https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/15/making-russia-the-enemy/



 
Exclusive: Despite conflicting accounts about who leaked the Democratic emails, the frenzy over an alleged Russian role is driving the U.S. deeper into a costly and dangerous New Cold War, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
The rising hysteria about Russia is best understood as fulfilling two needs for Official Washington: the Military Industrial Complex’s transitioning from the “war on terror” to a more lucrative “new cold war” – and blunting the threat that a President Trump poses to the neoconservative/liberal-interventionist foreign-policy establishment.
By hyping the Russian “threat,” the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks, who include much of the mainstream U.S. news media, can guarantee bigger military budgets from Congress. The hype also sets in motion a blocking maneuver to impinge on any significant change in direction for U.S. foreign policy under Trump.
Wintery scene at Red Square in Moscow, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Wintery scene at Red Square in Moscow, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Some Democrats even hope to stop Trump from ascending to the White House by having the Central Intelligence Agency, in effect, lobby the electors in the Electoral College with scary tales about Russia trying to fix the election for Trump.
The electors meet on Dec. 19 when they will formally cast their votes, supposedly reflecting the judgments of each state’s voters, but conceivably individual electors could switch their ballots from Trump to Hillary Clinton or someone else.
On Thursday, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. joined the call for electors to flip, writing: “The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the system.”
That Democrats would want the CIA, which is forbidden to operate domestically in part because of its historic role in influencing elections in other countries, to play a similar role in the United States shows how desperate the Democratic Party has become.
And, even though The New York Times and other big news outlets are reporting as flat fact that Russia hacked the Democratic email accounts and gave the information to WikiLeaks, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, a close associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the London Daily Mail that he personally received the email data from a “disgusted” Democrat.
Murray said he flew from London to Washington for a clandestine handoff from one of the email sources in September, receiving the package in a wooded area near American University.
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray
Former British Ambassador Craig Murray
“Neither of [the leaks, from the Democratic National Committee or Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] came from the Russians,” Murray said, adding: “the source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.”
Murray said the insider felt “disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.” Murray added that his meeting was with an intermediary for the Democratic leaker, not the leaker directly.
If Murray’s story is true, it raises several alternative scenarios: that the U.S. intelligence community’s claims about a Russian hack are false; that Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails for their own intelligence gathering without giving the material to WikiLeaks; or that Murray was deceived about the identity of the original leaker.
But the uncertainty creates the possibility that the Democrats are using a dubious CIA assessment to reverse the outcome of an American presidential election, in effect, making the CIA party to a preemptive domestic “regime change.”
Delayed Autopsy
All of this maneuvering also is delaying the Democratic Party’s self-examination into why it lost so many white working-class voters in normally Democratic strongholds, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Rather than national party leaders taking the blame for pre-selecting a very flawed candidate and ignoring all the warning signs about the public’s resistance to this establishment choice, Democrats have pointed fingers at almost everyone else – from FBI Director James Comey for briefly reviving Clinton’s email investigation, to third-party candidates who siphoned off votes, to the archaic Electoral College which negates the fact that Clinton did win the national popular vote – and now to the Russians.
FBI Director James Comey
FBI Director James Comey
While there may be some validity to these various complaints, the excessive frenzy that has surrounded the still-unproven claims that the Russian government surreptitiously tilted the election in Trump’s favor creates an especially dangerous dynamic.
On one level, it has led Democrats to support Orwellian/ McCarthyistic concepts, such as establishing “black lists” for Internet sites that question Official Washington’s “conventional wisdom” and thus are deemed purveyors of “Russian propaganda” or “fake news.”
On another level, it cements the Democratic Party as America’s preeminent “war party,” favoring an escalating New Cold War with Russia by ratcheting up economic sanctions against Moscow, and even seeking military challenges to Russia in conflict zones such as Syria and Ukraine.
One of the most dangerous aspects of a prospective Hillary Clinton presidency was that she would have appointed neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and her husband, Project for the New American Century co-founder Robert Kagan, to high-level foreign policy positions.
