Obama’s Deadly Cold War Legacy
Written by Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com
President Barack Obama and President
Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine talk after statements to the press following
their bilateral meeting at the Warsaw Marriott Hotel in Warsaw, Poland,
June 4, 2014.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Exclusive: President
Obama is endangering his legacy by letting neoconservatives still set
his foreign policy, including the creation of a new and costly Cold War
with Russia that could have been easily avoided and that now risks
spinning off into a nuclear showdown, writes Robert Parry.
Whatever
positive legacy that President Barack Obama might point to – the first
African-American president, the Affordable Care Act, the changed social
attitudes on gay rights, etc. – his ultimate legacy may be defined more
by his reckless stewardship guiding the United States into a wholly
unnecessary new Cold War.
The
costs of this Cold War II will be vast, emptying out what’s left of the
U.S. Treasury in a new arms race against Russia, assuming that the new
East-West showdown doesn’t precipitate a nuclear war that could end all
life on the planet. Already, the United States military has altered its
national security policies to treat Russia as the principal foreign
threat.
“If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,” said General
Joseph F. Dunford Jr., at Senate hearings on his nomination to be the
new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “And if you look at their
[the Russians’] behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.”
Dunford
also recommended shipping U.S. weapons to the post-coup regime in
Ukraine so it can better prosecute its war against ethnic Russian rebels
in the east who have resisted the overthrow of elected President Viktor
Yanukovych and have been deemed “terrorists” by the U.S.-backed
government in Kiev.
“Frankly,”
Dunford said on Thursday, “without that kind of support, they [the new
powers-that-be in Ukraine] are not going to be able to defend themselves
against Russian aggression.”
Which
may prove that no one in Official Washington grasps the concept of
irony any more. While Dunford sticks to the propaganda line about
“Russian aggression” and the Kiev regime wages its “anti-terror
operation” against the ethnic Russians in the east, we now know that
Kiev has dispatched a military force spearheaded by neo-Nazis, who are
eager to ethnically cleanse those ethnic Russians from Ukraine, and
Islamic jihadists with links to Islamic State terrorists.
So,
if you want to talk about “aggression” and “terrorism,” you might start
with the inconvenient truth that the U.S.-beloved government of Ukraine
– which supposedly “shares our values” – is the first European state
since World War II to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to kill other
Europeans – and arguably the first ever to create a combined military
force of Nazis and Islamic militants (described as “brothers” of the
Islamic State). [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”]
Yet,
when Russia helps these endangered ethnic Russians, who saw their
elected president illegally ousted from office in a coup supported if
not sponsored by the United States, that’s “Russian aggression.” And,
when the ethnic Russians resist the new order, which has now sent Nazis
and jihadists to kill them, it’s the ethnic Russians who are the
“terrorists.”
To
push the irony even further, while Dunford decried “Russian aggression”
in connection with a civil war on Russia’s border, he openly declared
that the U.S. military stands ready to bomb Iran — halfway around the
world — to destroy its nuclear facilities. Asked if the U.S. military
had that ability, Dunford said, “My understanding is that we do,
senator.”
An Up-Is-Down World
In
the up-is-down world that is now Official Washington, such
extraordinary and profoundly dangerous statements draw only nodding
approval from all the Important People. In part, that’s because
President Obama has allowed so many false narratives to take hold
regarding Russia, Iran and other nations that there is a Grimm’s
Fairytale quality to it all.
But
the most serious false narrative today is the one about “Russian
aggression.” Whatever one thinks of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he
did not initiate the Ukraine crisis; he reacted to a provocation by
neoconservatives in the U.S. government, especially Assistant Secretary
of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who sought a “regime
change” on Russia’s border.
And,
while there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that the U.S.
intervened in Ukraine, there is no evidence that Putin sought out this
crisis or had any designs to recreate the Russian Empire, two key
elements of the U.S. propaganda campaign. The truth is that by
encouraging and instigating the violent Ukraine coup on Feb. 22, 2014,
the Obama administration struck first.
Putin,
who had been preoccupied with the Sochi Winter Olympics at the time,
was caught off-guard and responded with an emergency national security
meeting on Feb. 23 to decide on what steps were needed to protect the
Russian strategic interests in Crimea, including the historic naval base
at Sevastopol. He was reacting, not instigating.
It
may be that President Obama was also surprised by the political
crisis in Ukraine, since he also was preoccupied by a variety of other
international hot spots, especially in the Middle East. Possibly, he and
Secretary of State John Kerry had given too much leeway to Nuland to
press for the destabilization of the Yanukovych government.
Nuland,
the wife of arch-neocon Robert Kagan who famously promoted “regime
change” in Iraq as a founder of the Project for the New American
Century, pushed the envelope in Ukraine in the cause of achieving her
own “regime change.” She even passed out cookies to anti-government
protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square in fall 2013.
In December 2013, Nuland reminded a
group of Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested
$5 billion in their “European aspirations.” Then, in early February
2014, Nuland was caught in a pre-coup phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing which Ukrainian politicians should be elevated in the new government.
“Yats
is the guy,” Nuland said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed
would become the post-coup prime minister. Dismissing the less
aggressive European Union approach to the crisis, Nuland exclaimed,
“Fuck the EU!” and pondered how to “glue this thing.” Pyatt wondered how
to “midwife this thing.”
