War With Russia: Alastair Crooke agrees with PCR
Here is Alastair Crooke’s full article:
Alastair Crooke, a British diplomat, was a senior
person in British intelligence.
Crooke has come to the same conclusions as I have:
Compare Crooke:
“we should perhaps contemplate the paradox that
Russia’s determination to try to avoid war is leading to war”
“Russia’s low-key and carefully crafted responses to
such provocations as the ambush of its SU-24 bomber in Syria; and President
Putin’s calm rhetoric, are all being used by Washington and London to paint
Russia as a ‘paper tiger,’ whom no one needs fear.”
“Russia is being offered only the binary choice: to
acquiesce to the ‘benevolent’ hegemon, or to prepare for war”
“Washington used Russia’s low key response to the
attack, for which Turkey did not apologize, to reassure Europe that Russia is a
paper tiger. The Western presstitutes trumpeted: ‘Russia A Paper Tiger.’”
“The Russian government’s low key response to the
provocation was used by Washington to reassure Europe that there is no risk in
continuing to pressure Russia in the Middle East, Ukraine, Georgia, Montenegro,
and elsewhere. Washington’s attack on Assad’s military is being used to
reinforce the belief that is being inculcated in European governments that
Russia’s responsible behavior to avoid war is a sign of fear and weakness.”
“the only choices left to Russia and China are to
accept American vassalage or to prepare for war.”
“Russia’s low key, responsible responses have been
used by Washington to paint Russia as a paper tiger that no one needs to fear.“
“We are left with the paradox that Russia’s
determination to avoid war is leading directly to war.”
The US government pays its trolls to ridicule those
who highlight the dangerous and reckless implications of the neocon’s hegemonic
policy. Now the trolls will have
to go after a senior person in British intelligence
CORNERING RUSSIA, RISKING
WORLD WAR III
Official Washington
is awash with tough talk about Russia and the need to punish President Putin
for his role in Ukraine and Syria. But this bravado ignores Russia’s genuine
national interests, its “red lines,” and the risk that “tough-guy-ism” can lead
to nuclear war, as Alastair Crooke explains.
Alastair Crooke,
Consortium News, 11 Dec 2015
We all know the narrative
in which we (the West) are seized. It is the narrative of the Cold War: America
versus the “Evil Empire.” And, as Professor Ira Chernus has written, since we are “human” and somehow they (the USSR or,
now, ISIS) plainly are not, we must be their polar opposite in every way.
“If they are absolute
evil, we must be the absolute opposite. It’s the old apocalyptic
tale: God’s people versus Satan’s. It ensures that we never have to admit
to any meaningful connection with the enemy.” It is the basis to America’s
and Europe’s claim to exceptionalism and leadership.
And “buried in the
assumption that the enemy is not in any sense human like us, is [an] absolution for
whatever hand we may have had in sparking or contributing to evil’s rise and
spread. How could we have fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any
responsibility for its successes? It’s a basic postulate of wars against
evil: God’s people must be innocent,” (and that the evil cannot be mediated,
for how can one mediate with evil).
Westerners may generally
think ourselves to be rationalist and (mostly) secular, but Christian modes of
conceptualizing the world still permeate contemporary foreign policy.
It is this Cold War
narrative of the Reagan era, with its correlates that America simply stared
down the Soviet Empire through military and – as importantly – financial
“pressures,” whilst making no concessions to the enemy.
What is sometimes
forgotten, is how the Bush neo-cons gave their “spin” to this narrative for the
Middle East by casting Arab national secularists and Ba’athists as the
offspring of “Satan”: David Wurmser was advocating in
1996, “expediting the chaotic collapse” of secular-Arab nationalism in
general, and Baathism in particular. He concurred with King Hussein of Jordan
that “the phenomenon of Baathism” was, from the very beginning, “an agent of foreign, namely Soviet policy.”
Moreover, apart from
being agents of socialism, these states opposed Israel, too. So, on the
principle that if these were the enemy, then my enemy’s enemy (the kings, Emirs
and monarchs of the Middle East) became the Bush neo-cons friends. And
they remain such today – however much their interests now diverge from those of
the U.S.