Though that risk may have passed assuming Clinton’s Electoral College defeat on Monday, Democrats now are excitedly joining the bash-Russia movement, making it harder to envision how the party can transition back into its more recent role as the “peace party” (at least relative to the extremely hawkish Republicans).
Trading Places
The potential trading places of the two parties in that regard – with Trump favoring geopolitical détente and the Democrats beating the drums for more military confrontations – augurs poorly for the Democrats regaining their political footing anytime soon.
Red Square in Moscow with a winter festival to the left and the Kremlin to the right. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Red Square in Moscow with a winter festival to the left and the Kremlin to the right, on Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
If Democratic leaders press ahead, in alliance with neoconservative Republicans, on demands for escalating the New Cold War with Russia, they could precipitate a party split between Democratic hawks and doves, a schism that likely would have occurred if Clinton had been elected but now may happen anyway, albeit without the benefit of the party holding the White House.
The first test of this emerging Democratic-neocon alliance may come over Trump’s choice for Secretary of State, Exxon-Mobil’s chief executive Rex Tillerson, who doesn’t exhibit the visceral hatred of Russian President Vladimir Putin that Democrats are encouraging.
As an international business executive, Tillerson appears to share Trump’s real-politik take on the world, the idea that doing business with rivals makes more sense than conspiring to force “regime change” after “regime change.”
Over the past several decades, the “regime change” approach has been embraced by both neocons and liberal interventionists and has been implemented by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Sometimes, it’s done through war and other times through “color revolutions” – always under the idealistic guise of “democracy promotion” or “protecting human rights.”
But the problem with this neo-imperialist strategy has been that it has failed miserably to improve the lives of the people living in the “regime-changed” countries. Instead, it has spread chaos across wide swaths of the globe and has now even destabilized Europe.
Yet, the solution, as envisioned by the neocons and their liberal-hawk understudies, is simply to force more “regime change” medicine down the throats of the world’s population. The new “great” idea is to destabilize nuclear-armed Russia by making its economy scream and by funding as many anti-Putin elements as possible to create the nucleus for a “color revolution” in Moscow.
To justify that risky scheme, there has been a broad expansion of anti-Russian propaganda now being funded with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money as well as being pushed by government officials giving off-the-record briefings to mainstream media outlets.
However, as with earlier “regime change” plans, the neocons and liberal hawks never think through the scenario to the end. They always assume that everything is going to work out fine and some well-dressed “opposition leader” who has been to their think-tank conferences will simply ascend to the top job.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)
Remember, in Iraq, it was going to be Ahmed Chalabi who was beloved in Official Washington but broadly rejected by the Iraqi people. In Libya, there has been a parade of U.S.-approved “unity” leaders who have failed to pull that country together.
In Ukraine, Nuland’s choice – Arseniy “Yats is the guy” Yatsenyuk – resigned amid broad public disapproval  earlier this year after pushing through harsh cuts in social programs, even as the U.S.-backed regime officials in Kiev continued to plunder Ukraine’s treasury and misappropriate Western economic aid.
Nuclear-Armed Destabilization
But the notion of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia is even more hare-brained than those other fiascos. The neocon/liberal-hawk assumption is that Russians – pushed to the brink of starvation by crippling Western sanctions – will overthrow Putin and install a new version of Boris Yeltsin who would then let U.S. financial advisers return with their neoliberal “shock therapy” of the 1990s and again exploit Russia’s vast resources.
Indeed, it was the Yeltsin era and its Western-beloved “shock therapy” that created the desperate conditions before the rise of Putin with his autocratic nationalism, which, for all its faults, has dramatically improved the lives of most Russians.
Bright lights on Red Square, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Bright lights on Red Square, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
So, the more likely result from the neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” plans for Moscow would be the emergence of someone even more nationalistic – and likely far less stable – than Putin, who is regarded even by his critics as cold and calculating.
The prospect of an extreme Russian nationalist getting his or her hands on the Kremlin’s nuclear codes should send chills up and down the spines of every American, indeed every human being on the planet. But it is the course that key national Democrats appear to be on with their increasingly hysterical comments about Russia.
