Ukraine, MH 17, and the Charge of the Atlanticist Brigade

The bloody farce in the Ukraine took another ugly turn with the shootdown of MH 17.

And to be ugly about it, if the rebels shot the plane down, it shouldn’t matter very much except as a horrible and unexpected catastrophe in a war zone and an overwhelming tragedy to the survivors of the victims on board.  Call it an accident, collateral damage, manslaughter, there is no credible version of events in which it was intentional mass murder or terrorism, either by the rebels or Russian technicians that, according to the Ukrainian government, possessed the ability to operate the elderly but complex anti-aircraft systems fingered in the attack.

Recall the US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 by the USS Vincennes.  It was also an ugly business.  The Iran Air jet was on a standard civilian flight path with its transponders on; the Vincennes through some bit of naval derring-do had actually intruded into Iranian territorial waters when it shot the plane down (something that was only admitted by the US three years later).  290 people died, the US never apologized, but eventually paid out some money to smooth things over, not in a particularly classy way, according to a 2002 account:

The US had compensated non-Iranian victims about 2.9 million dollars (not acknowledging any responsibility) but nothing to Iranian family members. In 1996, a 131.8 million dollar settlement was reached that included the ignored families (61.8 million). Seventy million was to be put into bank accounts and used to "pay off private U.S. claims against Iran and Iran's expenses for the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, which is handling the claims." The US stated it was for claims "involving banking matters, not the airliner," while Iran said that 30 million was for the plane. 

The shootdown was accompanied by the usual quotient of dishonest denial and blame shifting.  

The following day, the Pentagon held a news conference on the incident. After originally having flatly denied Iran's version of the event, saying that it had shot down an F-14 fighter and not a civilian aircraft, the State Department (after a review of the evidence) admitted the downing of Iran Air 655. It was claimed that the plane had "strayed too close to two U.S. Navy warships that were engaged in a battle with Iranian gunboats" and, according to the spokesman, that the "proper defensive action" was taken (in part) because the "suspect aircraft was outside the prescribed commercial air corridor" (Washington Post).

That it "strayed" from its normal, scheduled flight path is factually incorrect. And so was the claim that it was heading right for the ship and "descending" (emphasis, mine) toward it—it was ascending. Another "error" was the contention that it took place in international waters (it did not, a fact only later admitted by the government). Incorrect maps were used when Congress was briefed on the incident.

In an interesting sidebar, the “planeful of naked corpses” conspiracy canard (for which Western journos have repeatedly mocked a Ukrainian rebel militia leader who was, presumably, dumbfounded by the grotesque carnage of the crash) was first deployed by right wing US radio commentators to accuse Iran of staging a provocation by flying a plane of naked corpses at the Vincennes.

The Iran Air shootdown was classified as a goof—although the Iranians declared it rose to the level of criminal misconduct (and have been accused of engineering the Lockerbie bombing as retaliation)--and the captain of the Vincennes was condemned by his fellow officers as a reckless dingbat, per Wikipedia:

Commander David Carlson, commanding officer of the USS Sides, the warship stationed near to the Vincennes at the time of the incident, is reported to have said that the destruction of the aircraft "marked the horrifying climax to Captain Rogers' aggressiveness, first seen four weeks ago."^[39] His comment referred to incidents on 2 June, when Rogers had sailed the Vincennes too close to an Iranian frigate undertaking a lawful search of a bulk carrier, launched a helicopter within 2–3 miles (3.2–4.8 km) of an Iranian small craft despite rules of engagement requiring a four-mile (6.4 km) separation, and opened fire on small Iranian military boats. Of those incidents, Carlson commented, "Why do you want an Aegis cruiser out there shooting up boats? It wasn't a smart thing to do." He also said that Iranian forces he had encountered in the area a month prior to the incident were "...pointedly non-threatening" and professional.^[40] At the time of Rogers' announcement to higher command that he was going to shoot down the plane, Carlson is reported to have been thunderstruck: "I said to folks around me, 'Why, what the hell is he doing?' I went through the drill again. F-14. He's climbing. By now this damn thing is at 7,000 feet." Carlson thought the Vincennes might have more information, and was unaware that Rogers had been wrongly informed that the plane was diving.^[41]
Craig, Morales & Oliver, in a slide presentation published in M.I.T.'s Spring 2004 Aeronautics & Astronautics as the "USS Vincennes Incident", commented that Captain Rogers had "an undeniable and unequivocal tendency towards what I call 'picking a fight.'" On his own initiative, Rogers moved the Vincennes 50 miles (80 km) northeast to join the USS Montgomery. An angry Captain Richard McKenna, Chief of Surface Warfare for the Commander of the Joint Task Force, ordered Rogers back to Abu Musa, but the Vincennes helicopter pilot, Lt Mark Collier, followed the Iranian speedboats as they retreated north, eventually taking some fire:

...the Vincennes jumps back into the fray. Heading towards the majority of the speedboats, he is unable to get a clear target. Also, the speedboats are now just slowly milling about in their own territorial waters. Despite clear information to the contrary, Rogers informs command that the gunboats are gathering speed and showing hostile intent and gains approval to fire upon them at 0939. Finally, in another fateful decision, he crosses the 12-nautical-mile (22 km) limit off the coast and enters illegally into Iranian waters.^[42]

Captain Rogers was not officially censured for the shootdown; instead, two years later he was awarded the Legion of Merit for his services while captain of the Vincennes and soon after retired.

There you have it.

So, by the ordinary standards of murderous military ineptitude, the fallout from the MH 17 tragedy would be disorganization and denial, an exhaustive and time-consuming investigation, a belated acknowledgment of responsibility, no legal consequences, and the application of some financial emollient eight or so years down the road.

This is obviously Putin’s goal, whether or not rebel forces were complicit (which I should say is not yet a slam dunk, despite the declarations of the US government), an objective which the US and many of its allies are determined to deny him.

There have been several attempts to frame the accidental shootdown as an episode of Putin barbarism that places him and his government beyond the civilized pale and in the fatal zone of illegitimate pariah state upon whom demands can be made, whose calls for due process can be swept aside, and is fair game for whatever principled skullduggery the democratic powers can concoct.

The first and, to be blunt, most ludicrous episode was “corpse gate”, an attempt to depict the militias, and by extension their purported puppetmaster, Putin, as inhumanly callous in their treatment of the remains of the nearly 300 people that had fallen from the sky.

The militias were clearly overwhelmed by the vast disaster scene and the question of how to secure it properly.  No doubt there was looting—an endemic problem at all crash sites, even in the civilized United States—and possibly the idea of diddling with evidence and getting the black boxes into friendly Russian hands.  As to the disgusting drunkenness allegedly exhibited by some militia members, crash scenes are horrible, they can be extremely traumatic, and it is not out of the question that some militia members turned to alcoholic oblivion to deal with the scenes they had witnessed.

But the media tried to latch on to the idea that the militias were committing a crime against humanity by dragging the rotting bodies hither and yon through the 88-degree heat and eventually loading them into refrigerated rail cars.  In this effort the militias worked together with emergency services of the Ukranian government, which somehow made it on site, a fact that was ignored in the accusations of militia barbarism.  Once the body bags were put on the train, there was also some attempt to flay the militias for not immediately pulling the train out of the station, even though the root problem seems to have been the Ukrainian government’s inability to come up with dispatch instructions.

Then there was “destruction of evidence gate”.  Again, beyond the militias’ fiddling with luggage and removal of bodies, there is no credible reportage that they were attempting to tamper with the key evidence: the immense debris field of plane wreckage.

On US ABC News, an aviation expert, John Nance, pointed out that the key forensic evidence to be gleaned from the crash site would be shrapnel impact on the airframe, which would indicate what struck the plane (SAM, air to air missile or whatever) and where, and is available in abundance across the crash site.  The black box recorders would be unlikely to yield useful information on the instantaneously catastrophic event itself, nor would the bodies.

The key evidence for the overall investigation will be the surveillance records of US and Russian satellites and radars, which should be able to identify where the missiles came from, as well as addressing accusations that Kyiv fighters were shadowing the jet, etc.

If indeed MH17 was destroyed by a surface to air missile at 30,000 feet, the culprit would appear to be a BUK mobile air defense battery, a Soviet product extensively deployed across the remains of the USSR.  The Russians have them—and the Ukrainian government has accused Russia of shuttling units across the border in order to do the dirty on Ukrainian military aircraft.  The rebels might have captured one or more units; it’s unclear whether the Ukrainian military actually disabled them before abandoning them, as they claimed.  The Ukrainian government also has its own working BUK units; despite government denials that there was any need to deploy anti-aircraft batteries in the east, AP had photographs of a Ukrainian BUK battery trundling through Slavyansk in early July to protect its ATO units against potential Russian airstrikes.

