December 3, 2021
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
US Policy Hawks Press
for Warlike Action against Russia
Friends,
How many false flags, how much disinformation, how much
fanning-the-flames of Russophobia does it take for Americans and others to
fathom what is going on with the virulently anti-Russian policy hawks in
Washington and Foggy Bottom?
On countless occasions in the past I have written on this
topic, beginning
back in 2014, and continuing
up through the Russia
Hoax which was used as a cudgel
to attempt to unseat (and impeach) Donald Trump. Many leading Democrats,
supported (and at times outdone) by Republicans have continued to hanker for
some sort of military action against Russia for years. Every time one turns on
Fox (not to mention other networks), there is some benighted GOP congressman,
or maybe the irrepressible Brian Kilmeade, ranting and raving that we must ramp
up our support for poor, beleaguered Ukraine. This, after previous calls for
ramping up heightened vigilance against Russia for, let’s see: throwing the
2016 election to Trump, or crippling our power grid, or propping up Bashar
Assad in Syria, or somehow aiding the
Taliban against our boys in Afghanistan, the list goes on.
As I have pointed out in the past Russophobia is something
that brings
the fanatical Left and the hawkish Neocon “conservative/Republican
establishment” together in one of those ugly ideological marriages
made in Hell.
For the Left Vladimir Putin and his country have become a
useful political target to use against figures like Donald Trump. In
particular, they loathe Putin’s supposed “persecution” of homosexuals and his
embrace of traditional Christianity in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church.
So while the policies and government of China are far more perilous for American
foreign interests, there remains, just below the surface, a certain lingering stench
of the old Leftist sympathy for the Chinese Communist “agrarian reformers”
dating back to the 1940s (remember John Gunther’s popular pro-Maoist book, Inside Asia?). Not to mention the
still-not-completely-revealed connection to Beijing of Hunter Biden (and his
father, Joe), and its cover-up. And, of
course, Big Tech and American capitalism are tied torso-to-torso with the Red
Chinese.
For the conservative establishment, too many Republicans in
Congress, and the
conservative media (i.e., Fox News, Newsmax, etc.) the old description of the
French Bourbons applies: they’ve never learned anything, and they’ve never
forgotten anything. For most of them it is still Reagan calling out the “Evil
Empire”; Russia is still, thirty years after the fall of Communism in 1991 and
its virtual disappearance in Mother Russia, the Evil Empire. Nothing for them
has essentially changed.
But more than that, the ideological litmus tests of the dominant Neoconservatives now prevails with most conservatives. One ideologically tainted “expert” (military or policy wonk) pronounces and the lesser minions in Congress and on Fox pick it up and spout it as gospel.
Their
reasoning goes like this:
“Putin is a dictator,”
“Russia is not a democracy and does not have free elections”
(like we do? Huh?),
“Putin wants to invade his neighbors and re-establish the old
Soviet Union,”
“Putin persecutes homosexuals and lesbians and deprives them
of their civil rights,”
“Russia has been since the end of the Soviet Union (1991)
hostile to American interests around the world.”
None
of this is actually factual, despite its near mechanical
repetition by various conservatives (and Leftists). There are numerous studies,
detailed reports, that give the lie to each of these accusations, but you won’t
hear them at Fox News or CNN, or read them in The New York Times.
Most recently, the sabre-rattlers in the military-industrial
complex and their camp followers in Congress are
at it again (CNN, December 3, 2021), this time not quite, but almost giving
a “blank check” to the “democratic” government of Ukraine (recall that our
State Department helped engineer the overthrow of a popularly elected
pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych government in Kiev back in February 2014). Thus,
Ukraine which is hoping to recover ethnic and Russian-speaking Crimea
(historically a part of Russia) and several majority Russian provinces in the
extreme east of the country, could lite the fuse for world conflagration. And
we Americans and the British foreign office seem to be going along.
The results could be disastrous for all concerned.
*****
Recently, I came across a good summary of what is happening and
has happened; it’s a perspective which argues for thoughtful restraint and
reason that far too few Americans hear or read. But it should be front and
center as our leaders may well commit to a conflict that none of us want:
The myth of Russian aggression
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/11/16/the-myth-of-russian-aggression/
No, Russia is not preparing to invade Ukraine.
Granted, memories in
the era of instant media are short. But are they so short that US and European
public opinion is being invited to accept, without challenge, a new round of
scaremongering about Russia that comes only six months after the last?
It was, after all, as recently as April
that most of Europe was on tenterhooks over reports that 100,000 Russian troops
were massing on Ukraine’s eastern border,
preparing for… well, it was never quite spelled out what they were preparing
for. It could have been an invasion and takeover of the whole of Ukraine, the
installation of a puppet government in the Donbass, or the annexation – or
‘integration’, as Russia might have preferred to say – of that territory by the
Russian Federation, on the model of Crimea in 2014. Or just a new ‘offensive’
against Ukrainian government forces in the region.