The Democratic National Committee issued a statement on Wednesday accusing Trump of giving Russia “an early holiday gift that smells like a payoff. … It’s rather easy to connect the dots. Russia meddled in the U.S. election in order to benefit Trump and now he’s repaying Vladimir Putin by nominating Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.”
Besides delaying a desperately needed autopsy on why Democrats did so badly in an election against the also-widely-disliked Donald Trump, the new blame-Russia gambit threatens to hurt the Democrats and their preferred policies in another way.
If Democrats vote in bloc against Tillerson or other Trump foreign-policy nominees – demanding that he appoint people acceptable to the neocons and the liberal hawks – Trump might well be pushed deeper into the arms of right-wing Republicans, giving them more on domestic issues to solidify their support on his foreign-policy goals.
That could end up redounding against the Democrats as they watch important social programs gutted in exchange for their own dubious Democratic alliance with the neocons.
Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have courted factions of the neocons, apparently thinking they are influential because they dominate many mainstream op-ed pages and Washington think tanks. In 1993, as a thank-you gift to the neocon editors of The New Republic for endorsing him, Clinton appointed neocon ideologue James Woolsey as head of the CIA, one of Clinton’s more disastrous personnel decisions.
But the truth appears to be that the neocons have much less influence across the U.S. electoral map than the Clintons think. Arguably, their pandering to a clique of Washington insiders who are viewed as warmongers by many peace-oriented Democrats may even represent a net negative when it comes to winning votes.
I’ve communicated with a number of traditional Democrats who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because they feared she would pursue a dangerous neocon foreign policy. Obviously, that’s not a scientific survey, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that Clinton’s neocon connections could have been another drag on her campaign.
Assessing Russia
I also undertook a limited personal test regarding whether Russia is the police state that U.S. propaganda depicts, a country yearning to break free from the harsh grip of Vladimir Putin (although he registers 80 or so percent approval in polls).
Couple walking along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
Couple walking along the Kremlin wall, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
During my trip last week to Europe, which included stops in Brussels and Copenhagen, I decided to take a side trip to Moscow, which I had never visited before. What I encountered was an impressive, surprisingly (to me at least) Westernized city with plenty of American and European franchises, including the ubiquitous McDonald’s and Starbucks. (Russians serve the Starbucks gingerbread latte with a small ginger cookie.)
Though senior Russian officials proved unwilling to meet with me, an American reporter, at this time of tensions, Russia had little appearance of a harshly repressive society. In my years covering U.S. policies in El Salvador in the 1980s and Haiti in the 1990s, I have experienced what police states look and feel like, where death squads dump bodies in the streets. That was not what I sensed in Moscow, just a modern city with people bustling about their business under early December snowfalls.
The police presence in Red Square near the Kremlin was not even as heavy-handed as it is near the government buildings of Washington. Instead, there was a pre-Christmas festive air to the brightly lit Red Square, featuring a large skating rink surrounded by small stands selling hot chocolate, toys, warm clothing and other goods.
Granted, my time and contact with Russians were limited – since I don’t speak Russian and most of them don’t speak English – but I was struck by the contrast between the grim images created by Western media and the Russia that I saw.
It reminded me of how President Ronald Reagan depicted Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” with a militarized state ready to march on Texas, but what I found when I traveled to Managua was a third-world country still recovering from an earthquake and with a weak security structure despite the Contra war that Reagan had unleashed against Nicaragua.
In other words, “perception management” remains the guiding principle of how the U.S. government deals with the American people, scaring us with exaggerated tales of foreign threats and then manipulating our fears and our misperceptions.
As dangerous as that can be when we’re talking about Nicaragua or Iraq or Libya, the risks are exponentially higher regarding Russia. If the American people are stampeded into a New Cold War based more on myths than reality, the minimal cost could be the trillions of dollars diverted from domestic needs into the Military Industrial Complex. The far-greater cost could be some miscalculation by either side that could end life on the planet.
So, as the Democrats chart their future, they need to decide if they want to leapfrog the Republicans as America’s “war party” or whether they want to pull back from the escalation of tensions with Russia and start addressing the pressing needs of the American people.
