March 10, 2014

Preparing the Ground for NATO (Ukraine) - William Blum

Preparing the Ground for NATO

by William Blum / March 8th, 2014

Ukraine

When it gets complicated and confusing, when you’re overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory … try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.

The United States strives for world domination, hegemony wherever possible, their main occupation for over a century, it’s what they do for a living. The United States, NATO and the European Union form The Holy Triumvirate. The Holy Triumvirate has subsidiaries, chiefly The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Criminal Court … all help to keep in line those governments lacking the Holy Triumvirate Seal Of Approval: the IMF, WB, and WTO impose market fundamentalism, while foreign leaders who act too independent are threatened with being handed over to the ICC for heavy punishment, as the United States imposes sanctions on governments and their leaders as only the King of Sanctions can, lacking any sense of hypocrisy or irony.

And who threatens United States domination? Who can challenge The Holy Triumvirate’s hegemony? Only Russia and China, if they were as imperialistic as the Western powers. (No, the Soviet Union wasn’t imperialistic; that was self-defense; Eastern Europe was a highway twice used by the West to invade; tens of millions of Russians killed or wounded.)

Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been surrounding Russia, building one base after another, ceaselessly looking for new ones, including in Ukraine; one missile site after another, with Moscow in range; NATO has grabbed one former Soviet Republic after another. The White House, and the unquestioning American mainstream media, have assured us that such operations have nothing to do with Russia. And Russia has been told the same, much to Moscow’s continuous skepticism. “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO some years ago, “is this is a military organization? Yes, it’s military. … Is it moving towards our border? It’s moving towards our border. Why?” <1>

The Holy Triumvirate would love to rip Ukraine from the Moscow bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. (In case you were wondering what prompted the Russian military action.) Kiev’s membership in the EU would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neo-conservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but no price is too great to pay for being part of glorious Europe and the West!

The Ukrainian insurgents and their Western-power supporters didn’t care who their Ukrainian allies were in carrying out their coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month … thugs who set policemen on fire head to toe … all manner of extreme right-wingers, including Chechnyan Islamic militants <2> … a deputy of the ultra-right Svoboda Party, part of the new government, who threatens to rebuild Ukraine’s nukes in three to six months. <3> … the snipers firing on the protestors who apparently were not what they appeared to be – A bugged phone conversation between Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister, and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, reveals Paet saying: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” <4> … neo-Nazi protestors in Kiev who have openly denounced Jews, hoisting a banner honoring Stepan Bandera, the infamous Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on February 24 that Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman advised “Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country.” Edward Dolinsky, head of an umbrella organization of Ukrainian Jews, described the situation for Ukrainian Jews as “dire” and requested Israel’s help.

All in all a questionable gang of allies for a dubious cause; reminiscent of the Kosovo Liberation Army thugs Washington put into power for an earlier regime change, and has kept in power since 1999.

The now-famous recorded phone conversation between top US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, wherein they discuss which Ukrainians would be to Washington’s liking in a new government, and which not, is an example of this regime-change mentality. Nuland’s choice, Arseniy Yatseniuk, emerged as interim prime minister.

The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website lists 65 projects that it has supported financially in recent years in Ukraine. <5> The descriptions NED gives to the projects don’t reveal the fact that generally their programs impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized.

The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” <6>

NED, receives virtually all its financing from the US government, but it likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO. Its long-time intervention in Ukraine is as supra-legal as the Russian military deployment there. Journalist Robert Parry has observed:

For NED and American neocons, Yanukovych’s electoral legitimacy lasted only as long as he accepted European demands for new “trade agreements” and stern economic “reforms” required by the International Monetary Fund. When Yanukovych was negotiating those pacts, he won praise, but when he judged the price too high for Ukraine and opted for a more generous deal from Russia, he immediately became a target for “regime change.”

Thus, we have to ask, as Mr. Putin asked – “Why?” Why has NED been funding 65 projects in one foreign country? Why were Washington officials grooming a replacement for President Yanukovych, legally and democratically elected in 2010, who, in the face of protests, moved elections up so he could have been voted out of office – not thrown out by a mob? Yanukovych made repeated important concessions, including amnesty for those arrested and offering, on January 25, to make two of his adversaries prime minister and deputy prime minister; all to no avail; key elements of the protestors, and those behind them, wanted their putsch.

