{"id":108897,"date":"2014-03-02T20:57:15","date_gmt":"2014-03-02T20:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=108897"},"modified":"2014-03-02T20:57:15","modified_gmt":"2014-03-02T20:57:15","slug":"neocons-want-ukraine-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/neocons-want-ukraine-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Parry\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

President Barack Obama has been trying, mostly in secret, to craft a new foreign policy that relies heavily on cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to tamp down confrontations in hotspots such as Iran and Syria. But Obama\u2019s timidity about publicly explaining this strategy has left it open to attack from powerful elements of Official Washington, including well-placed neocons and people in his own administration.<\/p>\n

The gravest threat to this Obama-Putin collaboration has now emerged in Ukraine, where a coalition of U.S. neocon operatives and neocon holdovers within the State Department fanned the flames of unrest in Ukraine, contributing to the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and now to a military intervention by Russian troops in the Crimea, a region in southern Ukraine that historically was part of Russia.<\/p>\n

Though I\u2019m told the Ukraine crisis caught both Obama and Putin by surprise, the neocon determination to drive a wedge between the two leaders has been apparent for months, especially after Putin brokered a deal to head off U.S. military strikes against Syria last summer and helped get Iran to negotiate concessions on its nuclear program.<\/p>\n

Putin also is reported to have verbally dressed down Israel\u2019s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan over what Putin considered their provocative actions regarding the Syrian civil war.<\/p>\n

American neocons \u2014 along with Israel and Saudi Arabia \u2014 had hoped\u00a0that Obama would launch military strikes on Syria and Iran that could open the door to more \u201cregime change\u201d across the Middle East, a dream\u00a0at the center of neocon geopolitical strategy since the 1990s.<\/p>\n

This neocon strategy\u00a0took shape after the display of U.S. high-tech warfare against Iraq in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union later that year. U.S. neocons began believing in a new paradigm of a uni-polar world where\u00a0U.S. edicts were law.<\/p>\n

The neocons felt this paradigm shift also meant that Israel would no longer need to put up with frustrating negotiations with the Palestinians. Rather than haggling over a two-state solution, U.S. neocons simply pressed for \u201cregime change\u201d in hostile Muslim countries that were assisting the Palestinians or Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah.<\/p>\n

Iraq was first on the neocon hit list, but next came Syria and Iran. The overriding idea was that once the regimes assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah were removed or neutralized, then Israel could dictate peace terms to the Palestinians who would have no choice but to accept what was on the table.<\/p>\n

U.S. neocons working on Netanyahu\u2019s campaign\u00a0team in 1996, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, even formalized their bold new plan, which they outlined in a\u00a0strategy paper, called \u201cA Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.\u201d The paper argued\u00a0that only \u201cregime change\u201d in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary \u201cclean break\u201d from the diplomatic standoffs that had followed inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.<\/p>\n

In 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but\u00a0President Bill Clinton refused to go along. The situation changed, however,\u00a0when President George W. Bush took office and after the 9\/11 attacks. Suddenly, the neocons had\u00a0a Commander in Chief who agreed with the need to eliminate Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein \u2013 and\u00a0a stunned and angry U.S. public\u00a0could be easily persuaded. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cThe Mysterious Why of the Iraq War<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

So, Bush invaded Iraq, ousting Hussein but failing to subdue the country. The U.S. death toll of nearly 4,500 soldiers and the staggering costs, estimated to exceed $1 trillion, made the American people and even Bush unwilling to fulfill the full-scale neocon vision, which was expressed in one of their favorite jokes of 2003 about where to attack next, Iran or Syria, with the punch line: \u201cReal men go to Tehran!\u201d<\/p>\n

Though hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney pushed the neocon\/Israeli case for having the U.S. military bomb Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities \u2014 with the hope that the attacks also might spark a \u201cregime change\u201d in Tehran \u2014 Bush decided that he couldn\u2019t risk the move, especially after the U.S. intelligence community assessed in 2007 that Iran had stopped work on a bomb four years earlier.<\/p>\n

The Rise of Obama<\/b><\/p>\n

The neocons were dealt another setback in 2008 when Barack Obama defeated a neocon favorite, Sen. John McCain. But Obama then made one of the fateful decisions of his presidency, deciding to staff key foreign-policy positions with \u201ca team of rivals,\u201d i.e. keeping Republican operative Robert Gates at the Defense Department and recruiting Hillary Clinton, a neocon-lite, to head the State Department.<\/p>\n

