Putin or Kerry: Who's Delusional?

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

06 March 14

hen Secretary of State John Kerry denounces Russia's intervention in Crimea by declaring "It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not Twenty-first Century, G-8, major-nation behavior," you might expect that the next line in a serious newspaper would note Kerry's breathtaking hypocrisy.

But not if you were reading the New York Times on Wednesday, or for that matter the Washington Post or virtually any mainstream U.S. newspaper or watching a broadcast outlet.

Yet, look what happens when Russia's President Vladimir Putin does what the U.S. news media should do, i.e. point out that "It's necessary to recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, where they acted either without any sanction from the U.N. Security Council or distorted the content of these resolutions, as it happened in Libya. There, as you know, only the right to create a no-fly zone for government aircraft was authorized, and it all ended in the bombing and participation of special forces in group operations."

Despite the undeniable accuracy of Putin's observation, he was promptly deemed to have "lost touch with reality," according to a Washington Post's editorial, which called his press conference "rambling" and a "bizarre performance" in which his words have "become indistinguishable from the propaganda of his state television network."

You get the point. If someone notes the disturbing U.S. history of military interventions or describes the troubling narrative behind the "democratic" coup in Ukraine - spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias who overthrew a duly elected president - you are dismissed as crazy.

Revised Narrative

Yet, it has been the Post, Times and other U.S. news outlets which have led the way in developing a propaganda narrative at odds with the known reality. For instance, the violent February clashes in Kiev are now typically described as the Ukrainian police having killed some 80 protesters, though the original reporting had that death toll including 13 policemen and the fact that neo-Nazi militias were responsible for much of the violence, from hurling firebombs to shooting firearms.

That history is already fast disappearing as we saw in a typical New York Times report on Wednesday, which reported: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."

Those revised "facts" better fit the preferred narrative of innocent and peaceful demonstrators being set upon by thuggish police without provocation. But that isn't what the original reporting revealed. Either the New York Times should explain how the earlier reporting was wrong or it should respect the more nuanced reality.

To do so, however, would undercut the desired narrative. So, it's better to simply accuse anyone with a functioning memory of being "delusional." The same with anyone who mentions the stunning hypocrisy of the U.S. government suddenly finding international law inviolable.

The history of the United States crossing borders to overthrow governments or to seize resources is a long and sordid one. Even after World War II and the establishment of the Nuremberg principles against "aggressive war," the U.S. government has routinely violated those rules, sometimes unilaterally and sometimes by distorting the clear meaning of U.N. resolutions, as Putin noted.

No Accountability

Those violations of international law have done nothing to diminish the official reputations of presidents who broke the rules. Despite the slaughters of millions of people from these U.S. military adventures, no U.S. president has ever been punished either by U.S. judicial authorities or by international tribunals.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan, one of the most honored political figures in modern American history, ordered the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow its leftist government amid a political crisis that U.S. hostility had helped stir up. Reagan's pretext was to protect American students at the St. George's Medical School, though the students were not in any physical danger.

The U.S. invasion killed some 70 people on the island, including 25 Cuban construction workers. Nineteen U.S. soldiers also died. Though Reagan's clear violation of international law was noted around the globe, he was hailed as a hero by the U.S. media at home and faced no accountability from the United Nations or anyone else.

When I went to Grenada to report on the invasion for the Associated Press, an article that I co-wrote about abuses committed by American troops, including the ransacking of the personal libraries of prominent Grenadians (in search of books such as Karl Marx's Das Kapital), was spiked by my AP editors, presumably because it clashed with the feel-good U.S. public reaction to the invasion.

Last week, as I was reviewing documents at the Reagan Presidential Library at Simi Valley, California, I found a number of papers about how the Reagan administration used propaganda techniques to manipulate the American people regarding Grenada.

The files belonged to Walter Raymond Jr., a top CIA expert in propaganda and psychological operations who had been reassigned to Reagan's National Security Council staff to oversee the creation of a global psy-op structure including one aimed at the U.S. public.

On Nov. 1, 1983, just a week after the invasion, White House public-relations specialist David Gergen advised Reagan's image-molder Michael Deaver on steps to orchestrate the "follow-up on Grenada" to impress the American people, including making sure that the phased U.S. withdrawals were "well publicized, the bigger the groups the better. When units of the fleet leave, that also ought to be done with fanfare."

The P.R. choreography called, too, for using the "rescued" students as props. Gergen wrote: "Students Meet with Liberating Forces: Everyone sees this as a key event, and it needs to be done before RR [Reagan] leaves for the Far East. … Students Visit the Wounded: Many of the wounded would probably welcome a thank you visit from a student delegation."

In a handwritten comment on the last suggestion, Raymond praised the idea: "Happy Grenada theme."