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).
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10 comments for “Making Russia ‘The Enemy’

  1. Ragnar Ragnarsson 
    December 15, 2016 at 3:25 pm
    Thank you for being the voice of reason and truth teller that you are Mr. Parry. I sincerely hope the domestic coup in progress fails miserably and that Trump is able to pursue peace. I am so sick of Neo-cons and what they’ve done to the world.
  2. Abe 
    December 15, 2016 at 3:47 pm
    German political theorist Carl Schmitt defined the content of politics as opposition to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one’s own interests. The “other” or the “stranger” is defined as an “enemy”
    For Schmitt, the political is not an autonomous domain equivalent to any other domain, such as the economic, but instead is the “existential” basis that would determine any other domain should it reach the point of politics.
    Schmitt defined the enemy as whoever is “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.” 
    For Schmitt, such an “existential” enemy need not even be based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything.
    Leo Strauss, a follower of political Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, had a position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin. Strauss wrote to Schmitt in 1932 and summarized Schmitt’s political theology thus: “[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against – against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men – the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state”
    With a letter of recommendation from Schmitt, Strauss received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to begin work, in France, on a study of Hobbes. Schmitt went on to become an influential figure in the new Nazi government of Adolf Hitler.
    In the late 1930s, as Hitler’s Reich was expanding in Europe, Schmitt developed his concept of “Grossraum”, literally “great-space”. The term has a sense of a “sphere” of influence, and “geopolitical space” may be closer to the meaning. 
    Schmitt intended the Grossraum concept to grasp an area or region that goes beyond a single state (that is, a specific territory), to comprehend much larger scale spatial orderings, complexes or arrangements.
    After World War II, Schmitt considered the United States to be the only political entity capable of resolving what he regarded as the crisis of global order.
    Indirectly influenced by Schmitt’s concept of the political, twenty-first century American Superpower “exceptionalism” has no space in its Grossraum concept for a “Eurasia”.
    The very enunciation of a “Eurasian” political sphere by Russia and China is regarded by American Superpower as a “terrorist” act. All those associated with such “lunacy” are viewed as geopolitical “enemies” to be annihilated by any means possible.
    For more on Schmitt see:
    Reading Schmitt geopolitically: Nomos, territory and Grossraum
    By Stuart Elden
    https://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/reading-schmitt-geopolitically.pdf
  3. Zachary Smith 
    December 15, 2016 at 4:08 pm
    The Moon of Alabama site has a new post about the motives of this latest “stuff”.
    My only quibble with it is that he neglected to mention other people who would prefer President Hillary or President Pence.
  4. Patricia Guerrero 
    December 15, 2016 at 4:13 pm
    Thank you for this. Its difficult to sort out sometimes the twists and turns of politics. as a dem/dove who is appalled at what our foreign policies have been, although I don’t like trump, I thought an easing of cold war hostilities with Russia was a good thing. Now I know why. I only voted for Clinton because I thought it was the only way to help further Sanders agenda. I cannot forget that she grinned as she stood behind her husband when he signed the bill that killed Glass Steagal or her support for the first Iraqi invasion and continuing hawkishness. I don’t despise her like some do but I could never really warm up to her. Sanders is very authentic; when asked about human rights for Palestine he was the only politician that at least said they were entitled; all Clinton could repeat was “precautions must be taken”. With HRC she came across as espousing policies to win votes, not that she was passionate or even honest about them.
  5. James lake 
    December 15, 2016 at 4:38 pm
    Interesting article. Clinton, and her echo chamber in the media with all this Russia bashing really are tone deaf.
    She misjudged the voter and showed no sense of their concerns.
    They were thinking about jobs and health and other concerns, her only policy was more war. 
    If Trump can stop the neo cons that in itself will be a great achievement for America and the world.
  6. December 15, 2016 at 4:43 pm
    This article was so over needed. While the content within won’t make it to any MSM report (until, perhaps, months/years down the road), I was sure — as an adamant progressive with cyber security background — to post it to every social media outlet I use and send to email chains where it’s me vs a bunch of “liberal-hawk” friends. 