The Russians have already distributed a fair amount of evidentiary chaff of varying quality, claiming that a Ukranian BUK radar was switched on at the time of the incident; Robert Parry’s US defense sources are also telling him there’s a suspicion that a Ukrainian BUK battery was responsible.

So, in an ordinary investigation, plenty of he said/she said, fog o’ war, bluster, obfuscation and the prospect that a mutually acceptable story will be sorted out months if not years down the road.

As to the “restricting access to crash site gate” the subject of much indignant huffing and a newly-minted UNSC resolution (which Russia supported) this appears to be a canard. 

Most Western journalists in the field have reported that they easily passed through rebel checkpoints and wandered unrestricted through the crash site (one journo was castigated for actually rifling through a victim’s luggage to illustrate his video report), and noted that, if anybody was delaying the arrival of the international investigatory team, it was the Ukrainian government (which held 100+ international experts in Kyiv until “security issues” could be sorted out).  Further cognitive dissonance was assured when Kyiv forces launched several attacks in Donetsk, not exactly conducive to the ceasefire intended to facilitate the investigation, and also endangering the passage of the “corpse train” that everybody was, at least a couple days ago, so worked up about.

To date, the US strategy seems to be to crank up the indignation machine by whatever means come to hand, in this case excoriating Russia for obstructions of the investigation that aren’t occurring, in order to justify immediate further sanctions that would short circuit Russia’s desire for a conventional, legalistic, and protracted investigation.

As of this writing, the international experts have arrived at the crash site, the rebels, after some unedifying back and forth, have coughed up the black boxes, and there seems to be little that the West can currently complain about.

But the United States is perhaps considering this unpalatable contingency.

Will it demand an immediate and intrusive inventory of Russian and rebel BUK units “or else”?  Hold Russia responsible for non-appearance of rebel witnesses/suspects?  Issue a pre-emptive US declaration that the culprits have been identified, coupled with a demand to produce them?  Or content itself with the boilerplate declaration that Russia is not doing enough to rein in the east Ukrainian militias? We shall see.

By now, I think sanctions are an end in themselves for US Russia policy.

My outsider’s impression is that the US foreign policy for Russia has been pretty much captured by doctrinaire anti-Russians in a diplomatic and military deep state that pretty much permeates and survives every incoming administration.  The Russia desk has had a reasonably good run since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I think today the prevailing idea is that oligarch anxieties about the sanctioning of their overseas assets will soon reach a tipping point (see this article about “horror of the oligarchs”), and the “Atlanticists”, perhaps led by that nice Mr. Medvedev, will club together against Putin’s “Eurasianists” and pull the plug on his dreams of confronting the West as an equal and opposite force.  

Maybe Putin will need more of a shove—he’s an ex-KGB guy with multiple assets in the Russian elite and his current approvals are running over 80%--but there’s an app for that: intensified sanctions.

So sanctions, and more sanctions.  Sanctions for Crimea, sanctions for succoring the separatist uprising, now sanctions related to the plane crash.  Sanctions that will never go away, no matter what Putin does, as long as he stays in power.

Best case, some combination of popular and elite revulsion pushes Putin from power and a new regime approaches the West as supplicant.  Worst case, Russia = Venezuela, neutered by perpetual sanctions, vitriol, economic and political warfare, and subversion.

The key point, at this stage, is for the US to get European buy-in—especially from Angela Merkel, who is demonstrably less than enthusiastic about having a constitutionally dysfunctional relationship with Russia (and not enamored of the continual political heat brought by revelations of US spying)—so that the US is isolating Russia, and not the other way around.

My sense of the situation, especially from the Asian perspective, is that the US is in danger of overplaying its hand, indeed that it has a bad case of tunnel vision in which it is fixated on the goal of sticking it to Putin at the expense of US global interests.

With its almost comical insistence that “the world” is uniting against Russia (which only counts if “the world” is defined as the Atlantic democracies and their close allies and China, India, et. al. are excluded) and, even more damagingly, the US insistence on peddling the Russia = the world’s greatest monster story even as the United States condones the catastrophic and much more bloody Israel incursion into Gaza, the US is accelerating the natural trend toward disintermediation of America in significant chunks of the global diplomatic and economic system.