The problem, as Professor
Steve Cohen, the foremost Russia scholar in the U.S., laments, is that it is this narrative which has precluded
America from ever concluding any real ability to find a mutually
acceptable modus vivendi with Russia – which it sorely needs,
if it is ever seriously to tackle the phenomenon of Wahhabist jihadism (or
resolve the Syrian conflict).
What is more, the “Cold
War narrative” simply does not reflect history, but rather the narrative effaces
history: It looses for us the ability to really understand the demonized
“calous tyrant” – be it (Russian) President Vladimir Putin or (Ba’athist)
President Bashar al-Assad – because we simply ignore the actual history of how
that state came to be what it is, and, our part in it becoming what it is.
Indeed the state, or its
leaders, often are not what we think they are – at all. Cohen explains: “The chance for a durable Washington-Moscow
strategic partnership was lost in the 1990 after the Soviet Union
ended. Actually it began to be lost earlier, because it was [President
Ronald] Reagan and [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev who gave us the
opportunity for a strategic partnership between 1985-89.
“And it certainly ended
under the Clinton Administration, and it didn’t end in Moscow. It ended in
Washington — it was squandered and lost in Washington. And it was lost so
badly that today, and for at least the last several years (and I
would argue since the Georgian war in 2008), we have literally been in a new
Cold War with Russia.
“Many people in politics
and in the media don’t want to call it this, because if they admit, ‘Yes,
we are in a Cold War,’ they would have to explain what they were doing during
the past 20 years. So they instead say, ‘No, it is not a Cold War.’
“Here is my next point.
This new Cold War has all of the potential to be even more dangerous than the
preceding 40-year Cold War, for several reasons. First of all, think about
it. The epicentre of the earlier Cold War was in Berlin, not close to Russia.
There was a vast buffer zone between Russia and the West in Eastern Europe.
“Today, the epicentre is
in Ukraine, literally on Russia’s borders. It was the Ukrainian conflict that
set this off, and politically Ukraine remains a ticking time bomb. Today’s
confrontation is not only on Russia’s borders, but it’s in the heart of
Russian-Ukrainian ‘Slavic civilization.’ This is a civil war as profound
in some ways as was America’s Civil War.”
Cohen continued: “My next
point: and still worse – You will remember that after the Cuban Missile
Crisis, Washington and Moscow developed certain rules-of-mutual conduct. They
saw how dangerously close they had come to a nuclear war, so they adopted
“No-Nos,’ whether they were encoded in treaties or in unofficial
understandings. Each side knew where the other’s red line was. Both sides
tripped over them on occasion but immediately pulled back because there was a
mutual understanding that there were red lines.
“TODAY THERE ARE NO RED
LINES. One of the things that Putin and his predecessor President Medvedev
keep saying to Washington is: You are crossing our Red Lines! And
Washington said, and continues to say, ‘You don’t have any red lines. We have
red lines and we can have all the bases we want around your borders, but
you can’t have bases in Canada or Mexico. Your red lines don’t
exist.’ This clearly illustrates that today there are no mutual
rules of conduct.
“Another important
point: Today there is absolutely no organized anti-Cold War or Pro-Detente
political force or movement in the United States at all –– not in our political
parties, not in the White House, not in the State Department, not in the
mainstream media, not in the universities or the think tanks. … None of this
exists today. …
“My next point is a
question: Who is responsible for this new Cold War? I don’t ask this
question because I want to point a finger at anyone. The position of the
current American political media establishment is that this new Cold War is all
Putin’s fault – all of it, everything. We in America didn’t do anything
wrong. At every stage, we were virtuous and wise and Putin was aggressive and a
bad man. And therefore, what’s to rethink? Putin has to do all of the
rethinking, not us.”
