Ukraine: Flat Facts, Half-Truths, and Lame Excuses

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

30 July 14

aving been bombarded since childhood with the endless lies of the first Cold War, those of us of a certain age should not be surprised by how quickly Cold War II has produced its own one-sided, self-serving prevarications. Paid spin doctors, propagandists, and psychological warriors in Moscow, Washington, and the capitals of Europe have fought to frame the conflict and lay the blame, and they have the support of their go-along media, whether state-owned like Voice of Russian and RT or in private hands like The New York Times. This is all to be expected – and fought against.

Harder to understand is why so many progressive pundits and others who should know better have chosen to cheerlead or make lame excuses for one side or the other, blinding themselves to inconvenient facts that will come back to haunt us all.

On one side are those who cannot seem to remember that an expansionist European Union – urged on primarily by the Swedes, Poles, British, and Dutch – and a hegemonic United States started the present conflict in Ukraine. Indeed, the American desire to dominate extended across a broad bipartisan consensus. These included not just the neocons, whom we all love to blame. They were also, or even more so, “foreign policy realists” like President George H.W. Bush and his alter ego Brent Scowcroft, old-line American nationalists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Cold War liberals like Billary and Barack, and faith-based Christian Evangelicals like the younger Bush.

In “Exposing the Cold War Roots of America’s Coup in Kiev,” I started the story even earlier, reaching back into the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Their campaigns to promote human rights behind the Iron Curtain, which Ronald Reagan greatly accelerated, led to greater freedom, democracy, and national independence throughout Eastern Europe. But especially with US support for Solidarity in Poland, a country central to the strategic position of the Soviet Union, these efforts also led to expanding a nuclear-armed NATO eastward right up to Russia’s borders.

First, the elder Bush and German chancellor Helmut Kohl hoodwinked Mikhail Gorbachev into believing that they would not expand NATO to the east. Bill Clinton then presided over inviting most of the former Warsaw Pact into NATO, spreading the North Atlantic Alliance eastward into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Clinton and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright also led NATO into the former Yugoslavia, greatly expanding its role beyond its original mission, which was to act only in defense of its member nations.

Building on Clinton covert support for the popular uprising against Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, Bush and his European allies went on to stage-manage “color revolutions” in the Ukraine and other newly independent nations along the border of the former Soviet Union. Their aim, for all their paeans to democracy, was to bring to power politicians who would move their countries away from Russia and closer to NATO and the EU. The coup that the Obama administration put together in Kiev (here and here) simply followed in the grand tradition, as did European support for it.

This is a whole lot of history to ignore, but those who side with Washington and the Europeans manage to do it without a thought. They also remain blind to any idea that Western ambitions here go far beyond reining in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has made more than clear. For Zbig and the many “deep thinkers” he has inspired, expanding NATO has been only a step toward dominating all of Eurasia, the entire “World Island” from Western Europe to Eastern Asia with its strategic position and all of its natural riches.

“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland,” said Brzezinski, quoting the World War I era British geographer and geostrategist Sir Halford John Mackinder. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

On the other side of the frame are those who would hold Putin and the Russians completely without blame. Given the enormity of what Western leaders and their story-tellers are trying to get away with, I often share the urge. I work hard not to give into it. As journalism, it sucks. As politics, it is worse.

Putin has obviously added his share to the current conflict, greatly increasing the prospects of a nuclear confrontation. He violated both international law and his country’s treaty commitments by bringing Crimea into the Russian Federation, no matter what voters in a hastily called and completely controlled plebiscite might or might not have wanted. He greatly added to tensions by massing his troops on the border, and though he has since withdrawn them, he continues to support rebellious pro-Russians in Eastern Ukraine, as they freely admit.

To be fair, he has every bit as much – or as little – right to give his support as the US and NATO have to lend their theirs to the Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev. After all, this is a civil war, duly declared as such by the International Red Cross. But in the real world, his efforts have proved a strategic disaster. His side is on the verge of losing. Short of an all-out Russian invasion, which would be disastrous, the rebels have no chance of turning the tide. Worse, Putin’s mostly covert intervention has only strengthened the hand of the Ukrainian oligarchs and the determination of Washington and the Europeans to back them. He has increased the number of Ukrainians begging for Western protection and created greater fear of Russia throughout Eastern Europe. And he has whipped up a nasty Russian nationalism that he may not be able to control.

This is not a hand that progressive journalists should help him to play, and certainly not by making lame excuses for every justification he offers. One of the worst of which is his framing of the war in Eastern Ukraine as primarily a fight against Ukrainian neo-Nazis. This is far-and-away Putin’s favorite propaganda theme, which poses every battle he fights as a reenactment of the heroic fight that the Soviet Union waged against the German Nazis – heroic, that is, after the Führer betrayed the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Let me be clear. There can be no denying the role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, who are certainly real enough. Back in early April, I reported in detail on the Right Sector, Oleg Tyanybok, leader of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, and Andriy Parubiy, who led the armed street fighters that many observers credit with driving former President Viktor Yanukovych out of office. Parubiy now heads Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, and many of his neo-Nazi friends are fighting against the pro-Russians in Eastern Ukraine.

But don’t overstate their importance. They are just the hired hands, and no matter how often we talk about them, they do not make the major decisions in Kiev or in Eastern Ukraine. The oligarchs do. The oligarchs are the ones the US, Europeans, and IMF wanted in power, and they are the ones with whom Putin will ultimately make a deal.