Obama also retained Bush\u2019s high command, most significantly the media-darling Gen. David Petraeus. That meant that Obama didn\u2019t take control over his own foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Gates and Petraeus were themselves deeply influenced by the neocons, particularly Frederick Kagan, who had been a major advocate for the 2007 \u201csurge\u201d escalation in Iraq, which was hailed by the U.S. mainstream media as a great \u201csuccess\u201d but never achieved its principal goal of a unified Iraq. At the cost of nearly 1,000 U.S. dead, it only bought time for an orderly withdrawal that spared Bush and the neocons the embarrassment of an obvious defeat.<\/p>\n

So, instead of a major personnel shakeup in the wake of the catastrophic Iraq War, Obama presided over what looked more like continuity with the Bush war policies, albeit with a\u00a0firmer commitment to\u00a0draw down troops in Iraq and eventually in\u00a0Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

From the start, however, Obama was opposed by key elements of his own administration, especially at State and Defense, and by the still-influential neocons of Official Washington. According to various accounts, including Gates\u2019s new memoir\u00a0Duty<\/i>, Obama was\u00a0maneuvered into supporting a troop\u00a0\u201csurge\u201d in Afghanistan, as advocated\u00a0by neocon Frederick Kagan and pushed by\u00a0Gates, Petraeus and Clinton.<\/p>\n

Gates wrote that\u00a0Kagan\u00a0persuaded him to recommend the Afghan \u201csurge\u201d and that Obama grudgingly went along\u00a0although Gates concluded that Obama didn\u2019t believe in the \u201cmission\u201d and wanted to reverse course more quickly than Gates, Petraeus and their side wanted.<\/p>\n

Faced with this resistance from his own bureaucracy, Obama began to rely on a small inner circle built around Vice President Joe Biden and a few White House advisers with the analytical support of some CIA officials, including CIA Director Leon Panetta.<\/p>\n

Obama\u00a0also found a surprising ally in Putin after he regained the Russian presidency in 2012. A Putin adviser told me that the Russian president personally liked Obama and genuinely wanted to help him resolve dangerous disputes, especially crises with Iran and Syria.<\/p>\n

In other words, what evolved out of Obama\u2019s early \u201cteam of rivals\u201d misjudgment was an extraordinary presidential foreign policy style, in which Obama developed and implemented much of his approach to the world outside the view of his secretaries of State and Defense (except when Panetta moved briefly to the Pentagon).<\/p>\n

Even after the eventual departures of Gates in 2011, Petraeus as CIA director after a sex scandal in late 2012, and Clinton in early 2013, Obama\u2019s peculiar approach didn\u2019t particularly change. I\u2019m told that he has a distant relationship with Secretary of State John Kerry, who never joined Obama\u2019s inner foreign policy circle.<\/p>\n

Though Obama\u2019s taciturn protectiveness of his \u201creal\u201d foreign policy may be understandable given the continued neocon \u201ctough-guy-ism\u201d that dominates Official Washington, Obama\u2019s freelancing approach gave space to hawkish elements of his own administration.<\/p>\n

For instance, Secretary of State Kerry came close to announcing a U.S. war against Syria in a\u00a0bellicose speech on Aug. 30, 2013, only to see Obama pull the rug out from under him as the President worked with Putin to defuse the crisis sparked by a disputed chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cHow War on Syria Lost Its Way<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Similarly, Obama and Putin hammered out the structure for an interim deal with Iran on how to constrain its nuclear program. But when Kerry was sent to seal that agreement in Geneva, he instead inserted new demands from the French (who were carrying water for the Saudis) and nearly screwed it all up. After getting called on the carpet by the White House, Kerry returned to Geneva and finalized the arrangements.[See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cA Saudi-Israel Defeat on Iran Deal<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Unorthodox Foreign Policy<\/b><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s unorthodox foreign policy \u2014 essentially working in tandem with the Russian president and sometimes at odds with his own foreign policy bureaucracy \u2014 has forced Obama into faux outrage when he\u2019s faced with some perceived affront from Russia, such as its agreement to give temporary asylum to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n

For the record, Obama had to express strong disapproval of Snowden\u2019s asylum, though in many ways Putin was doing Obama a favor by sparing Obama from having to prosecute Snowden with the attendant complications for U.S. national security and the damaging political repercussions from Obama\u2019s liberal base.<\/p>\n

Putin\u2019s unforced errors also complicated the relationship, such as when he defended Russian hostility toward gays and cracked down on dissent before the Sochi Olympics. Putin became an easy target for U.S. commentators and comedians.<\/p>\n

But Obama\u2019s hesitancy to explain the degree of his strategic cooperation with Putin has enabled\u00a0Official Washington\u2019s still influential neocons, including holdovers within the State Department bureaucracy, to drive more substantive wedges between Obama and Putin. The neocons came to recognize that the Obama-Putin tandem had become a major impediment to their\u00a0strategic vision.<\/p>\n