The PRC occasionally comes in for mockery for its alleged hubris in wishing to elevate the Chinese RMB to the status of an international currency.  However, I don’t think the PRC’s near term objective, or even desire, is to assume the glorious but extremely onerous burden of displacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency.

Instead, I think there are tactical as well as strategic forces in play, inspired in part by Russia’s sanctions miseries as well as the PRC's own experiences with covert as well as overt US financial sanctions relating to China's Iran and North Korea transactions, which date back to the George W. Bush years.  The PRC approach reflects the difficulty of sustaining strict capital controls on a national currency when China’s economy is increasingly open to the world; and the risk that a more freely-trading Chinese currency can bring to the PRC in its current competition and incipient clash with the United States.

So the PRC internationalizes the yuan in a series of bilateral agreements with key trading partners, so that its financial transactions increasingly exit the dollar and are less vulnerable to US and Western sanctions; it tries to push its investors to look for adequate returns in friendly regions rather than dumping excess funds in Western financial centers; and it cracks down on corruption and capital flight so that its oligarchs will be less exposed to financial and legal blackmail in places like London and the United States.  And for that matter, it offers the enticement to global financial centers of profitable, high-volume trading in yuan, a fungible benefit that can be diverted somewhere else if a jurisdiction turns unfriendly.

And the Xi Jinping regime must take into account the possibility that the outrage and sanctions machine, so intensively deployed against Russia over Ukraine, will be employed against the People’s Republic of China.

The United States is backing off from its stated “honest broker” position in the South China Sea to a tilt toward China’s adversaries, offering the possibility of direct confrontation over the PRC’s maritime claims and use of the sanctions regime to punish PRC misbehavior.  Taiwan is inexorably bumping along to a political confrontation between the pro-mainland KMT and pro-independence DPP and student forces, which will offer the US government, if so inclined, a chance to ditch the One China policy and stand up to the PRC militarily and with sanctions.

And, finally, there is Hong Kong.

With that wonderful synchronicity that liberals adore (and their adversaries roll their eyes at) the three UK China-bashing prestige liberal organs—the Independent, the Guardian, and the Financial Times [sorry, correction: Guardian, FT, & The Economist]—all recently editorialized that Great Britain should “stand up” to the PRC on behalf of the people of Hong Kong on the issue of whether candidates for the Hong Kong chief executive should be chosen by full suffrage (instead of nominated by a pro-mainland committee).  If Xi Jinping decides now is not the time to countenance defiance of the PRC within China’s borders and cracks down on the sizable number of pro-democracy activists and supporters, sanctions would appear to be the inevitable consequence.

So one consequence of the singleminded US campaign against Russia is that it is being driven into the arms of the PRC; another is that the PRC is making its ability to resist sanctions a national priority.  The US Atlanticists may succeed in either subduing Russia to Western tutelage or simply expelling it from the European sphere; but what about the Pacific?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: America's Darling in Russia...and Ukraine!

Russian ex-oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was incarcerated in Russia for a decade before he was amnestied by Vladimir Putin in December, was in Kiev's Maidan Square recently, giving aid and comfort to the new government with two rather dubious pronouncements.

First, he backed the Kiev government's version of snipergate--that Russia was behind it.

Second, he tried to innoculate the new government against the bad/anxious press engendered by its high profile embrace of fascists, neo-Nazis, and ultranationalists.

Per RT:

Khodorkovsky claimed that force was used against the protesters “with the agreement of the Russian authorities.”

The former tycoon – who spent 10 years in jail for tax evasion, embezzlement, and money laundering and left for Europe upon release in December – also dismissed allegations that neo-Nazi groups have been taking an active part in protests, calling the accusations “Russian propaganda.”

“There are no fascists or Nazis here,” Khodorkovsky claimed.

Mission unaccomplished, in my admittedly personal opinion.

The important thing about Mkhail Khodorkovsky is that he is America's man in Russia. If there is a pro-Western political upheaval in Russia and Putin finally falls on his ass, Khodorkovsky will probably be at the center of the new power structure.

Khodorkovsky gets sympathetic press in the West, for his stoicism in prison and his pronouncements in favor of Western values. I also expect that he gets good press because he spread his money around generously and wisely to tend his political garden in the United States, and because he is a key American asset en ovo for New Russia.

After his release, Khodorkovsky has safely re-established himself and whatever wealth he managed to shield from Putin in Switzerland. Despite protestations he would abstain from Russian politics, consider the Maidan speech his coming out party.