Carl Gershman, president of NED, wrote last September that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”. <8> The man knows whereof he speaks. He has presided over NED since its beginning, overseeing the Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004), the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (2005), the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005), the Green Revolution in Iran (2009), and now Ukraine once again. It’s as if the Cold War never ended.

The current unbridled animosity of the American media toward Putin also reflects an old practice. The United States is so accustomed to world leaders holding their tongue and not voicing criticism of Washington’s policies appropriate to the criminality of those policies, that when a Vladimir Putin comes along and expresses even a relatively mild condemnation he is labeled Public Enemy Number One and his words are accordingly ridiculed or ignored.

On March 2 US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine (Crimea) and threatened economic sanctions. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.” <9>

Iraq was in the 21st century. Senator John Kerry voted for it. Hypocrisy of this magnitude has to be respected.


POSTSCRIPT: Ukraine’s interim prime minister announced March 7 that he has invited the NATO Council to hold a meeting in Kiev over the recent developments in the country. “I invited the North Atlantic Council to visit Kiev and hold a meeting there,” Arseny Yatsenyuk said during a visit to Brussels, where he met with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and EU officials. “We believe that it will strengthen our cooperation.”

Notes

1. Guardian Weekly (London), June 27, 2001
2. RT television (RT.com, Moscow/Washington, DC), March 1, 2014
3. Deputy Mikhail Golovko, RT, March 1, 2014
4. RT, March 5, 2014, “The EU’s Ukraine policy and moral bankruptcy”; the phone conversation is believed to have taken place February 26.
5. NED 2012 Annual Report
6. Washington Post, September 22, 1991
7. Victoria Nuland, speaking at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, December 13, 2013
8. Washington Post, September 26, 2013
9. “Face the Nation”, CBS, March 2, 2014

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/126
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/03/preparing-the-ground-for-nato/ (Thanks dipsydoodle)

March 10, 2014

US Provokes Russia, Acts Surprised to Get a Nasty Reaction

US Provokes Russia, Acts Surprised to Get a Nasty Reaction

How crazy will Americans get over Ukraine?

by William Boardman / March 5th, 2014

If too many people get sucked in by the current, distorted media coverage of events unfolding now in Ukraine, then there’s a good chance life will get very ugly for a lot of innocent people, since one of the logical end points is the use of nuclear weapons. Everyone in power knows that’s a potential reality, but the urge to demagogue the Russians is presently overwhelming honesty and caution.



Ukraine is NOT a real place. Ukraine has never been a real place, not in the sense that Madascar or Cuba are both undeniably real places with real edges. Ukraine has no real edges, just lines on a map imposed by some treaty or army over the past several thousand years. To speak, as the more pompous do, of Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” is to speak of an imaginary construct, useful for blurring people’s minds for political purposes.

Ukraine in recent years has been what the power brokers of the disintegrating Soviet Union decided to let it be in 1991. Ukraine has no coherent history as a nation. First inhabited some 44,000 years ago, most of the region’s history is as occupied territory.

Russia’s history of maintaining a military presence in Crimea is older than United States history. The Russian Black Sea Fleet has been based in Sevastopol in Crimea continuously since 1783. For the Russians, this is a crucial warm water port, currently leased from Ukraine till 2042.

To understand what this means to the Russians, it probably matters more to them than the United States would care if the Cubans decided to threaten the Naval Base at Guantanamo, and we know that wouldn’t have a happy ending.

...

Read more>> http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/03/us-provokes-russia-acts-surprised-to-get-a-nasty-reaction/


Adding another pic that goes well with this article

March 10, 2014

Senate Ukraine Draft Measure Said to Include IMF Change

Source: Bloomberg

By Kathleen Hunter 2014-03-10T16:04:11Z

Senate Democrats may boost International Monetary Fund resources in an aid package they’re preparing for Ukraine, potentially setting up a dispute with the U.S. House.

The IMF assistance, requested by President Barack Obama and the Treasury Department, is included in a draft version of Ukraine aid legislation, said a congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the measure isn’t yet public.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, is crafting the measure with the panel’s top Republican, Bob Corker of Tennessee, to rebuke Russia for its incursion into Ukraine and to assist the Ukrainian government. The committee is scheduled to vote on the measure tomorrow.

