http://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/23/neocons-and-the-ukraine-coup/
Exclusive: American
neocons helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its
elected government, a “regime change” on Russia’s western border. But the coup
– and the neo-Nazi militias at the forefront – also reveal divisions within the
Obama administration, reports Robert Parry.
by Robert Parry
More than five years into
his presidency, Barack Obama has failed to take full control over his foreign
policy, allowing a bureaucracy shaped by long years of Republican control and
spurred on by a neocon-dominated U.S. news media to frustrate many of his
efforts to redirect America’s approach to the world in a more peaceful
direction.
But Obama deserves a big
dose of the blame for this predicament because he did little to neutralize the
government holdovers and indeed played into their hands with his initial
appointments to head the State and Defense departments, Hillary Clinton, a
neocon-leaning Democrat, and Robert Gates, a Republican cold warrior,
respectively.
Even now, key U.S. diplomats
are more attuned to hard-line positions than to promoting peace.
The latest
example is Ukraine where U.S. diplomats, including Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt,
are celebrating the overthrow of an elected pro-Russian government.
Occurring during the Winter
Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the coup in Ukraine dealt an embarrassing black eye
to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had offended neocon sensibilities by
quietly cooperating with Obama to reduce tensions over Iran and Syria, where
the neocons favored military options.
Over the past
several weeks, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was undercut by
a destabilization campaign encouraged by Nuland and Pyatt and
then deposed in a coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias. Even
after Yanukovych and the political opposition agreed to an orderly transition
toward early elections, right-wing armed patrols shattered the agreement
and took strategic positions around Kiev.
Despite these ominous signs,
Ambassador Pyatt hailed the coup as “a day for the history books.” Most of the
mainstream U.S. news media also sided with the coup, with commentators praising
the overthrow of an elected government as “reform.” But a few dissonant reports
have pierced the happy talk by noting that the armed militias are part of the
Pravy Sektor, a right-wing nationalist group which is often compared to the
Nazis.
Thus, the Ukrainian coup
could become the latest neocon-initiated “regime change” that ousted a target
government but failed to take into account who would fill the void.
Some of these same American
neocons pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, not realizing that removing
Saddam Hussein would touch off a sectarian conflict and lead to a pro-Iranian
Shiite regime. Similarly, U.S. military intervention in Libya in 2011
eliminated Muammar Gaddafi but also empowered Islamic extremists who later
murdered the U.S. ambassador and spread unrest beyond Libya’s borders to
nearby Mali.
One might trace this
neocons’ blindness to consequences back to Afghanistan in the 1980s when the
Reagan administration supported Islamic militants, including Osama bin Laden,
in a war against Soviet troops, only to have Muslim extremists take control of Afghanistan
and provide a base for al-Qaeda to plot the 9/11 attacks against the United
States.
Regarding Ukraine, today’s
State Department bureaucracy seems to be continuing the same anti-Moscow
geopolitical strategy set during those Reagan-Bush years.
Robert Gates described the
approach in his new memoir, Duty, explaining the view of
President George H.W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Dick Cheney: “When the Soviet
Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not
only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it
could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”
Vice President Cheney and
the neocons pursued a similar strategy during George W. Bush’s presidency,
expanding NATO aggressively to the east and backing anti-Russian regimes in the
region including the hard-line Georgian government, which provoked a military
confrontation with Moscow in 2008, ironically, during the Summer Olympics in
China.
Obama’s Strategy
As President, Obama has
sought a more cooperative relationship with Russia’s Putin and, generally, a
less belligerent approach toward adversarial countries. Obama has been
supported by an inner circle at the White House with analytical assistance from
some elements of the U.S. intelligence community.
But the neocon momentum at
the State Department and from other parts of the U.S. government has continued
in the direction set by George W. Bush’s neocon administration and by
neocon-lite Democrats who surrounded Secretary of State Clinton during Obama’s
first term.