The Globe & Mail was there and delivered the requisite fluffing, highlighting Khodorkovsky's "simple dark anorak and jeans" and quoted him as saying, “I’ve seen the plywood planks they used to stand up to the bullets. It made me want to cry, it’s so awful,” he said, his voice shaking with emotion.

The ever-reliable AP is pitching in as well:

"Ukraine must become a European state," the former tycoon told the students. For that to happen, Khodorkovsky said there must be foreign investment, eradication of corruption and a modern-day Marshall Plan of international assistance.

He also called for establishing a congress of Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals to boost ties.

On Sunday, Khodorkovsky almost wept as he assured a large crowd in Kiev's center not to believe that all Russians support their government's actions in Crimea.

Bloomberg would also like a word:

“Legal states exist only where and when there is a separation of powers, an independent judiciary and real changes in power as a result of elections,” Khodorkovsky said. “It’s completely clear that there’s nothing of the sort in Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych or in Russia under Vladimir Putin.”

 “Khodorkovsky is a galvanizing person for everyone who holds a grudge against Vladimir Putin,” Erixon said. “His fight against the Kremlin from inside prison and before is something that all those fighting Putin can look to as an example.”

...

Following his release from prison, Khodorkovsky said he is not interested in politics and will devote himself to helping Russia develop civil society. Khodorkovsky plans to apply for permanent residency in Switzerland, Agence France-Presse reported today.

“Prior to being locked up, I was obsessed with business,” Khodorkovsky said. “But there’s something more important. And that something is what I myself am searching for. And i think that something was found by the people who went out onto Maidan, and by the people who stood under the bullets.”

Reuters also delivered a brief report titled

Russia complicit in violence against Kiev protesters- Khodorkovsky

Yeah, Khodorkovsky is back.

To my mind, Khodorkovsky's re-emergence and this eagerly-reported barrage of criticism against Putin and Russia represents another escalation by the United States.  Whether the Obama administration simply wants to vent its spleen and gain some propaganda points inside and outside Russia by vilifying Putin, or whether President Obama wants Putin's scalp on his belt and is going to try and foment an existential crisis out of the Ukraine mess, remains to be seen.

In my previous career blogging at Halcyon Days, where I singlehandedly saved the United States from the folly of the Iraq War (just kidding!), I wrote a piece about Khodorkovsky on the occasion of his initial arrest. Since I believe Khodorkovsky will be a part of whatever mischief the US has planned for Vladimir Putin, the observations I made in 2003 are still valid and I think it's worth reposting.



America's Secret Stake in the Yukos Affair



November 5, 2003

Who is Mikhail Khodorkovsky?

Russia's richest man, principal owner of Russia's biggest oil company, Yukos, currently under arrest by Putin for some obscure financial hanky panky.

Who cares?

At first I didn't.  I thought of Khodorkovsky merely as a distant figure rich in oil, consonants, and syllables.

I was wrong.

A lot of people in America care deeply about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and I should, too.

The State Department cares.  On October 30, in the State Department briefing, a spokesman expressed concern that this was a case of "selective prosecution" targeting Khodorkovsky, who has bankrolled some of Putin's opponents.

One would think that the State Department, given the Padilla case, the perpetual detentions in Guantanamo, and the string of US concentration camps across Iraq packed with people with bags over their heads denied due process, access to lawyers, and even basic human needs, should not be pitching rocks out of its glass house at a friendly sovereign state and ally in the war on terror conducting a criminal investigation of one of its own citizens.

It is of course possible that the Bush administration is bound by a sacred oath to come to the aid of any member of the international petroleum brotherhood in need.

I can imagine the scene in the Oval Office.  Condi Rice rushes in and gasps: "Mr. President.  An oil executive is in peril!".  Our George rises resolutely from his desk, smacks his fist decisively into his palm, and declares, "Something must be done!  Get me the State Department!".

But other people care, too.

Readers of the International Herald Tribune's op-ed page were treated to an impassioned stemwinder depicting the Yukos case as a titanic confrontation between Soviet-era dinosaurs and the gallant entrepeneurial crusaders for capitalism in New Russia.  (see Russia's future and the fate of an oligarch, Leon Aron, IHT 11/1-2/03).

The article does contain some interesting nuggets like the factoid that Yukos gave $45 million to charity in 2002.

Faith in the disinterested generosity of oil executives with their stockholders' money being what it is, it is not surprising that the shenanigans of another energy giant--Enron--come to mind.  Ken Lay's binge of influence buying included a multitude of charitable contributions--not just to charities, but to deserving politicians as well.