These two narratives, the
Cold War narrative, and the neocons’ subsequent “spin” on it: i.e. Bill
Kristol’s formulation (in 2002) that precisely because of its Cold War
“victory,” America could, and must, become the “benevolent global hegemon,”
guaranteeing and sustaining the new American-authored global order – an
“omelette that cannot be made without breaking eggs” – converge and conflate in
Syria, in the persons of President Assad and President Putin.
President Obama is no
neocon, but he is constrained by the global hegemon legacy, which he must
either sustain, or be labeled as the arch facilitator of America’s
decline. And the President is also surrounded by R2P
(“responsibility-to-protect”) proselytizers, such as Samantha Power, who seem
to have convinced the President that “the tyrant” Assad’s ouster would puncture
and collapse the Wahhabist jihadist balloon, allowing “moderate” jihadists
such as Ahrar al-Sham to finish off the deflated fragments of the punctured
ISIS balloon.
In practice, President
Assad’s imposed ouster precisely will empower ISIS, rather than implode it, and
the consequences will ripple across the Middle East – and
beyond. President Obama privately may understand the nature and dangers of
the Wahhabist cultural revolution, but seems to adhere to the conviction that
everything will change if only President Assad steps down. The Gulf States
said the same about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. He has gone
(for now), but what changed? ISIS got stronger.
Of course if we think of
ISIS as evil, for evil’s sake, bent on mindless, whimsical slaughter, “what a
foolish task it obviously [would be] to think about the enemy’s actual motives.
After all, to do so would be to treat them as humans, with human purposes
arising out of history. It would smack of sympathy for the devil. Of
course,” Professor Chernus continues, “this means that, whatever we might think of their
actions, we generally ignore a wealth of evidence that the Islamic State’s
fighters couldn’t be more human or have more comprehensible motivations.”
Indeed, ISIS and the
other Caliphate forces have very clear human motivations and clearly
articulated political objectives, and none of these is in any way consistent
with the type of Syrian State that America says it wants for Syria. This
precisely reflects the danger of becoming hostage to a certain narrative,
rather than being willing to examine the prevailing conceptual framework more
critically.
America lies far away
from Syria and the Middle East, and as Professor Stephen Cohen notes,
“unfortunately, today’s reports seem to indicate that the White House and State
Department are thinking primarily how to counter Russia’s actions in
Syria. They are worried, it was reported, that Russia is diminishing
America’s leadership in the world.”
It is a meme of perpetual
national insecurity, of perpetual fears about America’s standing
and of challenges to its standing, Professor Chernus suggests.
But Europe is not “far
away”; it lies on Syria’s doorstep. It is also neighbor to Russia. And in
this connection, it is worth pondering Professor Cohen’s last
point: Washington’s disinclination to permit Russia any enhancement to its
standing in Europe, or in the non-West, through its initiative strategically to
defeat Wahhabist jihadism in Syria, is not only to play with fire in the Middle
East. It is playing with a fire of even greater danger: to do both at the
same time seems extraordinarily reckless.
Cohen again: “The false
idea [has taken root] that the nuclear threat ended with the Soviet
Union: In fact, the threat became more diverse and
difficult. This is something the political elite forgot. It was another
disservice of the Clinton Administration (and to a certain extent the first
President Bush in his re-election campaign) saying that the nuclear dangers of
the preceding Cold War era no longer existed after 1991. The reality is that
the threat grew, whether by inattention or accident, and is now more dangerous
than ever.”
As Europe becomes
accomplice in raising the various pressures on Russia in Syria – economically
through sanctions and other financial measures, in Ukraine and Crimea, and in beckoning Montenegro,
Georgia and the Baltic towards NATO – we should perhaps contemplate the paradox
that Russia’s determination to try to avoid war is leading to war.
Russia’s call to
co-operate with Western states against the scourge of ISIS; its low-key and
carefully crafted responses to such provocations as the ambush of its SU-24
bomber in Syria; and President Putin’s calm rhetoric, are all being used by
Washington and London to paint Russia as a “paper tiger,” whom no one needs
fear.
In short, Russia is being
offered only the binary choice: to acquiesce to the “benevolent” hegemon, or to
prepare for war.
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