SOSE & ALLEN’S LEGACY FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES YOUTH CORPS FELLOWSHIPS
[ Part 2.2: “Attached Text” ]
NEOCONS’ UKRAINE-SYRIA-IRAN GAMBIT
PUBLISHED ON THURSDAY, MARCH 20, 2014 BY CONSORTIUM NEWS
THE UKRAINE CRISIS – IN PART STIRRED UP BY U.S. NEOCONS – HAS DAMAGED
PROSPECTS FOR PEACE NOT ONLY ON RUSSIA’S BORDERS BUT IN TWO
MIDDLE EAST HOTSPOTS, SYRIA AND IRAN, WHICH MAY HAVE BEEN EXACTLY
THE POINT
by Robert Parry
You might think that policymakers with so many bloody fiascos on
their resumes as the U.S. neocons, including the catastrophic Iraq
War, would admit their incompetence and return home to sell insurance
or maybe work in a fast-food restaurant. Anything but directing the
geopolitical decisions of the world’s leading superpower.
But Official Washington’s neocons are nothing if not relentless
and resilient. They are also well-funded and well-connected. So they
won’t do the honorable thing and disappear. They keep hatching
new schemes and strategies to keep the world stirred up and to keep
their vision of world domination – and particularly “regime
change” in the Middle East – alive.Sen. John McCain appearing
with Ukrainian rightists at a rally in Kiev. Sen. John McCain appearing
with Ukrainian rightists at a rally in Kiev.
Now, the neocons have stoked a confrontation over Ukraine, involving
two nuclear-armed states, the United States and Russia. But – even
if nuclear weapons don’t come into play – the neocons have
succeeded in estranging U.S. President Barack Obama from Russian
President Vladimir Putin and sabotaging the pair’s crucial
cooperation on Iran and Syria, which may have been the point all along.
Though the Ukraine crisis has roots going back decades, the chronology
of the recent uprising – and the neocon interest in it – meshes neatly
with neocon fury over Obama and Putin working together to avert a
U.S. military strike against Syria last summer and then brokering an
interim nuclear agreement with Iran last fall that effectively took
a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran off the table.
With those two top Israeli priorities – U.S. military attacks on
Syria and Iran – sidetracked, the American neocons began activating
their influential media and political networks to counteract the
Obama-Putin teamwork. The neocon wedge to splinter Obama away from
Putin was driven into Ukraine.
Operating out of neocon enclaves in the U.S. State Department and
at U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, led by the National
Endowment for Democracy, neocon operatives targeted Ukraine even before
the recent political unrest began shaking apart the country’s
fragile ethnic and ideological cohesion.
Last September, as the prospects for a U.S. military strike against
Syria were fading thanks to Putin, NED president Carl Gershman,
who is something of a neocon paymaster controlling more than $100
million in congressionally approved funding each year, took to the
pages of the neocon-flagship Washington Post and wrote that Ukraine
was now “the biggest prize.”
But Gershman added that Ukraine was really only an interim step
to an even bigger prize, the removal of the strong-willed and
independent-minded Putin, who, Gershman added, “may find
himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad [i.e. Ukraine]
but within Russia itself.” In other words, the new hope was
for “regime change” in Kiev and Moscow.
Putin had made himself a major annoyance in Neocon World, particularly
with his diplomacy on Syria that defused a crisis over a Sarin
attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Despite the attack’s
mysterious origins – and the absence of any clear evidence proving the
Syrian government’s guilt – the U.S. State Department and the
U.S. news media rushed to the judgment that Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad did it.
Politicians and pundits baited Obama with claims that Assad had
brazenly crossed Obama’s “red line” by using
chemical weapons and that U.S. “credibility” now demanded
military retaliation. A longtime Israeli/neocon goal, “regime
change” in Syria, seemed within reach.
But Putin brokered a deal in which Assad agreed to surrender
Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal (even as he continued to deny
any role in the Sarin attack). The arrangement was a huge letdown
for the neocons and Israeli officials who had been drooling over the
prospect that a U.S. bombing campaign would bring Assad to his knees
and deliver a strategic blow against Iran, Israel’s current
chief enemy.
Putin then further offended the neocons and the Israeli government
by helping to facilitate an interim nuclear deal with Iran, making
another neocon/Israeli priority, a U.S. war against Iran, less likely.
Putting Putin in Play
So, the troublesome Putin had to be put in play. And, NED’s
Gershman was quick to note a key Russian vulnerability, neighboring
Ukraine, where a democratically elected but corrupt president, Viktor
Yanukovych, was struggling with a terrible economy and weighing whether
to accept a European aid offer, which came with many austerity strings
attached, or work out a more generous deal with Russia.
There was already a strong U.S.-organized political/media apparatus
in place for destabilizing Ukraine’s government.
Gershman’s NED had 65 projects operating in the country –
training “activists,” supporting “journalists”
and organizing business groups, according to its latest report. (NED
was created in 1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long
done in secret, nurture pro-U.S.
operatives under the umbrella of “promoting democracy.”)
So, when Yanukovych opted for Russia’s more generous $15 billion
aid package, the roof fell in on him. In a speech to Ukrainian business
leaders last December, Assistant Secretary of State for European
Affairs, Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover and the wife of prominent
neocon Robert Kagan, reminded the group that the U.S. had invested
$5 billion in Ukraine’s “European aspirations.”