Without doubt, the neocons\u2019 most dramatic \u2014 and potentially most dangerous \u2014 counter-move has been Ukraine, where they have lent their political and financial support to opposition forces who sought to break Ukraine away from its Russian neighbor.<\/p>\n

Though this crisis also stems from the historical division of Ukraine \u2014 between its more European-oriented west and the Russian-ethnic east and south \u2014 neocon operatives, with financing from the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other U.S. sources, played key roles in destabilizing and\u00a0overthrowing the democratically elected president.<\/p>\n

NED, a $100 million-a-year agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against targeted states, lists 65 projects that it supports financially inside Ukraine, including training activists, supporting \u201cjournalists\u201d and promoting business groups, effectively creating a full-service structure primed and ready to destabilize a government in the name of promoting \u201cdemocracy.\u201d [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cA Shadow US Foreign Policy<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

State Department neocons also put their shoulders into shoving Ukraine away from Russia. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan and the sister-in-law of the Gates-Petraeus adviser Frederick Kagan, advocated strenuously for Ukraine\u2019s reorientation toward Europe.<\/p>\n

Last December, Nuland\u00a0reminded<\/a>\u00a0Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve \u201cits European aspirations, we have invested more than $5 billion.\u201d She said the U.S. goal was to take \u201cUkraine into the future that it deserves,\u201d by which she meant into the West\u2019s orbit and away from Russia\u2019s.<\/p>\n

But President Yanukovych rejected a European Union plan that would have imposed harsh austerity on the already impoverished Ukraine. He accepted a more generous $15 billion loan from Russia, which also has propped up Ukraine\u2019s economy with discounted natural gas. Yanukovych\u2019s decision\u00a0sparked anti-Russian street protests in Kiev, located in the country\u2019s western and more pro-European region.<\/p>\n

Nuland was soon at work planning for \u201cregime change,\u201d encouraging\u00a0disruptive street protests by personally passing out cookies to the anti-government demonstrators. She didn\u2019t seem to notice or mind that the protesters in Kiev\u2019s Maidan square had hoisted a large banner honoring Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.<\/p>\n

By late January, Nuland was discussing\u00a0with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt\u00a0who should be allowed in the new government.<\/p>\n

\u201cYats is the guy,\u201d Nuland said in a phone call to Pyatt that was intercepted and posted online. \u201cHe\u2019s got the economic experience, the governing experience.\u00a0He\u2019s the guy you know.\u201d By \u201cYats,\u201d Nuland was referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had served as head of the central bank, foreign minister and economic minister \u2013 and who was committed to harsh austerity.<\/p>\n

As Assistant Secretary Nuland and Sen. McCain cheered the demonstrators on, the street protests turned violent. Police clashed with neo-Nazi bands,\u00a0the ideological descendants of Bandera\u2019s anti-Russian Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazi SS during World War II.<\/p>\n

With the crisis escalating and scores of people killed in the street fighting, Yanukovych agreed to a E.U.-brokered deal that called for moving up scheduled elections and having the police stand down. The neo-Nazi storm troopers then seized the opening to occupy government buildings and force Yanukovych and many of his aides to flee for their lives.<\/p>\n

With these neo-Nazis providing \u201csecurity,\u201d\u00a0the remaining parliamentarians agreed in a series of unanimous or near unanimous votes to establish a new government and seek Yanukovych\u2019s arrest for\u00a0mass murder. Nuland\u2019s choice, Yatsenyuk, emerged as interim prime minister.<\/p>\n

Yet, the violent ouster of Yanukovych provoked\u00a0popular resistance to the coup from the Russian-ethnic south and east. After seeking refuge in Russia, Yanukovych appealed to Putin for help. Putin then dispatched Russian troops to secure control of the Crimea. [For more on this history, see Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cCheering a \u2018Democratic\u2019 Coup in Ukraine<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Separating Obama from Putin<\/b><\/p>\n

The Ukraine crisis has given Official Washington\u2019s neocons another wedge to drive between Obama and Putin. For instance, the neocon flagship Washington Post editorialized on Saturday that Obama was responding \u201cwith phone calls\u201d when something much more threatening than \u201ccondemnation\u201d was needed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always stunning when the Post, which so energetically lobbied for the U.S. invasion of Iraq under the false pretense of eliminating its (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, gets its ire up about another country acting in response to a genuine security threat on its own borders, not half a world away.<\/p>\n