Based
on this and other evidence, the reality of what happened in Ukraine was
never hard to figure out. It was a coup with President Yanukovych
forced to flee for his life on Feb. 22, 2014, and extra-constitutional
steps then used to remove him as the nation’s leader. It was reminiscent
of similar U.S.-orchestrated coups – Iran, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras,
etc.
But
the increasingly unprofessional mainstream U.S. news media had already
ditched even a pretense of journalistic objectivity. The media stuck
white hats on the coup-makers and black hats on Yanukovych (and his ally
Putin). The word “coup” became virtually forbidden in the U.S. news
media along with any reference to the neo-Nazis who spearheaded the
coup.
Any
deviation from this “group think” opened you to charges of “Moscow
stooge” or “Putin apologist.” Yet, there were a few people who still
spoke frankly. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence
firm Stratfor, described the overthrow of Yanukovych as “the most blatant coup in history.”
Why the Coup?
The
motive for the coup was also not hard to divine. It was to deliver a
powerful blow to Russia by forcing Ukraine out of Russia’s economic
orbit and thus undermine popular support for Putin, all the better to
build toward another “regime change” in Moscow.
The
plan was laid out on Sept. 26, 2013, by National Endowment for
Democracy President Carl Gershman, a major neocon paymaster who
distributes more than $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money to
undermine governments disfavored by the U.S. — or in Official Washington
speak to engage in “democracy promotion.”
On
the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post, Gershman called Ukraine
“the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward toppling Putin,
who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but
within Russia itself.”
It’s
also important to remember that in 2013 Putin had offended Washington’s
powerful neocons by working with President Obama to avert a U.S.
military strike against Syria over the mysterious sarin gas attack on
Aug. 21, 2013, and by helping to bring Iran to the negotiating table
over its nuclear program. In both cases, the neocons wanted to bomb
those countries to provoke more “regime change.”
So,
Putin’s peacemaking made him the new target – and especially his
cooperation with Obama to reduce international tensions. Ukraine, with
its neuralgic sensitivity for Russians as the historic route for bloody
invasions, was the perfect wedge to drive between the two leaders.
Obama
could have directed the confrontation in a less hostile direction by
insisting on a more balanced presentation of the narrative. He could
have recognized that the violent right-wing coup in Kiev provoked an
understandable desire among the ethnic Russians of Crimea to secede from
Ukraine, a sentiment reflected in the 96 percent vote in a referendum.
The ethnic Russians in south and east Ukraine also had reason to fear
the extreme Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev.
Instead,
Obama bowed to the neocon storyline and bought into the rhetoric about a
“Russian invasion.” Obama also could have told the American people that
there was no credible intelligence suggesting that Putin had aggressive
designs on eastern Europe. He could have tamped down the hysteria, but
instead he helped fuel the frenzy..
Before
long, the full firepower of U.S. propaganda arsenal was blasting away,
enflaming a new Cold War. That effort was bolstered by the U.S.
government pouring tens of millions of dollars into propaganda outlets,
often disguised as “bloggers” or “citizen journalists.” The U.S. Agency
for International Development alone estimates its budget for “media
strengthening programs in over 30 countries” at $40 million annually.
USAID,
working with billionaire George Soros’s Open Society, also funds the
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which engages in
“investigative journalism” that usually goes after governments that have
fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out
for accusations of corruption. The USAID-funded OCCRP also collaborates with Bellingcat, an online investigative website founded by blogger Eliot Higgins.
Higgins has spread misinformation on the Internet, including discredited claims implicating the Syrian government in the sarin attack in 2013 and directing an Australian TV news crew to what was clearly the wrong location for a video of a BUK anti-aircraft battery as it supposedly made its getaway to Russia after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014.
Leveling with Americans
Obama
could have neutralized much of this propaganda by revealing details
about what U.S. intelligence agencies know about some of these pivotal
events, but instead he has withheld any information that undercuts the
preferred propaganda theme.
Regarding
Ukraine, for instance, Obama could disclose what the U.S. government
knows about whether the coup-makers, not Yanukovych, carried out the
bloody sniper attack on Feb. 20, 2014, that killed dozens of police and
protesters and set the stage for the coup on Feb. 22.
Obama
also could release what the U.S. intelligence community knows about the
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down on July 17, 2014, an incident
that killed 298 people and further escalated tensions. In the first five
days after the crash, Obama let his administration put out sketchy
information implicating the ethnic Russian rebels and the Russian
government.
However,
as the CIA collected and analyzed more detailed data, the
administration shut up. One source briefed on the findings told me that
the reticence resulted from the intelligence analysts seeing evidence
implicating a “rogue” element of the U.S.-backed Kiev regime, not the
rebels. The source said that if Obama let the full story out, the entire
Ukraine narrative might collapse.
So,
by staying silent on these key questions – and preventing the U.S.
intelligence community from telling the public what it knows – Obama has
protected the earlier narratives that put the ethnic Russians and
Moscow in the worst possible light. That propaganda has fed the fires of
a new Cold War and exacerbated dangerous tensions between the two
biggest nuclear powers.
Unless
Obama somehow decides to change course – and level with the American
people, rather than manipulate them – he will leave behind a grim legacy
of a bloated military-industrial complex and a new Cold War.
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