...

The U.S. is delaying implementation of a 2010 agreement by all IMF member countries to double the fund’s lending capacity to about $733 billion. The plan would give emerging markets such as China more clout at the institution, which was set up at the end of World War II to help ensure the stability of the global monetary system.

...

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-10/senate-ukraine-draft-measure-said-to-include-imf-change.html

March 10, 2014

PNAC in the State Department messing with Ukraine. Let. That. Sink. In.

Wife of PNAC co-counder, Victoria Nuland, says US invested $5 Billion in 'The Development of Ukrainian "Democratic Institutions"'

This is the same woman who was running back and forth to Ukraine passing out cookies to the violent protesters and egging them in in the finest Florida Bush-mob tradition. This picture was snapped before the intercepted phone call on unsecure cell phone between her and the US Ambassador in Ukraine discussing which of their rent-a-mob leaders should take the reins later and "fuck the EU" if they didn't like it because we'll get the UN to glue it all together for us.)

Victoria Nuland handing out cookies to protesters in Kiev

Here's her claptrap propaganda at a recent event sponsored by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Monsanto and stacked with Freedom House, NED types.

Thursday, 19 May 2011
The strange appointment of Victoria Nuland as State Department Spokesperson
By Patricia H. Kushlis

Update: 7/12/2013 - Toria grilled about Benghazi role at Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing today for her next high level position: Assistant Secretary of State for Europe
.
Is Hillary asleep at the switch? What is going on here?

Earlier this week, Josh Rogin at FP and Eric Martin at Progressive Realist both flagged the curious appointment of Victoria Nuland as the next State Department Spokesperson to fill P.J. Crowley’s shoes.
Martin questions whether this has foreign policy implications, in particular the replacement of an anti-torture appointee with someone who served as Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney.

Rogin doesn’t directly raise potential administration policy shifts but does point out that once upon a time Nuland was Strobe Talbott’s Chief of Staff when he was Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration and that Talbott had thought very highly of her at the time and still does. In fact, he, according to Rogin, praised her to the hilt in an interview about the pending appointment. So the seemingly amoral Nuland, we’re led to believe, can and will do anyone’s bidding and do it well – in short, a consummate career diplomat.

Why?

But why would Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration agree to appoint to this politically sensitive position someone who willingly served such a controversial figure in suppporting and implementing the “war on terror” and all the baggage that comes with it? Furthermore, how reliable is a Talbott reference anyway? After all, I understand that he just helped his friend Robert Kagan, Nuland’s neocon husband, get a job at Brookings and Talbott is also a friend of neocon writer Marc Gerecht, the husband of Diane Zeleny who also just latched onto a likely sweetheart deal sort of appointment as Head of External Relations and Congressional Affairs at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Whether Zeleny deserves or is qualified for the position or not.

From what I know about the Department, an FSO doesn’t just get detailed to the staff of a highly charged and ideological Vice President unless that detailee agrees to follow the boss’s dictates. Cheney’s were all too often forceful and odious. Furthermore, does anyone really think that Cheney –with his penchant for super loyalty and secrecy - would have ever accepted Nuland (or anyone else) for the position without some kind of loyalty test?
Surely the State Department under Hillary Clinton could have found equally (or likely even better) qualified career candidates who do not carry Nuland’s political baggage.

Behind the scenes trade off?
......Continued at the Link.....

http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2011/05/the-strange-appointment-of-victoria-nuland-as-states-spokesperson.html

Taken from http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024461021#post2

Let. That. Sink. In.

March 10, 2014

How was it an uprising of "the people of Ukraine" when there were never more than 50,000 on streets?

So all the people who disagreed with them and stayed home? They don't get a vote according to these rewritten neo-democratic principles of staggering hypocrisy?

Maybe this is where Occupy went wrong. Maybe it should have gotten billions of dollars worth of funding from other countries and sent our entire government packing. But that wouldn't have been democratic because everyone, as witnessed right here at DU with our more conservative members, everyone didn't agree with their Occupy's principles and we, throughout our worst years (8 years of Bush!) remained civilized enough to do things democratically.


And that loathsome little neonazi putchmeister, as was pre-planned, is going to ram through IMF austerity before the Ukrainian people even know what hit them.

Today they got a whiff of what's to come- 50% reduction in their pensions.

