August 4, 2016
Exclusive: The prospect of
Donald Trump in the White House alarms many people but bashing him over
his contrarian views on NATO and U.S.-Russian relations could set the stage for
disasters under President Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The widespread disdain for
Donald Trump and the fear of what his presidency might mean have led to an
abandonment of any sense of objectivity by many Trump opponents and, most
notably, the mainstream U.S. news media. If Trump is for something, it must be
bad and must be transformed into one more club to use for hobbling his
candidacy.
While that attitude may be
understandable given Trump’s frequently feckless and often offensive behavior –
he seems not to know basic facts and insults large swaths of the world’s
population – this Trump bashing also has dangerous implications because some of
his ideas deserve serious debate rather than blanket dismissal.
Amid his incoherence and
insults, Trump has raised valid points on several important questions,
such as the risks involved in the voracious expansion of NATO up to Russia’s
borders and the wisdom of demonizing Russia and its internally popular
President Vladimir Putin.
Over the past several years,
Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment has pushed a
stunning policy of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia in pursuit of a “regime
change” in Moscow. This existentially risky strategy has taken shape with
minimal substantive debate behind a “group think” driven by anti-Russian and
anti-Putin propaganda. (All we hear is what’s wrong with Putin and Russia: He
doesn’t wear a shirt! He’s the new Hitler! Putin and Trump have a bro-mance!
Russian aggression! Their athletes cheat!)
Much as happened in the run-up
to the disastrous Iraq War in 2002-2003, the neocons and their “liberal
interventionist” allies bully from the public square anyone who doesn’t share
these views. Any effort to put Russia’s behavior in context makes you a “Putin
apologist,” just like questioning the Iraq-WMD certainty of last decade made
you a “Saddam apologist.”
But this new mindlessness –
now justified in part to block Trump’s path to the White House – could very
well set the stage for a catastrophic escalation of big-power tensions under a
Hillary Clinton presidency. Former Secretary of State Clinton has already surrounded
herself with neocons and liberal hawks who favor expanding the war against
Syria’s government, want to ratchet up tensions with Iran, and favor shipping
arms to the right-wing and virulently anti-Russian regime in Ukraine, which
came to power in a 2014 coup supported by U.S. policymakers and money.
By lumping Trump’s few
reasonable points together with his nonsensical comments – and making
anti-Russian propaganda the only basis for any public debate – Democrats and
the anti-Trump press are pushing the United States toward a conflict
with Russia.
And, for a U.S. press corps
that prides itself on its “objectivity,” this blatantly biased approach toward
a nominee of a major political party is remarkably unprofessional. But the
principle of objectivity has been long since abandoned as the mainstream U.S.
media transformed itself into little more than an outlet for U.S. government
foreign-policy narratives, no matter how dishonest or implausible.
Losing History
To conform with the
neocon-driven narratives, much recent history has been lost. For instance, few
Americans realize that some of President Barack Obama’s most notable foreign
policy achievements resulted from cooperation with Putin and Russia, arguably
more so than any other “friendly” leader or “allied” nation.
For instance, in summer 2013,
Obama was under intense neocon/liberal-hawk pressure to bomb the Syrian
military supposedly for crossing his “red line” against the use of chemical
weapons after a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2103.
Yet, hearing doubts from the
U.S. intelligence community about the Assad regime’s guilt, Obama balked at a
military strike that – we now know – would have played into the hands of Syrian
jihadists who some intelligence analysts believe were the ones behind the
false-flag sarin attack to trick the United States into directly
intervening in the civil war on their side.
But Obama still needed a path
out of the corner that he had painted himself into and it was provided by Putin
and Russia pressuring Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons, a clear
victory for Obama regardless of who was behind the sarin attack.
Putin and Russia helped Obama
again in convincing Iran to accept tight restraints on its nuclear program, an
agreement that may mark Obama’s most significant foreign policy success. Those
negotiations came to life in 2013 (not coincidentally after Secretary of State
Clinton, who allied herself more with the bomb-bomb-bomb Iran faction led by
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had resigned and was replaced by
John Kerry).
As the negotiating process
evolved, Russia played a key role in bringing Iran along, offering ways for
Iran to rid itself of its processed nuclear stockpiles and get the medical
research materials it needed. Without the assistance of Putin and his Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov, the landmark Iranian nuclear deal might never have
happened.
Obama recognized the value of
this Russian help but he also understood the political price that he would pay
if he were closely associated with Putin, who was already undergoing a thorough
demonization in the U.S. and European mainstream media. So, Obama mostly worked
with Putin under the table while joining in the ostracism of Putin above the
table.
