on Moscow with the goal to take down Russian President Vladimir Putin and presumably replace him with some U.S. puppet, a Russian-speaking Ahmed Chalabi perhaps. Since the neocons have never faced accountability for the Iraq disaster \u2013 when the conniving Chalabi was their man \u2013 they are still free to dream about a replay in Russia.<\/p>\n

However, as catastrophic as the Iraq War was especially for Iraqis, the new neocon goal of Russian \u201cregime change\u201d is far more dangerous. If one looks at the chaos that has followed neocon (and \u201cliberal interventionist\u201d) schemes to overthrow governments in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and elsewhere, what might the risks be if such political disorder was created in Russia?<\/p>\n

Since the neocon plans don\u2019t always work out precisely as they dream them up at Washington think tanks or at the Washington Post\u2019s editorial board, what are the chances that some radical Russian nationalist might emerge from the chaos and take command of the nuclear launch codes? As much fun as the Washington tough guys and gals are having today, the prospects for thermo-nuclear war might not be as pleasing.<\/p>\n

And, does anyone really think that cooler heads in Official Washington would prevail in such a crisis? From what we have seen over the past year regarding Ukraine \u2013 not to mention other international hot spots \u2013 it seems that the only game in town is to swagger around, as pumped up as Hans and Franz, just not as amusing.<\/p>\n

You see, the Russians have already experienced what it is like to comply with U.S. economic edicts. That was tried during the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union when experts from Harvard University descended on Moscow with \u201cshock therapy\u201d for the post-communist society. What happened was that a handful of well-connected thieves plundered the nation\u2019s resources, making themselves into billionaire oligarchs while President Boris Yeltsin stayed drunk much of the time and many average Russians faced starvation.<\/p>\n

A key reason why Putin and his autocratic style have such a strong political base is that he took on some of the oligarchs and restructured the economy to improve the lives of many Russians. The neocons may think that they can oust Putin through a combination of economic pain and information warfare but there is a deep understanding among many Russians what a repeat of the Yeltsin years would mean.<\/p>\n

So, even a \u201csuccessful regime change\u201d could\u00a0end up with a more radical figure in charge of Russia and its nuclear arsenal than Putin. But that is the course that Official Washington has chosen to take, with Congress almost unanimously approving a package of harsher sanctions and $350 million in arms and military equipment for Ukraine to wage its \u201canti-terrorism operation\u201d against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Cuba Example<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is some irony here in that just as President Barack Obama finally begins to lift the ineffective, half-century-old U.S. embargo against Cuba, the U.S. Congress and the entire mainstream U.S. news media have jumped on another high horse to charge off against Russia, imposing new economic sanctions and dreaming of\u00a0another \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The promiscuous use of sanctions \u2013 as part of \u201cregime change\u201d strategies \u2013 has become almost an addiction in Washington. One can envision some tough-talking U.S. diplomat confronting the leaders of a troublesome nation by going around the room and saying, \u201cwe sanction you, we sanction you, we sanction you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond the trouble that this pathology creates for American businesses, not sure whether they\u2019re stumbling over one of these sanctions, there is the backlash among countries increasingly trying to circumvent the United States in order to deny Washington that leverage over them. The long-run effect is surely to be a weakening of the U.S. dollar and the U.S. economy.<\/p>\n

However, in the meantime, U.S. politicians can\u2019t seem to get enough of this feel-good approach to foreign disputes. They can act like they\u2019re \u201cdoing something\u201d by punishing the people of some wayward country, but\u00a0sanctions are still short of outright war, so the politicians\u00a0don\u2019t have to attend funerals and face distraught mothers and fathers, at least not the\u00a0mothers and fathers of American soldiers.<\/p>\n

In the past, sanctions, such as those imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, took a fearsome toll, killing some half million Iraqi children, according to United Nations estimates.<\/p>\n