But the Post\u2019s editors have never been deterred by their own hypocrisy. They wrote,\u00a0\u201cMr. Putin\u2019s likely objective was not difficult to figure. He appears to be responding to Ukraine\u2019s overthrow of a pro-Kremlin government last week with an old and ugly Russian tactic: provoking a separatist rebellion in a neighboring state, using its own troops when necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reality, however, appears to have been that neocon elements from within the U.S. government encouraged the overthrow of the elected president of Ukraine via a coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi storm troopers who then terrorized lawmakers as the parliament passed draconian laws, including some intended to punish the Russian-oriented regions which favor Yanukovych.<\/p>\n

Yet, besides baiting Obama over his tempered words about the crisis, the Post declared that \u201cMr. Obama and European leaders must act quickly to prevent Ukraine\u2019s dismemberment. Missing from the president\u2019s statement was a necessary first step: a demand that all Russian forces \u2014 regular and irregular \u2014 be withdrawn \u2026 and that Moscow recognize the authority of the new Kiev government. \u2026 If Mr. Putin does not comply, Western leaders should make clear that Russia will pay a heavy price.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Post editors are fond of\u00a0calling for ultimatums<\/a>\u00a0against various countries, especially Syria and Iran, with the implication that if they don\u2019t comply with some U.S. demand that harsh actions, including military reprisals, will follow.<\/p>\n

But now the neocons, in their single-minded\u00a0pursuit of endless \u201cregime change\u201d in countries that get in their way, have taken their ambitions to a dangerous new level, confronting nuclear-armed Russia with ultimatums.<\/p>\n

By Sunday, the Post\u2019s neocon editors were \u201cspelling out the consequences\u201d for Putin and Russia, essentially proposing a new Cold War. The Post mocked Obama\u00a0for alleged softness toward Russia and suggested that the next \u201cregime change\u201d must come in Moscow.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany in the West did not believe Mr. Putin would dare attempt a military intervention in Ukraine because of the steep potential consequences,\u201d the Post wrote. \u201cThat the Russian ruler plunged ahead shows that he doubts Western leaders will respond forcefully. If he does not quickly retreat, the United States must prove him wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

The madness of the neocons has long been indicated by their extraordinary arrogance and their contempt for other nations\u2019 interests. They assume that U.S. military might and other coercive means must be brought to bear on any nation that doesn\u2019t bow before U.S. ultimatums or that resists U.S.-orchestrated coups.<\/p>\n

Whenever the neocons meet resistance, they don\u2019t\u00a0rethink their strategy; they simply take it to the next level. Angered by Russia\u2019s role in heading off U.S. military attacks against Syria and Iran, the neocons escalated their geopolitical conflict by taking it to Russia\u2019s own border, by egging on the violent ouster of Ukraine\u2019s elected president.<\/p>\n

The idea was to give Putin an embarrassing black eye as punishment for his interference in the neocons\u2019 dream of \u201cregime change\u201d across the Middle East. Now, with Putin\u2019s countermove, his dispatch of Russian troops to secure control of the Crimea, the neocons want Obama to further escalate the crisis by going after Putin.<\/p>\n

Some leading neocons even see ousting\u00a0Putin as a crucial step toward\u00a0reestablishing the preeminence of their agenda.\u00a0NED president Carl Gershman\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in the Washington Post, \u201cUkraine\u2019s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. \u00a0\u2026 Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

At minimum,\u00a0the neocons hope that they can neutralize Putin as Obama\u2019s ally in trying to tamp down tensions with Syria and Iran \u2014 and thus put American military strikes against those two countries back under active consideration.<\/p>\n

As events spin out of control, it appears way past time for President Obama to explain to the American people why he has collaborated with President Putin in trying to resolve some of the world\u2019s thorniest\u00a0problems.<\/p>\n

That, however, would require him to belatedly take control of his own administration, to purge the neocon holdovers who have worked to sabotage his actual foreign policy, and to put an end to neocon-controlled organizations, like the National Endowment for Democracy, that use U.S. taxpayers\u2019 money to stir up trouble abroad. That would require real political courage.<\/p>\n

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,\u00a0America\u2019s Stolen Narrative,<\/i>\u00a0either in\u00a0print here<\/a>\u00a0or as an e-book (from\u00a0Amazon<\/a>\u00a0andbarnesandnoble.com<\/a>). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry\u2019s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes\u00a0America\u2019s Stolen Narrative<\/i>. For details on this offer,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Parry\u00a0 RINF Alternative News President Barack Obama has been trying, mostly in secret, to craft a new foreign policy that relies heavily on cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to tamp down confrontations in hotspots such as Iran and Syria. But Obama\u2019s timidity about publicly explaining this strategy has left it open to attack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-108897","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}