The End of the Politics of Mindless ?

        It seems pretty clear by now that no one of any political weight in Washington or  Ottawa reads my blog. Which I would say is sad given that I offer an essential point of view that describes me, as the Soviet dissidents under Brezhnev used to say, inakomyslayuschiy.  Curiously, the Mainstream Media in the West, is now the official POV of the nachalniki (ie. the big cheeses), and no-one pays any attention to those "thinking differently" except for the Department of Homeland Security analyzing the NSA intercepts of their smart phones. 

        Of course, in the eyes of the average Joe and Jane, as in the Eastern Europe of my youth,  the mainstream media are professional liars, starting with their describing themselves as "mainstream".  The only difference is that the average anglo today does not have access to intelligent, consistent political viewpoint to shed light on the two official versions of the same political drool. If, for example, I do not believe in equating homosexual partnerships with traditional institution marriage, it instantly disqualifies me in one camp as a pervert who would deny gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered folks their civil rights. In the other version naturally I would be a closet fairy who would give them every civil right except the rights of parenthood if they are not parents.  Strange as it may seem, on a certain level these two political stances are equivalent - in being vacuous.  Like in the former USSR, the different personal creeds and obsessions, do not obstruct the party line (though sometimes they were at variance with it).  Dick Cheney may be a supporter of gay marriage, but his view of the Maidan putsch in Kiev coincides with that of Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and president Obama. It was not a putsch: it was a revolution of Ukrainian people in revolt of Putin's henchmen who would deny them the pearly gate of EU.  All of them deplore the thugs in Crimea who deny the OSCE observers (the verb derived from the Czech word obsírati - to 'pooh around') access. None of them would so much as peep for an investigation into the identity of the Maidan snipers who apparently were picking their targets equally among the rioters and the riot police !  Imagine the scandal if they were to be linked to the legitimate government of Ukraine which put out an international arrest warrant on the former president Yanukovich for mass murder.

       Henry Kissinger may have difficulty reading some aspects of the current conflict, but I don't.  The happenings in the Ukraine were prefigured by the Western posture in Libya and Syria, and had I been asked, I would have predicted that Putin would react forcefully if confronted by the meddling and bungling US-led shit-disturbers in his back yard.    Kissinger's reading of course is right on many points, and his viewpoint stands in stark contrast to the bluster and bleating heard everywhere west of Dnieper. He understands the importance of Ukraine to Russia and that it far exceeds any political gambits that Putin may have had in mind.  Above all,  good old Henry understands that this issue far surpasses whoever might be sitting in the Kremlin. Had some strongman (like the late general Lebed') been in power, Russian tanks would have been in Kiev before the Sochi Olympics' closing ceremonies.  The former player of the China-card (which somehow ended in Putin's hand too)  is also sharply critical of the EU's handling of Ukraine, anabashedly accusing its 'bureaucratic dilatoriness' with turning negotiations into a crisis. All good !  Kissinger, in my view,  however does not quite grasp the Crimea power play by Putin.  It is a carefully chosen piece of strategy, which I believe is calculated to extract a price for the West's repeated unprovoked harrassment of Russia and to dissuade Washington and Brussels from trying the heavy-handed tactics again. It is also a revanche for the ugly assault of the West on Russia's traditional Balkan's ally, Serbia, and the forceful separation from its cultural cradle, Kosovo. It happened under Yeltsin who was the friendliest Russian leader to the West since Catherine. The unilateral proclamation of Kosovo independence in 2008, on Putin's watch, left the Russians slighted and humiliated but also resolved.  It might have happened to the Serbian holy land around Kosovo Polje; it will not happen to Russia's holy land of Kievan Rus. There are powerful motivators for Putin to make the West eat the humble pie. 
      
       The US policy makers would do well to take the another look. Hillary's sophomoric parallels won't do.  Is it possible that she is so out of touch she does not know the type of argument she deploys has been a staple of ridicule known as the Godwin's Law ? Incidentally, also someone apparently forgot to tell Madam Secretary that the United Kingdom still holds Munich to be a valid agreement, based on the unalienable right of a people to self-determination. In the unapologetic view of Whitehall, it was Hitler who abrogated the treaty when he took over Bohemia and Moravia in 1939. 

   Putin is an exceptionally shrewd politician who knows how far he can go. I don't think it was his plan to annex Crimea outright, but to hold it as a bargaining chip to make the US and EU more amenable to his point of view.  When he was snubbed, he opted for plan B.  The referendum may still be an open-ended play. If Russia gets what it wants : most importantly the implementation of the accord signed by Yanukovich with the West (Putin has already indicated he does not expect him to return),  recall of the new "governors" in the East, repeal of the despicable language edict, and the absurd "lustration" laws which in effect bar Russian speakers from political office, the plebiscite may be postponed and the region will eventually settle for quasi-independent status with no political satraps from Kiev and Ukrainian military on the peninsula.  But Russians will not de-escalate since from their point of view it was not they who escalated the situation in the first place.  I think secretary Kerry has some leg-work to do.  Let's hope someone at the State Department can decipher the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Preferably someone who knows the correct Russian word if you want to be friendly with them. 

The Long Shadow of Kosovo

I commented years ago, when Richard Holbrooke played his KLA card against Milosevic in Kosovo, that it looked like the losing move in the game of U.S. patronage of Europe. Strategically it was a horrendously dumb idea, morally, a cynical self-damnation. It was of course not the first time that the United States allied itself with some hugely dehumanized figure or regime. Stalin’s USSR or Pol Pot’s Kampuchea would be two elementary examples. But this was hugely different. There was very little known about Stalin’s repressions and atrocities before the Iron Curtain fell and likewise about Pol Pot’s killing fields before he was driven into the jungle. The regimes in both countries were entrenched without US help. The context of the Stalin’s alliance was a world war against Nazism and Japanese militarism. The support for Pol Pot was dictated by the logic of a global rivalry with Soviet communism. The Sino-Soviet split produced a strange bedfellow for the US.