It's funny how according to the warped, corporate beholden Western press, the only voices in Ukraine that count are the voices of the few people who violently seized power in Ukraine right before the MAY elections because they knew there was no way the Ukrainian people would endorse this at the ballot box.

March 9, 2014

FAIR: Denying the Far-Right Role in the Ukrainian Revolution

Denying the Far-Right Role in the Ukrainian Revolution
By Jim Naureckas

Some commentators on the Ukraine crisis seem so convinced that it must be a struggle between good guys and bad guys that they're willing to ignore evidence that there's anything problematic about their chosen side.


Nationalist flags fly over an anti-government protest in Kiev. (cc photo: Antanana/Wikimedia)

In the US press, this generally means whitewashing the opposition that overthrew the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, since Yanukovych had the support of official enemy Russia. To maintain a simple good vs. evil framework, the fact that Ukraine's neo-fascist movement had a significant role in that opposition–and in the new government that replaced Yanukovych–was downplayed or even outright denied.



Photo illustrating Timothy Snyder's New York Review of Books piece (by Jerome Sessini)

Take Timothy Snyder's widely circulated piece from the New York Review of Books (3/1/14), "Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda." Snyder is a professor of history at Yale; I've read one of his books, The Reconstruction of Nation: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, and thought it was excellent. But his piece on the Ukraine crisis illustrates that being a gifted historian does not automatically convey the ability to write about events in one's own time in a clear-eyed fashion.

Complaining that "from Moscow to London to New York, the Ukrainian revolution has been seen through a haze of propaganda," Snyder cited claims by both Russian and former Ukrainian officials that "Ukrainian protesters were right-wing extremists" and that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had been ousted by "right-wing thugs." "Interestingly," Snyder wrote,

the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul's newsletter through The Nation and the Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist or even Nazi coup d'état.

In other words, not only Russian and ex-Ukrainian officials, but also various Western media outlets–with the most oddball and marginal listed first–are putting forth the "propaganda" claim that Yanukovych was overthrown by the far right.

Given this introduction, you would expect the article to go on to debunk the idea that the people who overthrew the Ukrainian government were fascists. Instead, Snyder spends the next 20 paragraphs arguing that Yanukovych's government was bad and undemocratic. It need hardly be said, of course, that bad, undemocratic governments can have fascist opponents; if they could not, his opposition to Stalin would disqualify Hitler as a fascist.


Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok (cc photo: Marco Residori)

So it isn't until the 23rd paragraph that Snyder begins to address the claims made by "the far left and the far right" about fascists overthrowing Yanukovych. And he starts, surprisingly enough, by acknowledging that there's an element of truth to them: "The Ukrainian far right did play an important part in the revolution," he writes. That's maybe something he could have mentioned some 1,800 words earlier; it seems an important qualifier to the assertion that talk of "right-wing extremists" is mere "propaganda."

Snyder makes an argument that Yanukovych, by not repressing his fascist opponents as much as he did liberal democrats, was actually using them to bolster his claim to power–imputing to Yanukovych a sort of association with fascism for failing to be antifascist enough. Snyder sees no need, on the other hand, for the anti-Yanukovych movement to apologize for actually including fascists in its coalition; in fact, he depicts the participation of fascist militia in the overthrow of Yanukovych's government in what can only be described as a heroic light:

The radical youth of Svoboda fought in considerable numbers, alongside of course people of completely different views. They fought and they took risks and they died, sometimes while trying to save others.

Svoboda's original logo evoked the swastika, and even more closely resembled a symbol used by Nazi SS units.

Svoboda is a far-right party launched in 1991; its original name (the Social-National Party) and logo (a swastika-like superimposed I-N, standing for "Idea Natsii," or "Idea of the Nation&quot were deliberate echoes of Nazism. It supposedly purged neo-Nazi elements in 2004, but its ostensibly more moderate leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, is notorious for his attacks on the "Moscow/Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine" and "the Moskali (Russians), Germans, Kikes and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state" (Channel 4, 12/16/13). Yuri Mykhailyshin, one of Tyahnybok's top advisers, set up something called the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Centre in 2005 (OSW Commentary, 7/4/11]). Did some of the people these far-right extremists fought alongside have "completely different views"? One should hope so.