Sure enough, the game is given away in the last paragraphs, where the author tries to wish away Khodorkovsky's legal problems with a plea for "...establishment of a statute of limitations on charges arising from the privatizations of the 1990's" and "New laws on lobbying, campaign finance and charitable contributions [that] will permit Russian business to advance openly its interests in Russian politics".

Translation:  Yukos' path to wealth and power was apparently paved with dirty rubles.  The corporation is now caught inextricably in the net of Russian laws, and Putin has Khodorkovsky by the balls.

The author of this piece, Leon Aron, is the director of Russian studies at neocon ground zero, the American Enterprise Institute.

So we know that the neocons care, and not just in a generic "no billionaire left behind" way about Khodorkovsky's fate.  They care enough to try and lobby for the right wing and the US government to inject themselves in a murky criminal case in a foreign country.

Richard Perle cares.  He weighed in with one of his hair-tearing tirades, declaring, "If the G-8 [the private club for the world's richest and most powerful countries] has any standards at all, Russia would no longer qualify"(Russian Events Leave White House Wary Maura Reynolds, LA Times, Nov. 1, 2003).

Although the comparison probably doesn't do the two men justice, the neocons probably saw Khodorkovsky as a Russian Berlusconi: a pro-American, right wing fixer who would throw his immense financial weight into politics to cripple and confound America's enemies in the Russian Republic.

But there was probably a darker, more dangerous game at work.  One that provoked Putin, the most astute and decisive leaders in world politics, to send security forces storming onto Khodorkovsky's private jet.

Khodorkovsky is not just an oil magnate.  He is an oil magnate in Russia, the only great power in the world not dependent on imported oil. 

In fact, Russia is awash in surplus oil and will soon decide whether to export 25 million tons per year of it to Japan--or to China.

Control of oil is the linchpin of the neocon geopolitical strategy.  We are in Iraq to control its oil, and to be able to deny China and any other competing power dependent on that region access to that oil.

How can we counter Russia's strategic superiority in oil resources?  How do we prevent the geopolitical balance in Europe and Asia from tipping toward Russia and its precious crude?

The answer to the Russian threat is to take the oil industry out of the hands of the government--just as we are preparing to do in Iraq.

Take away the oil.  Privatize it, internationalize it, and neutralize it. 

And what better way to do that than back the fortunes of a oil billionaire eager to protect and promote his wealth, power, and interests through a challenge to the political supremacy of Putin?

In September of this year, Khodorkovsky was about to conclude a merger that would sell 25% of Yukos to ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco for $22 billion.  As the Guardian reported, "...a deal with a US company would give Mr Khodorkovsky US political leverage as well as access to more western cash."  (Yukos looks overseas, Guardian Sept. 29, 2003).

We need explore or ponder no further.

Think of it.  An independent oil empire in Siberia, financed with US cash, controlling Russia's oil surplus and exports, hostile to the Russian state, aggressive in domestic politics to the point of subversion, and backed by the Bush administration.

Khodorkovsky was our Trojan horse.

So Putin has taken Khodorkovsky down.  It is another big loss for the neocons and their vision of sustained, unilateral US dominance.

It is also a huge defeat for Bush, as is shown by the disproportionate dismay voiced at this criminal case in faraway Russia.

Not only because Putin has sent our overworked and underqualified NSA drudge Condi Rice back to her Soviet polysci textbooks to try to come up with a strategy to deal with a resurgent, self-sufficient new Russian empire.

Because Putin decided that Bush was now a sufficiently marginalized international factor that the consequences of US dismay and displeasure could be comfortably and confidently ignored.

So chalk up that Yukos affair, together with the UN debacle, the failure of the Madrid donor's conference, and our long, lonely walk with Iraq into bloody oblivion as another victim of Bush's mismanagement of our nation's affairs and interests.

Who cares about Mikhail Khodorkovsky?

I guess we all should.

copyright 2003 Peter Lee

Was the Ukraine Coup America’s Main Event at the Sochi Olympics?

In my previous post, I speculated that the US and EU orchestrated the climax of the Ukraine crisis to occur while Vlad was preoccupied with presiding over his beloved Olympics, and unwilling or unable to destroy the soft power vibe by intervening forcefully in the Ukraine, or even giving the matter his more complete attention.

Clever, clever America, if this was the case.