More Recent Violations

Secretary Kerry might argue that Grenada was so Twentieth Century, along with such events as the Vietnam War, the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91, which involved the slaughter of Iraqi soldiers and civilians even after the Iraqi government agreed to withdraw from Kuwait in a deal negotiated by then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

However, if one were to take up Secretary Kerry's challenge and just look at the Twenty-first Century and "G-8, major-nation behavior," which would include the United States and its major European allies, you'd still have a substantial list of U.S. violations: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and others. France and Great Britain, two other G-8 countries, have engaged in military interventions as well, including France in Mali and other African conflicts.

On Aug. 30, 2013, Secretary Kerry himself gave a belligerent speech justifying U.S. military action against Syria over murky accounts of a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, a war that was only averted by Putin's diplomatic efforts in convincing President Bashar al-Assad to agree to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons.

Plus, throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has declared, over and over, that "all options are on the table" regarding Iran's nuclear program, a clear threat of another U.S. bombing campaign, another crisis that Putin has helped tamp down by assisting in getting Iran to the bargaining table.

Indeed, it appears that one reason why Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover, has been so aggressive in trying to exacerbate the Ukraine crisis was as a form of neocon payback for Putin's defusing the confrontations with Syria and Iran, when Official Washington's still-influential neocons were eager for more violence and "regime change." [See Consortiumnews.com's "What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis."]

In virtually all these threatened or actual U.S. military assaults on sovereign nations, the major U.S. news media has been enthusiastically onboard. Indeed, the Washington Post and the New York Times played key roles in manufacturing public consent for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the false pretext of eliminating its non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

By promoting dubious and false allegations, the Post and Times also have helped lay the groundwork for potential U.S. wars against Iran and Syria, including the Times making the bogus claim that the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack east of Damascus was launched by Syrian government forces northwest of the city. Months later, the Times grudgingly admitted that its reporting, which helped bring the U.S. to the brink of another war, was contradicted by the fact that the Sarin-laden missile had a much more limited range. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mistaken Guns of Last August."]

However, when Russia has a much more understandable case for intervention - an incipient civil war on its border that involves clear U.S. interference, the overthrow of an elected president and the participation of neo-Nazi militias - the U.S. government and its compliant mainstream media lock arms in outrage.

Why Washington Doesn't Want to Leave Afghanistan

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

06 March 14

Washington and Kabul have, for endless months, been performing a strange pas de deux over the issue of American withdrawal. Initially, the Obama administration insisted that if, by December 31, 2013, Afghan President Hamid Karzai didn't sign a bilateral security agreement the two sides had negotiated, the U.S. would have to commit to "the zero option"; that is, a total withdrawal from his country -- not just of American and NATO "combat troops" but of the works by the end of 2014. Getting out completely was too complicated a process, so the story went, for such a decision to wait any longer than that. Senior officials, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice, directly threatened the Afghan president: sign or else. When Karzai refused and the December deadline passed, however, they began to hedge. Still, whatever happened, one thing was made clear: Karzai must sign on the dotted line "in weeks, and not months," or else. Washington couldn't possibly wait for the upcoming presidential elections in April followed by possible run-offs before a new Afghan leader could agree to the same terms. When, however, it became clear that Karzai simply would not sign -- not then, not ever -- it turned out that, if necessary, they could wait.

And so it goes. At stake has been leaving a residual force of U.S. and NATO trainers, advisors, and special operations types behind for years to come, perhaps (the figures varied with the moment) 3,000-12,000 of them. With time, things only got curiouser and curiouser. The less Karzai complied, the more Obama administration and Pentagon officials betrayed an overwhelming need to stay. In the 13th year of a war that just wouldn't go right, this strange dance between the most powerful state on the planet and one of the least powerful heads of state anywhere, to say the least, puzzling. Why didn't the Americans just follow through on their zero-option threats and pull the plug on Karzai and the war? Obviously, fear that the Taliban might gain ground in a major way after such a departure was one reason.

In January, David Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times provided another. They reported that a paramount issue for Washington was "concerns inside the American intelligence agencies that they could lose their [Afghan] air bases used for drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan." It might, it turned out, be difficult to find other regimes in the region willing to lend bases in support of the U.S. drone campaigns in the Pakistani tribal areas and possibly Afghanistan as well.

Today, TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer provides a third potential reason in her striking explanation of just how the Pentagon has been managing to avoid serious sequestration cuts. It turns out that billions of dollars in extra funding are being salted away in a supplementary war-fighting budget that Congress grants the U.S. military, which is subject to neither cuts nor caps. But here's a potential problem: that budget relies on the existence of an Afghan War. What if, after 2014, there isn't even a residual American component to that war? Not that the Pentagon wouldn't try to keep "war budget" funding alive, but it's clearly a harder, more embarrassing task without a war to fund.