Another\u00a0example of how the sanctioning impulse can run amok has been U.S. policy toward Sudan, where leaders were sanctioned over the violence in Darfur. The United States also supported the secession of oil-rich South Sudan as a further penalty to Sudan.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0the U.S. sanctions on Sudan prevented South Sudan from shipping its oil through pipelines that ran through Sudan, creating a political crisis in South Sudan, which led to tribal violence. The U.S. government responded with, you guessed it, sanctions against leaders of South Sudan.<\/p>\n

So, now, the U.S. government is back on that high horse and charging off to sanction Russia and its leaders over Ukraine, a crisis that has been thoroughly misrepresented in the mainstream U.S. news media and in the halls of government.<\/p>\n

A False Narrative<\/strong><\/p>\n

Official Washington\u2019s \u201cgroup think\u201d on the crisis has been driven by a completely phony narrative of what has happened in Ukraine over the past year. It has become\u00a0the near-monolithic view of insiders that the crisis was instigated by Putin as part of some diabolical scheme to recreate the Russian Empire by seizing Ukraine, the Baltic states and maybe Poland.<\/p>\n

But the reality is that the crisis was initiated by the West, particularly by Official Washington\u2019s neocons, to pry Ukraine away from the Russian sphere of influence and into Europe\u2019s, a ploy that was outlined by a leading neocon paymaster, Carl Gershman, the longtime president of the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 26, 2013, Gershman took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post and pronounced Ukraine \u201cthe biggest prize\u201d and an important interim step\u00a0toward toppling Putin and putting down the resurgent and willful Russia that he represents.<\/p>\n

Gershman, whose NED is financed by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, wrote: \u201cUkraine\u2019s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. \u00a0\u2026 Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. Beyond Gershman\u2019s rhetoric was the fact that NED was funding scores of projects inside Ukraine, training activists, supporting \u201cjournalists,\u201d funding business groups.<\/p>\n

Then, in November 2013, Ukraine\u2019s elected President Viktor Yanukovych balked at an association agreement with the European Union after learning that it would cost Ukraine some $160 billion to separate from Russia. Plus, the International Monetary Fund was demanding economic \u201creforms\u201d that would hurt average Ukrainians.<\/p>\n

Yanukovych\u2019s decision touched off mass demonstrations from western Ukrainians who favored closer ties to Europe. That,\u00a0in turn, opened the way for the machinations by neocons inside the U.S. government, particularly the scheming of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, the wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan.<\/p>\n

Before long, Nuland was handpicking<\/a> the new leadership for Ukraine that would be in charge once Yanukovych was out of the way, a process that was ultimately executed\u00a0by tightly organized 100-man units of neo-Nazi storm troopers bused in from the western city of Lviv. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cNYT Discovers Ukraine\u2019s Neo-Nazis at War.<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

Worsening Crisis<\/strong><\/p>\n

The violent overthrow of President Yanukovych\u00a0led to resistance from south and east Ukraine where Yanukovych got most of his votes. Crimea, a largely ethnic Russian province, voted overwhelmingly to secede from the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia, which had been Crimea\u2019s home since the 1700s.<\/p>\n

When Putin accepted Crimea back into Russia \u2013 recognizing its historical connections and its strategic importance \u2013 he was excoriated by Western leaders and the mainstream U.S. media. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likened him to Hitler, as the narrative took shape that Putin was on a premeditated mission to conquer states of the former Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

That narrative was always fake but it became Official Washington\u2019s conventional wisdom, much like the existence of Iraq\u2019s WMD became what \u201ceveryone knew to be true.\u201d The \u201cgroup think\u201d was again so strong that not even someone as important to the establishment as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger could shake it.<\/p>\n

In an interview last month with Der Spiegel magazine, Kissinger said that \u201cThe annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 91-year-old Kissinger added that President Putin had no intention of instigating a crisis in Ukraine: \u201cPutin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn\u2019t make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead Kissinger argued that the West \u2013 with its strategy of pulling Ukraine into the orbit of the European Union \u2013 was responsible for the crisis by failing to understand Russian sensitivity over Ukraine and making the grave mistake of quickly pushing the confrontation beyond dialogue.<\/p>\n