Though not all of them do; another group that played a large role in the violent clashes was Right Sector, an ultra-nationalist movement that has criticized Svoboda for its "pacifism" (Nation, 1/21/14). While disclaiming racism and antisemitism, Right Sector describes itself as "nationalist, defending the values of white, Christian Europe against the loss of the nation and deregionalization" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 3/14). Snyder calls Right Sector "the group to watch" as "the radical alternative to Svoboda," but suggests that it, too, is nothing much to worry about, and possibly even represents a constructive stabilizing force: Its leaders tell Jews and Russians "that their goal is political and not ethnic or racial," and since the government's overthrow, "they have not caused violence or disorder. On the contrary, the subway runs in Kiev." But do the trains run on time?

Snyder insists that "the transitional authorities were not from the right," and that the "new government, chosen by parliament…is very similar in its general orientation." This is simply false; Snyder mentions a couple of political figures who are not fascists, but passes over in silence a number of bonafide far-right extremists who have been given powerful positions.


Andriy Parubiy (cc photo: Sasha Maksymenko/Wikimedia)

The new deputy prime minister, Oleksandr Sych, is from Svoboda; National Security Secretary Andriy Parubiy is a co-founder of the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, Svoboda's earlier incarnation; the deputy secretary for National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the head of Right Sector. Chief prosecutor Oleh Makhnitsky is another Svoboda member, as are the ministers for Agriculture and Ecology (Channel 4, 3/5/14). In short, if the prospect of fascists taking power again in Europe worries you, you should be very worried about Ukraine.


Forbes' Greg Satell

Snyder's piece inspired a much less informed screed in Forbes (3/4/14) making an even more sweeping denial of the role of the extreme right in the new Ukrainian government. Forbes contributor Greg Satell wrote:

There has also been completely unfounded accusations that Ukraine's interim government is "Neo-Nazi" and "Ultranationalist." Timothy Snyder has done a wonderful job debunking these claims.

Satell's link, of course, goes to Snyder's "Haze of Propaganda."

"Are there Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?" writes Satell. "Sure, just as there are in Chicago and every other major American city. Are some politically active? Yes, as is David Duke in our own country. Do they have any power to shape policy or events? Categorically no." Unless you count leading the fighting that overthrew the government as shaping events, or getting to run the military and justice system as affecting policy.

Satell has the nerve to call his utterly ignorant article "How the Western Press Is Getting It Terribly Wrong in Ukraine."



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

About Jim Naureckas

Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director.

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/03/07/denying-the-far-right-role-in-the-ukrainian-revolution/

March 8, 2014

Ukraine is About Oil. So Was World War I

Ukraine is About Oil. So Was World War I
by Robert Freeman


Pro-Russian supporters wave Russian flags to welcome the Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship, the missile cruiser Moskva, entering Sevastopol bay in September 10, 2008. (Photo: AFP)

Ukraine is a lot more portentous than it appears. It is fundamentally about the play for Persian Gulf oil. So was World War I. The danger lies in the chance of runaway escalation, just like World War I.

Let’s put Ukraine into a global strategic context.

The oil is running out. God isn’t making any more dinosaurs and melting them into the earth’s crust. Instead, as developing world countries aspire to first-world living standards, the draw-down on the world’s finite supply of oil is accelerating. The rate at which known reserves are being depleted is four times that at which new oil is being discovered. That’s why oil cost $26 a barrel in 2001, but $105 today. It’s supply and demand.

Oil recalls that old expression: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In industrial civilization, the nation that controls the oil is king. And 60% of the known oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. That’s why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003: to seize control of the oil. Alan Greenspan told at least one truth in his life: “I hate to have to admit what everybody knows. Iraq is about oil.”

But the U.S. lost the war in Iraq. Remember? The U.S. was going to install a democracy and 14 permanent bases there. They’re not there. The U.S. was run out after proving unable to pacify the Islamic jihad it had unleashed under the pretext of searching for non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Instead, Iraq allied itself with Iran, its Shi’ite comrade-in-arms in the Muslim Wars of Religion.

So today, the battle for the Persian Gulf is being carried out through its two regional powers, Saudi Arabia, the champion of Sunni Islam, and Iran, the torch carrier for Shi’ite Islam. Think of the Wars between the Protestants and Catholics in the 1500s. The U.S. backs Saudi Arabia, as it has done since 1945, when Roosevelt cut a deal with Ibn Saud to protect his illegitimate throne in exchange for the House of Saud only selling oil in dollars.