In contrast, Clinton and Albright knew full well what sort of people they were making use of against Milosevic. KLA would have had no chance to turn itself into a popular nationalist movement , because political resistance already existed in Kosovo, one which was democratic and non-violent. No objective necessity, or palpable pressure, existed to force the U.S. to call on the likes of Hashim Thaci for help. The U.S. knew from day one, that it engaged a gang of criminal misfits and degenerates. Carla Del Ponte’s book, published after prime minister Thaci declared Kosovo independence, did not break any big news for people who followed the conflict. In 1998, the KLA were terrorists with links to Iran and bin Laden. The State Department knew that. Richard Holbrooke may deny he made a deal forgiving Karadzic the bombing of Sarajevo bread-lines, but he may not deny that KLA figured in Clinton Administration books as a terrorist organization when he started to talk to them.

The Kosovo adventure had predictable consequences for U.S. prestige in Europe and within NATO. The NATO-occupied province of Serbia soon became a by-word for lawlessness and corruption and soon the “liberation” model began spreading to southern Serbia and Macedonia. Before it was contained, most of continental Europe from Athens to Stockholm scorned the U.S. policy in the Balkans. The Italians were first to have had their doubts about the Kosovo project, being the natural transit point for Albanian drug trafficking (and prostitution rackets) that had just secured a better supply line. France also dissented early, and was never quite on side for the U.S. joyride of humiliating Russia in the Balkans. It was the French press which first cast heavy doubt on the authenticity of the “Racak massacre”. Schroeder’s support for intervention of Kosovo was a shock to his party and most of the German public opinion. The “humanitarian war” did not have many takers, and a wave of criticism hit the media after Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, in a repeat of an unprovoked attack of 1941. By the time the bombs fell, most of Europe knew about the Rambouillet “annex” that Milosevic refused to sign, which gave NATO the right to occupy de facto any part of the Yugoslav rump. The secret part of the proposed text was put on the KLA Web site by mistake. A number of documents from German courts and Foreign Office Reports were collected and published on the Web by a lawyers organization. They showed duplicity in the claims of genocide against ethnic Albanians. . The war against Milosevic’ Serbia was waged under false pretenses.

The useless war for Kosovo would have cost the U.S. dearly no matter what followed. Europeans had wars waged on their soil in the 20th century and do not particularly care for the experience. In Europe you don’t cry “war”, for the same reason you don’t cry “wolf”. Even more so. But as it happened, barely a year after the Pristina noise finally died in the villages around Nis and Tetovo, the Americans were proposing another excellent war-game adventure in Iraq. Not being able to implicate Saddam in 9/11 - the idea of a Baathist and a Wahhabi plotting , being essentially an junior CIA analyst’s wishful thinking, the Gringos declared him in possession of WMDs. This would be a somewhat more realistic scenario because Saddam was gung-ho on acquiring them in the past. The problem was that Saddam, who had his reactor smashed by the IAF, who was unceremoniously run out of Kuwait, and who laboured for a decade under heavy economic sanctions did not look anything like his former self. It would have been no problem for the U.S. to clone him into a Moammar Gaddafi. The “old” Europe was very suspicious of US motives to remove Saddam and did not go along.

Sixth year into the adventure, the US and its Coalition of the Willing (East European Shitdisturbers) have not stabilized the place they took in three weeks. Iraq, essentially a structure created by British colonial expedients out of three culturally disparate regions would not have survived as a state, had it not been for a ruthless dictator. The U.S. did not think it wise in 2003 to rebuild Iraq’s statehood on the brilliant model of McArthur-occupied Japan. Instead it tinkered trying to find a “democratic” formula to neutralize the numerically dominant Shi’ites (who are hated by everyone else: the traditionalist (Saudi-allied) Sunnis, the western-leaning Sunnis, the Wahhabi-allied Sunnis, and the Kurds). The foolishness of this enterprise is still not apparent to Washington, which apparently believes that Iraq does not work politically because it is being undermined by the meddling of Iran. So, let’s - as Weird Al Yankowich would – “Bo-, bo-, bo-, bomb, bomb, Iran” (on the tune of Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann). Ahmadinejad is now the extended point of the Axis of Evil, the other member having suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and likely hence unable to continue to threaten the security of Lehman Brothers, etc. And this time, we know for sure that the Axis man enriches uranium.

I wonder if senators McCain and Obama have any inkling of the huge political losses the U.S. has suffered in Europe in the moral debacle that was and is Kosovo. It makes no sense to commit to Iraq without a political end-game. None exists today, and will not materialize unless the U.S. radically changes its foreign policy course and starts investing in the ideas of a “concert” that Metternich orchestrated for Europe between Napoleon and the Revolutions of 1848. To win the old Europe back should be the US foreign policy’s primary objective. The further and final integration of Russia into Europe and the world economy, is a big piece of that policy. The best and perhaps the only way how to pacify the Bear, is to let him on the honey. The Russians want peace and prosperity, first and foremost. Listen to Medvedev : get rid of the Sovietologists; get some Russologists !. This, the U.S. can do at no cost to anyone.

The alternative of course is to let the absolute power corrupt the US absolutely. To go into Iran, or doing it without the big players on side, is to continue on the path of the lone geopolitical suicide bomber. That much should be clear by now.