Then,
not only did nothing happen, but also two rather large clarifications emerged.
The first was that there were not, and never had been, 100,000 Russian troops
massing on Ukraine’s border. The vast majority were at their bases many
kilometres away. And second, the much smaller number who were moving around
were likely to be doing so in response to reports of Ukrainian troops mustering
for a spring offensive, new weapons deliveries from the UK and the US, and some
rather extensive NATO exercises being conducted in the Black Sea and to the
west of Ukraine.
As
is so often the case, what was presented as an aggressive stance on the part of
Russia was only half the story. The other half was what the US, the UK and NATO
were doing not a hundred kilometres from Russia’s borders. Once you factor this
in, you might just conclude that Russia was doing no more than taking prudent
precautions and that any troop movements were primarily defensive.
Part of what we are seeing and hearing
today is an almost exact reprise of this, even to the troop numbers supposedly
on the move. But there are some differences. This time, it is not just
Ukraine’s borders that are supposedly under threat. The Western fear-mongering
also seems more orchestrated, with the first warnings briefed by the
secretaries of state and defence in the US. These were picked up by the UK’s
outgoing defence chief, General Sir Nick Carter,
before Boris Johnson then promised to ‘support’ Ukraine (against the big bad
Russians) in his Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech.
It
might also be noted that the US seems to have made special efforts to get
Ukraine’s president on board. Volodymyr Zelensky has in the past tended to play
down others’ excitement about imminent Russian attacks. But last week he too
warned of ominous Russian troop movements – citing US intelligence reports.
The other big difference is the migrant crisis currently
playing out on the Belarus-Poland border. Despite zero evidence that this
confused and distressing situation has anything whatsoever to do with Russia,
many of those peddling the warnings about massed Russian troops poised to
invade Ukraine detect the not-so-hidden hand of Russia here, too.
Their
argument goes that Belarus and its “illegitimate” president, Alexander
Lukashenko, can do nothing without Russia’s backing (which is wrong); that
Putin is a big friend of Lukashenko (which is even more wrong); and that the
whole sorry mess is part of a longer-term Russian plan to bring a
Russia-Belarus union into effect and to destabilise the EU and the West in
general (which, if true at all, is rebounding badly).
All
the signs, such as they are, point to the migrant crisis as an exclusively
Belarusian project – dreamt up by Lukashenko in the hope of embarrassing the
EU, engineering the removal of sanctions and forcing Brussels to deal with him
as president. All that Russia has so far done is to have offered some sort of
mediation – so far rejected – before dissociating itself very publicly from
Lukashenko when he threatened to block Russia’s EU-bound gas supplies. Neither
of these moves suggests the Kremlin’s malign hand at work.
Of
course, for those who see Russia as always and forever a danger to the West,
such thinking dovetails nicely with the new alarm about an imminent Russian
offensive against Ukraine. It does not, though, explain why that particular
strand of scaremongering is suddenly back.
Let’s
dispense with the obvious explanation: that Russia indeed plans to invade
Ukraine. Why would anyone, least of all Russia, plan a military offensive in
the heart of Europe at the start of winter? And why would it jeopardise
approval for its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – which would surely be forfeit in
the event of any Russian move against Ukraine? It does not make sense.
So
what might? First, the US administration has been quietly mending fences with
Russia and a new summit is planned. Washington’s hawks have to be convinced Joe
Biden won’t sell out US interests. Some trumpeting about a Russia threat
wouldn’t come amiss. Second, with NATO’s extension of operations into the
Pacific theatre not going well, a Russia threat always offers NATO a new sense
of purpose, especially among its east and central European members.
Third,
Europe, especially Germany, needs Russian gas, and prices have soared, in part
because of the EU’s own missteps. But Russia has to be shown that it can’t
dictate terms. There has to be a bit of hard-ball before Nord Stream 2 gets its
licence.
And fourth, closer to home, Global
Britain is in the throes of a belated love-in with Ukraine, which includes not
just military training, but building ships and supplying weapons. The Black Sea incident in
June demonstrated that the UK is not above indulging in risky machismo. Now, as
well as sending a ‘small military detachment’ to
help Poland secure its border with Belarus, it has 600 special-forces personnel
‘set’ to be dispatched to Ukraine. Take away an imminent Russia threat, and the
wisdom of subsidising Ukraine’s war machine, let alone fomenting tensions in
the Black Sea, might draw more public scrutiny than it currently does.
Many
disparate interests might thus help to explain why a new Russia threat is being
conjured up now. But exaggerating a threat can be just as dangerous as
neglecting a real one. The so far non-military crisis at the Belarus-Polish
border introduces a whole new element of very human unpredictability that
demands restraint, rather than hype, from all sides.
Mary Dejevsky is
a writer and broadcaster. She was Moscow correspondent for The [UK] Times between
1988 and 1992. She has also been a correspondent from Paris, Washington and
China.
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