Checking Obama
But Washington’s
neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment – and its allied mainstream media
– check-mated Obama’s double-talking game in 2013 by aggressively supporting a
regime-change strategy in Ukraine where pro-Russian elected President
Viktor Yanukovych was under mounting pressure from western Ukrainians who
wanted closer ties to Europe and who hated Russia.
Leading neocon thinkers
unveiled their new Ukraine strategy shortly after Putin helped scuttle their
dreams for a major bombing campaign against Assad’s regime in Syria. Since the
1990s, the neocons had targeted the Assad dynasty – along with Saddam Hussein’s
government in Iraq and the Shiite-controlled government in Iran – for “regime
change.” The neocons got their way in Iraq in 2003 but their program stalled
because of the disastrous Iraq War.
However, in 2013, the neocons
saw their path forward open again in Syria, especially after the sarin attack,
which killed hundreds of civilians and was blamed on Assad in a media-driven
rush to judgment. Obama’s hesitancy to strike and then Putin’s assistance in
giving Obama a way out left the neocons furious. They began to recognize the
need to remove Putin if they were to proceed with their Mideast “regime change”
dreams.
In late September 2013 – a
month after Obama ditched the plans to bomb Syria – neocon National Endowment
for Democracy president Carl Gershman wrote
in The Washington Post that Ukraine was now “the biggest prize” but also was a
steppingstone toward the even bigger “regime change” prize in Moscow. Gershman,
whose NED is funded by Congress, wrote:
“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe
will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin
represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the
losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
By late 2013 and early 2014,
with Gershman’s NED financing Ukraine’s anti-government activists and
journalists and with the open encouragement of neocon Assistant Secretary of
State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Sen. John McCain, the prospects
for “regime change” in Ukraine were brightening. With neo-Nazi and other
Ukrainian ultra-nationalists firebombing police, the political crisis in Kiev
deepened.
Meanwhile, Putin was focused
on the Sochi Winter Olympics and the threat that the games could be disrupted
by terrorism. So, with the Kremlin distracted, Ukraine’s Yanukovych tried to
fend off his political crisis while limiting the violence.
However, on Feb. 20, 2014,
snipers fired on both police and protesters in the Maidan square and the
Western media jumped to the conclusion that Yanukovych was responsible
(even though later investigations have indicated that the sniper attack was
more likely carried out by neo-Nazi groups to provoke the chaos that followed).
A Successful Coup
On Feb. 21, a shaken
Yanukovych agreed to a European-brokered deal in which he surrendered some of
his powers and agreed to early elections. He also succumbed to Western pressure
that he pull back his police. However, on Feb. 22, the neo-Nazis and other
militants seized on that opening to take over government buildings and
force Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives.
The U.S. State Department and
its Western allies quickly recognized the coup regime as the “legitimate”
government of Ukraine. But the coup provoked resistance from the ethnic Russian
populations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, political uprisings that the new
Kiev regime denounced as “terrorist” and countered with an “Anti-Terrorism
Operation” or ATO.
When Russian troops – already
in Crimea as part of the Sevastopol naval basing agreement – protected the
people on the peninsula from attacks by the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, the
intervention was denounced in the West as a “Russian invasion.” Crimean
authorities also organized a referendum in which more than 80 percent of the
voters participated and favored leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia by a 96
percent margin. When Moscow agreed, that became “Russian aggression.”
Although the Kremlin refused
appeals from eastern Ukraine for a similar arrangement, Russia provided some
assistance to the rebels resisting the new authorities in Ukraine. Those
rebels then declared their own autonomous republics.
Although this historical
reality – if understood by the American people – would put the Ukrainian crisis
in a very different context, it has been effectively blacked out of what the
American public is allowed to hear. All the mainstream media talks about is
“Russian aggression” and how Putin provoked the Ukraine crisis as part of some
Hitlerian plan to conquer Europe.
Trump, in his bumbling way,
tries to reference the real history to explain his contrarian views regarding
Russia, Ukraine and NATO, but he is confronted by a solid wall of “group think”
asserting only one acceptable way to see this complex crisis. Rather than allow
a serious debate on these very serious issues, the mainstream U.S. media simply
laughs at Trump’s supposed ignorance.
The grave danger from this
media behavior is that it will empower the neocons and liberal hawks already
nesting inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign to prepare for a new series of
geopolitical provocations once Clinton takes office. By opportunistically
buying into this neocon pro-war narrative now, Democrats may find themselves
with buyer’s remorse as they become the war party of 2017.
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’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
No comments:
Post a Comment