The two competing currents
of geopolitical thinking – a less combative one from the White House and a more
aggressive one from the foreign policy bureaucracy – have often worked at
cross-purposes. But Obama, with only a few exceptions, has been unwilling to
confront the hardliners or even fully articulate his foreign policy vision
publicly.
For instance, Obama
succumbed to the insistence of Gates, Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus to
escalate the war in Afghanistan in 2009, though the President reportedly felt
trapped into the decision which he soon regretted. In 2010, Obama backed away
from a Brazilian-Turkish-brokered deal with Iran to curtail its nuclear program
after Clinton denounced the arrangement and pushed for economic sanctions and
confrontation as favored by the neocons and Israel.
Just last summer, Obama –
only at the last second – reversed a course charted by the State Department
favoring a military intervention in Syria over disputed U.S. claims that
the Syrian government had launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians.
Putin helped arrange a way out for Obama by getting the Syrian government
to agree to surrender its chemical weapons. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A
Showdown for War or Peace.”]
Stirring Up Trouble
Now, you have Assistant
Secretary of State Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, acting as
a leading instigator in the Ukrainian unrest, explicitly seeking to pry the
country out of the Russian orbit. Last December, she reminded Ukrainian
business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve “its European aspirations, we
have invested more than $5 billion.” She said the U.S. goal was to take
“Ukraine into the future that it deserves.”
The Kagan family includes
other important neocons, such as Frederick Kagan, who was a principal architect
of the Iraq and Afghan “surge” strategies. In Duty, Gates writes that “an
important way station in my ‘pilgrim’s progress’ from skepticism to support of
more troops [in Afghanistan] was an essay by the historian Fred Kagan, who sent
me a prepublication draft.
“I knew and respected Kagan.
He had been a prominent proponent of the surge in Iraq, and we had talked from
time to time about both wars, including one long evening conversation on the
veranda of one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad.”
Now, another member of the
Kagan family, albeit an in-law, has been orchestrating the escalation of
tensions in Ukraine with an eye toward one more “regime change.”
As for Nuland’s sidekick,
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Pyatt previously served as a U.S. diplomat in Vienna
involved in bringing the International Atomic Energy Agency into a line with
U.S. and Israeli hostility toward Iran. A July
9, 2009, cable from Pyatt, which was released by Pvt. Bradley Manning,
revealed Pyatt to be the middleman who coordinated strategy with the
U.S.-installed IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano.
Pyatt reported that Amano
offered to cooperate with the U.S. and Israel on Iran, including having private
meetings with Israeli officials, supporting U.S. sanctions, and agreeing to
IAEA personnel changes favored by the United States. According to the cable,
Pyatt promised strong U.S. backing for Amano and Amano asked for more U.S.
money. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s
Debt to Bradley Manning.”]
I
t was Ambassador Pyatt who
was on the other end of Nuland’s infamous Jan. 28 phone call in which she
discussed how to manipulate Ukraine’s tensions and who to elevate into the
country’s leadership. According to the conversation, which was intercepted and
made public, Nuland ruled out one opposition figure, Vitali Klitschko, a
popular former boxer, because he lacked experience.
Nuland also favored the UN
as mediator over the European Union, at which point in the conversation she
exclaimed, “Fuck the E.U.” to which Pyatt responded, “Oh, exactly …”
Ultimately, the Ukrainian
unrest – over a policy debate whether Ukraine should move toward entering the
European Union – led to a violent showdown in which neo-fascist storm troopers
battled police, leaving scores dead. To ease the crisis, President Yanukovych
agreed to a power-sharing government and to accelerated elections. But no
sooner was that agreement signed then the hard-right faction threw it out and
pressed for power in an apparent coup.
Again, the American neocons
had performed the role of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, unleashing forces and
creating chaos that soon was spinning out of control. But this latest “regime
change,” which humiliated President Putin, could also do long-term damage to
U.S.-Russian cooperation vital to resolving other crises, with Iran and Syria,
two more countries where the neocons are also eager for confrontation.