Then, urged on by Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain, protests in the
capital of Kiev turned increasingly violent with neo-Nazi militias
moving to the fore. Unidentified snipers opened fire on protesters
and police, touching off fiery clashes that killed some 80 people
(including about a dozen police officers).
On Feb. 21, in a desperate attempt to tamp down the violence,
Yanukovych signed an agreement brokered by European countries. He
agreed to surrender many of his powers, to hold early elections (so
he could be voted out of office), and pull back the police. That last
step, however, opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias to overrun
government buildings and force Yanukovych to flee for his life.
With these modern-day storm troopers controlling key buildings –
and brutalizing Yanukovych supporters – a rump Ukrainian parliament
voted, in an extra-constitutional fashion, to remove Yanukovych from
office. This coup-installed regime, with far-right parties controlling
four ministries including defense, received immediate U.S. and
European Union recognition as Ukraine’s “legitimate”
government.
As remarkable – and newsworthy – as it was that a government on
the European continent included Nazis in the executive branch for
the first time since World War II, the U.S. news media performed as
it did before the Iraq War and during various other international
crises. It essentially presented the neocon-preferred narrative and
treated the presence of the neo-Nazis as some kind of urban legend.
Virtually across the board, from Fox News to MSNBC, from the Washington
Post to the New York Times, the U.S. press corps fell in line, painting
Yanukovych and Putin as the “black-hat” villains and the
coup regime as the “white-hat” good guys, which required,
of course, whiting out the neo-Nazi “brown shirts.”
Neocon Expediency
Some neocon defenders have challenged my reporting that U.S. neocons
played a significant role in the Ukrainian putsch. One argument is
that the neocons, who regard the U.S.-Israeli bond as inviolable,
would not knowingly collaborate with neo-Nazis given the history of
the Holocaust (and indeed the role of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
in extermination campaigns against Poles and Jews).
But the neocons have frequently struck alliances of convenience with
some of the most unsavory – and indeed anti-Semitic – forces on earth,
dating back to the Reagan administration and its collaboration with
Latin American “death squad” regimes, including work with
the World Anti-Communist League that included not only neo-Nazis but
aging real Nazis.
More recently in Syria, U.S. neocons (and Israeli leaders) are so
focused on ousting Assad, an ally of hated Iran, that they have
cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy (known for
its gross anti-Semitism). Israeli officials have even expressed a
preference for Saudi-backed Sunni extremists winning in Syria if that
is the only way to get rid of Assad and hurt his allies in Iran and
Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Last September, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael
Oren told the Jerusalem Post that Israel so wanted Assad out and his
Iranian backers weakened, that Israel would accept al-Qaeda operatives
taking power in Syria.
“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc
that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the
Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren said in the
interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always
preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad
guys who were backed by Iran.”
Oren said that was Israel’s view even if the other “bad
guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Oren, who was Israel’s point man in dealing with Official
Washington’s neocons, is considered very close to Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reflects his views. For decades, U.S.
neocons have supported Netanyahu and his hardline Likud Party,
including as strategists on his 1996 campaign for prime minister
when neocons such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith developed
the original “regime change” strategy. [For details,
see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the
Iraq War.”]
In other words, Israel and its U.S. neocon supporters have been willing
to collaborate with extreme right-wing and even anti-Semitic forces
if that advances their key geopolitical goals, such as maneuvering
the U.S. government into military confrontations with Syria and Iran.
So, while it may be fair to assume that neocons like Nuland and McCain
would have preferred that the Ukraine coup had been spearheaded
by militants who weren’t neo-Nazis – or, for that matter,
that the Syrian rebels were not so dominated by al-Qaeda-affiliated
extremists – the neocons (and their Israeli allies) see these tactical
collaborations as sometimes necessary to achieve overarching strategic
priorities.
And, since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile
negotiations over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the
possibility of U.S. military strikes against those two countries,
the Putin-Obama collaboration had to go.
By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected
president, the neocons helped touch off a cascade of events – now
including Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and its annexation by
Russia – that have raised tensions and provoked Western retaliation
against Russia. The crisis also has made the continued Obama-Putin
teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Like other neocon-engineered schemes, there will surely be much
collateral damage in this latest one. For instance, if the tit-for-tat
economic retaliations escalate – and Russian gas supplies are disrupted
– Europe’s fragile recovery could be tipped back into recession,
with harmful consequences for the U.S. economy, too.
There’s also the certainty that congressional war hawks and
neocon pundits will press for increased U.S. military spending and
aggressive tactics elsewhere in the world to punish Putin, meaning
even less money and attention for domestic programs or deficit
reduction. Obama’s “nation-building at home” will
be forgotten.
But the neocons have long made it clear that their vision for the
world – one of America’s “full-spectrum dominance”
and “regime change” in Middle Eastern countries opposed
to Israel – overrides all other national priorities. And as long as
the neocons face no accountability for the havoc that they wreak,
they will continue working Washington’s corridors of power,
not selling insurance or flipping hamburgers.
(C) 2014 Consortium News Robert Parry
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege:
The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History:
Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’.
From: Baghdasarian