Kissinger\u2019s remarks \u2013 though undeniably true \u2013 were largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. media and had little or no impact on the U.S. Congress which pressed ahead with its legislation to expand the anti-Russia sanctions, which\u00a0\u2013 along with declining energy prices \u2013 were contributing to a severe economic downturn in Russia.<\/p>\n

The New York Times\u2019 editors spoke for many in their celebration over the pain being inflicted on Russia. In an editorial entitled \u201cThe Ruble\u2019s Fall and Mr. Putin\u2019s Reckoning<\/a>,\u201d the Times wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe blame for this [economic calamity] rests largely with the disastrous policies of President Vladimir Putin, who has consistently put his ego, his territorial ambitions and the financial interests of his cronies ahead of the needs of his country. The ruble fell as much as 19 percent on Monday after the Central Bank of Russia sharply raised its benchmark interest rate to 17 percent in the middle of the night in a desperate attempt to keep capital from fleeing the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince June, the Russian currency has fallen about 50 percent against the dollar. Because Russia relies heavily on imported food and other goods, the decline in its currency is fueling inflation. Consumer prices jumped 9.1 percent last month compared with a year earlier and also increased 8.3 percent in October.<\/p>\n

\u201cRussia\u2019s immediate problems were caused by the recent collapse of global crude oil prices and the financial sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe in an effort to get Mr. Putin to stop stirring conflict in Ukraine. But the rot goes far deeper. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Putin has taken great relish in poking the West. Now that he is in trouble, the rest of the world is unlikely to rush to his aid. On Tuesday, a White House spokesman said that President Obama intends to sign a bill that would authorize additional sanctions on Russia\u2019s energy and defense industries. That bill would also authorize the administration to supply arms to Ukraine\u2019s government.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sensible thing for Mr. Putin to do would be to withdraw from Ukraine. This would bring immediate relief from sanctions, and that would ease the current crisis and give officials room to start fixing the country\u2019s economic problems. The question is whether this reckless leader has been sufficiently chastened to change course.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the reality has been that Putin has tried to keep his distance from the ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, even urging them to postpone a referendum that revealed strong support for the region\u2019s secession from Ukraine. But he has faced a hard choice because\u00a0the Kiev regime launched an\u00a0\u201canti-terrorist operation\u201d against the eastern region, an offensive that took on the look of ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian government\u2019s strategy was to pound eastern cities and towns with artillery fire and then dispatch neo-Nazi and other extremist \u201cvolunteer battalions\u201d to do the dirty work of street-to-street fighting. Amnesty International and other human rights groups took note of the brutality inflicted by these anti-Russian extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cSeeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

Faced with thousands of ethnic Russians being killed and hundreds of thousands fleeing into Russia, Putin had little political choice but to provide help to the embattled people of Donetsk and Luhansk. But Official Washington\u2019s narrative holds that all the trouble in Ukraine is simply the result of Putin\u2019s \u201caggression\u201d and that everything would be just peachy if Putin let the Kiev regime and its neo-Nazi affiliates do whatever they wanted to the ethnic Russians.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not something Putin can really do politically. So, what we\u2019re\u00a0seeing here is the usual step-by-step progress toward a neocon \u201cregime change\u201d scenario, as the targeted foreign demon fails to take the \u201creasonable\u201d steps dictated by Washington and thus must be confronted with endless escalations, all the more severe to force the demon to submit or\u00a0until ultimately the suffering of his people creates openings for \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have seen this pattern with Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein, for instance, and even with Ukraine\u2019s Yanukovych, but the risks in this new neocon game are much greater \u2013 the future of the planet is being put into play.<\/p>\n

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America\u2019s Stolen Narrative,<\/em> either in\u00a0print here<\/a> or as an e-book (from Amazon<\/a> and barnesandnoble.com<\/a>). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry\u2019s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America\u2019s Stolen Narrative<\/em>. For details on this offer, click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n


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