Of course, with what we know now about the aggressive Western destabilization effort in Ukraine—which included subversion, coercion, and even comfort and aid to violent insurrectionists against Yanukovich’s hapless elected government—it is rather ironic that the Western media anointed Putin History’s Greatest Monster February 2014 Edition.

You remember that, don’t you?  The mean, anti-democratic, gay-hating, Pussy-Riot whipping autocrat who might unleash tyrannical Russian might against the freedom fighters in Maidan Square?

Well, it is also ironic that Putin preached non-intervention and let Ukraine (and Yanukovich, obviously not his BFF) stew, while it was the West and the ever-reliable Western media that engaged in active cheerleading and more, intervening in Ukraine to facilitate the overthrow of an elected government on Russia’s borders.

Wait a minute.  Maybe that’s too ironic.  Maybe it was intentional.  Maybe the Western campaign against Putin and Sochi was part of the pre-emptive framing effort to depict events in Ukraine as a struggle of freedom-loving Euro-Ukrainians against the Evil Empire.

I always thought the ostensible reason for the near universal boycott of the Sochi opening ceremonies by President Obama and the EU states always smelled a little fishy.  As I recall, the guy who runs Belgium was the only Atlantic leader who showed up.

Of course, nobody said We’re boycotting.  It was just, we’re too busy, (F*ck you Vladimir). 

 

There was considerable rumbling in the Western press, I recall, that the forces of freedom were dumping on Putin and Sochi because of the anti-gay propaganda law, a justification that has a few holes in it, considering that the legal position of LGBTs is more protected in Russia than it is in several US states.  And let’s not forget the brutal oppression of stray dogs—cute, cuddly puppies!—by the heartless Russian bear.

Maybe the Sochi-time hostility was more a matter of making sure that Putin and Russia were on the wrong side of global opinion—and less likely to risk spoiling the optics of the Games by throwing themselves into a regional crisis—when Ukraine finally blew up.

As to why the United States was so keen to hand Russia a geopolitical loss, maybe it has to do with support for the EU’s long-standing desire to wrench Ukraine into the Western column.

I hope so.

Because an alternate possibility is that the United States did it for revenge, to punish Putin for not going along with the US program on Syria.

That’s not great because, if so, the decision might have been made out of short-sighted spite, and the West might have taken sole custody of the Ukrainian tar baby just as its finances are teetering to collapse and the split between eastern and western Ukrainians threatens to turn into a permanent rift.

It would be…ironic! There’s that word again!—if punishing Putin over Syria turned Ukraine into another Syria.

I don’t think this revenge scenario is too outlandish.  President Obama seems to be a man who likes his revenge served cold—icy cold—and maybe underneath that controlled façade he was itching to show Putin that Russia could not lightly defy US demands to withdraw support from Assad and collapse the Syrian government.  I believe personal disdain and the need to assert his credentials as world’s numero uno big boss drives President Obama’s foreign policy with regard to Putin, with the Chinese leadership (ever since he was subjected to a finger-wagging tirade by China’s chief climate negotiator for America’s botched outing at the Copenhagen summit in 2010), and of course, his counterproductive crusade—now in its third dismal year with a promise of further escalation-- to destroy Syria and further destabilize the Middle East in order to punish Bashar Assad for refusing to go when Obama told him to go.

One hopes that twelve-dimensional chess is guiding US moves in the Ukraine.  But if that policy is in the hands of a crude neo-con like "Fuck the EU" Victoria Nuland, maybe we’re looking at another one of those “nobody could have foreseen” bloody foreign policy botches that the US seems to specialize in nowadays.

And Putin might have the last laugh, withholding Russia’s promised contribution of $15 billion while the EU scrambles to come up with the $30 billion Ukraine needs to get through the year (amazingly, the US has to date made no commitment to provide financial aid, something the EU is probably noticing; and thinking Thanks a Billion! Not! Vicky Nuland, since the aggressive US strategy blew up the transitional government negotiated by the EU that might have kept Russia in the game and on the hook).

A year from now it might be Vladimir Putin who’s saying Thanks! Victoria Nuland.  Thanks to you I was spared the cost and trouble of propping up a dysfunctional pro-Russian government in the Ukraine.  I saved $15 billion bucks…turned a nice profit since I could drop concessional pricing in the new gas contracts…and I picked up east and south Ukraine as new Russian provinces for free!

Clever, clever...maybe too clever America.