    I can understand/deal with one absurd, hawkish and out of touch/reality party. But, to have both in the same boat, is really, REALLY scary stuff. The stuff that makes a Trump presidency alone seem like a walk in the park.
  7. Dwight 
    December 15, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    The Union for Concerned Scientists has joined in this hysteria in a press release about Trump’s appointment of Exxon CEO Tillerson as Secretary of State. UCS President Ken Kimmell states: “This position calls for someone able to put national security and the well-being of Americans first and foremost. But Tillerson’s close ties to President Putin and Russian oligarchs call into question his ability to deal firmly with Russia, which attempted to disrupt U.S. elections according to U.S. intelligence agencies.” 
    The main concern Kimmell raises in the press release is climate change, and I can certainly understand an environmental group being concerned about an oil exec as Secretary of State with climate negotiations in his portfolio. However, a new Cold War is the last thing we need if we want reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and détente with Russia could enable cooperation on climate change. Decades of inaction ago, Robert Redford called this “Greenhouse Glasnost” in his book of that name with articles by U.S. and Soviet climate scientists. 
    UCS also works on risks of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, which are related concerns on which we international cooperation not a new arms race and more proxy wars.
    I learned about the UCS press release in an email from a local environment group which repeated the gratuitous attack on Russia in seeking donations. It is sad to see this meme spreading among people that should be thinking deeper about the implications of détente versus cold war.
  8. The Artist formerly known as young man 
    December 15, 2016 at 4:49 pm
    Apparently Churchill once said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”. The American version of this quote? – History will be kind to us, for we intend to repeat it. 
    That pretty much sums up the current drive for starting Cold War 2 by the Americans (They were responsible for starting the first one too, by the way). Their way of thinking is – Cold War 1 took care of the Soviet Union, so hopefully Cold War 2 will take care of Russia. Not so fast amigos. 
    Americans repeat history not because they didn’t learn something from it, but because they draw wrong conclusions from it. Just because they “won” the Cold War 1, it doesn’t mean that they should expect to “win” a second one too. The stakes are much different now. It’s much easier to give up on ideology than it is to give up on the place where you live. 
    Or maybe the Americans decided to tweak a little bit another saying: “Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. I actually think that repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results is equally insane. Circumstances change, you know, the world is not an isolated laboratory where you can eliminate external factors. The experiment might fail this time. But don’t listen to me, go about your business.
  9. hyperbola 
    December 15, 2016 at 5:06 pm
    Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were one of the greatest leaders that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a massive rise in living standards and life expectancy, recuperation of national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled kleptocrats and gangsters wisely and well, whose foreign policy has on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who has presided over a country of which the human rights record is considerably better than that of the United States and in which civil rights are improving, and who richly deserves the steady support of 65% – currently at a Ukraine-related high of 83% – of the population that he possesses. It is my understanding that the reality is closer to the second scenario than the first – and I may note that I say this as someone with no ethnic, financial, professional or political ties to Russia whatsoever. It follows that I am not a Russian expert – but nor am I, on the other hand, parti pris. I am a friendly, distanced observer of the country.
    Let me start by explaining the history of my connection to the country. ….
  10. Randy Torres 
    December 15, 2016 at 5:07 pm
    I spent 3 weeks in Russia and was amazed by what I saw. Sanctions are a joke. Russians have just simply replaced Western goods with their own, which in many cases are of better quality. The only shortages I noticed were of American crap. Two things stood out about Moscow and St. Petersburg vs. New York City where I live: 1) everything was so clean and spotless, hardly any graffiti; and 2) how clean and efficient (and cheap) their subway system was relative to NYC. Some of their stations look like museums, spotless and no rats. Also, trains that run on time and no delays due to “sick passengers” or “train traffic ahead” and free wifi everywhere including trains and not just on select stations. Russia isn’t perfect of course, but it is far far far from being the dungeon depicted in the US media. On the contrary Moscow and St. Petersburg are in many ways better places to live than New York.

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