That's just one of the questions that emerges from Kramer's clear-eyed look at what -- once you've read her piece -- can only be considered the Pentagon's sequestration con game. It's a shocking tale largely because, while the budget figures are clear enough, you can't read about them anywhere except here at TomDispatch. Tom

The Pentagon's Phony Budget War

By Mattea Kramer, TomDispatch

06 March 14

ashington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers like the New York Times and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting process.

Yet a careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military -- a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57% of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40% of all military spending on this planet -- shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.

This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action -- and the "news" that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.

The Pentagon Cries Wolf, Round One

As sequestration first approached, the Pentagon issued deafening cries of despair. Looming cuts would "inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country," said Secretary Hagel in December 2012.

Sequestration went into effect in March 2013 and was slated to slice $54.6 billion from the Pentagon's $550 billion larger-than-the-economy-of-Sweden budget. But Congress didn't have the stomach for it, so lawmakers knocked the cuts down to $37 billion. (Domestic programs like Head Start and cancer research received no such special dispensation.)

By law, the cuts were to be applied across the board. But that, too, didn't go as planned. The Pentagon was able to do something hardly recognizable as a cut at all. Having the luxury of unspent funds from previous budgets -- known obscurely as "prior year unobligated balances" -- officials reallocated some of the cuts to those funds instead.

In the end, the Pentagon shaved about 5.7%, or $31 billion, from its 2013 budget. And just how painful did that turn out to be? Frank Kendall, who serves as the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has acknowledged that the Pentagon "cried wolf." Those cuts caused no substantial damage, he admitted.

And that's not where the story ends -- it's where it begins.

Sequestration, the Phony Budget War, Round Two

A $54.6 billion slice was supposed to come out of the Pentagon budget in 2014. If that had actually happened, it would have amounted to around 10% of its budget. But after the hubbub over the supposedly devastating cuts of 2013, lawmakers set about softening the blow.

And this time they did a much better job.

In December 2013, a budget deal was brokered by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray. In it they agreed to reduce sequestration. Cuts for the Pentagon soon shrank to $34 billion for 2014.

And that was just a start.

All the cuts discussed so far pertain to what's called the Pentagon's "base" budget -- its regular peacetime budget. That, however, doesn't represent all of its funding. It gets a whole different budget for making war, and for the 13th year, the U.S. is making war in Afghanistan. For that part of the budget, which falls into the Washington category of "Overseas Contingency Operations" (OCO), the Pentagon is getting an additional $85 billion in 2014.

And this is where something funny happens.

That war funding isn't subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all. So imagine for a moment that you're an official at the Pentagon -- or the White House -- and you're committed to sparing the military from downsizing. Your budget has two parts: one that's subject to caps and cuts, and one that isn't. What do you do? When you hit a ceiling in the former, you stuff extra cash into the latter.

It takes a fine-toothed comb to discover how this is done. Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, found that the Pentagon was stashing an estimated extra $20 billion worth of non-war funding in the "operation and maintenance" accounts of its proposed 2014 war budget. And since all federal agencies work in concert with the White House to craft their budget proposals, it's safe to say that the Obama administration was in on the game.

Add the December budget deal to this $20 billion switcheroo and the sequester cuts for 2014 were now down to $14 billion, hardly a devastating sum given the roughly $550 billion in previously projected funding.

And the story's still not over.

When it was time to write the Pentagon budget into law, appropriators in Congress wanted in on the fun. As Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight discovered, lawmakers added a $10.8 billion slush fund to the war budget.

All told, that leaves $3.4 billion -- a cut of less than 1% from Pentagon funding this year. It's hard to imagine that anyone in the sprawling bureaucracy of the Defense Department will even notice. Nonetheless, last week Secretary Hagel insisted that "[s]equestration requires cuts so deep, so abrupt, so quickly that... the only way to implement [them] is to sharply reduce spending on our readiness and modernization, which would almost certainly result in a hollow force."

Yet this less than 1% cut comes from a budget that, at last count, was the size of the next 10 largest military budgets on the planet combined. If you can find a threat to our national security in this story, your sleuthing powers are greater than mine. Meanwhile, in the non-military part of the budget, sequestration has brought cuts that actually matter to everything from public education to the justice system.

Cashing in on the "Cuts," Round Three and Beyond

After two years of uproar over mostly phantom cuts, 2015 isn't likely to bring austerity to the Pentagon either. Last December's budget deal already reduced the cuts projected for 2015, and President Obama is now asking for something he's calling the "Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative." It would deliver an extra $26 billion to the Pentagon next year. And that still leaves the war budget for officials to use as a cash cow.

And the president is proposing significant growth in military spending further down the road. In his 2015 budget plan, he's asking Congress to approve an additional $115 billion in extra Pentagon funds for the years 2016-2019.

My guess is he'll claim that our national security requires it after the years of austerity.