Iran, of course, is implacably hostile to the U.S. after the U.S. overthrew Iran’s democratically elected president, Mosaddegh, in 1953 and installed its own fascist puppet, the Shah of Iran. The Iranians overthrew the Shah in 1979 and installed a fundamentalist theocracy that continues to this day.

Iran’s main ally in the region is Syria, which the U.S. has been trying to overthrow for three years by helping the al-Qaeda-linked rebels that are attacking Syria. Syria’s chief military patron is Russia, which conveniently bailed Obama out of his childish “red line” declaration last year, a declaration he had neither the military nor political nor diplomatic capacity to carry out.

So, the upheaval in Ukraine is really about the U.S. trying to weaken Syria’s patron, Russia. If Russia is weakened, Syria is weakened. If Syria is weakened, Iran is weakened. If Iran is weakened, the U.S. has a better chance of seizing control of the world’s largest reserves of oil. That is the Great Game that is going on here.

The problem is the risk of escalation. It’s not at all fanciful to imagine some ambitious Ukrainian colonel firing at Russian forces. Russia fires back, decisively. This puts Ukraine at risk for its European suitor, the EU. So NATO intervenes to try to intimidate Russia. Russia retaliates to blacken NATO's nose. And before anyone knows it, the U.S. is dragged into a shooting war where no one can understand how it ends. This is almost exactly how World War I started.

The Germans were gunning for Persian Gulf oil via their relationship with the Ottoman Empire. But this would have given Germany a choke hold on England, which had only just converted its navy to oil. So, England reversed its historical rivalry with France, in 1904, and with Russia, in 1907, to try to contain Germany. But a minor, unanticipated dust-up in the Balkans in the summer of 1914 escalated into The Greatest War The World Had Ever Known.

In a freak event, a Serbian teenager killed the heir-apparent to the Austrian-Hungarian throne. So Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia. Russia couldn’t stand idle as its sole Balkan ally, Serbia, was humiliated. So it mobilized on Austria-Hungary, an effective declaration of war.

Germany moved to defend its ally, Austria-Hungary, by attacking Russia’s ally, France. England, France’s ally, responded by declaring war on Germany. Within less than one month of a minor incident in a minor region of the continent, all the major powers of Europe were at war.

World War I would inflict 27 million casualties through the industrialization of human slaughter. It destroyed four great empires, more than had expired in any single event, ever. Eleven new nations were created in its aftermath, including Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. It was the event that shifted the locus of global power from Europe to the U.S., where it has resided ever since. It rearranged the architecture of global power more than any event of the last thousand years.

So the portent of Ukraine is a global strategic order hanging in the balance. The U.S. must subdue Russia to gain control of the world’s oil. It is the same strategic objective that is driving the U.S.’s subversion of the democratically elected government in Venezuela: it sits on one of the world’s largest reserves of oil. Indeed, all of the U.S.’ aggressions on Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, and its subversion of the democratically elected government of Ukraine, can be understood in this context.

The wild card in the whole fracas is China. China is the biggest customer of Iranian oil, and the largest international investor in Venezuela. These represent some of China’s moves to counter the U.S. attempt to control the world’s oil. The potential escalation from Ukraine as the U.S. pressures Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, inescapably involves China. If China becomes involved, trying to defend its allies and its supply of oil, it is anybody’s guess where it ends. But it won’t be pretty.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Robert Freeman is the author of The Best One-Hour History series which includes World War I and The Vietnam War. He is the founder of the national non-profit One Dollar For Life which helps American students build schools in the developing world from their contributions of one dollar

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/08

Editing to OP to add some stuff from History 101 that they used to teach in school:

And for information from a random link (there are thousands more out there):

March 8, 2014

Robert Parry: The 'We-Hate-Putin' Group Think

For your viewing pleasure, I've attached the video that goes with the embedded transcript. I recommend reading Parry's whole article, not just the snips.

March 7, 2014

international law, sovereignty, territorial integrity and.... resources!

I can't believe the jokes coming out of Washington right now. This is what happens when you have a bunch of neocons and neolibs infesting your administration and recycling their lies.

“Stealing the assets of the Ukrainian people”? That's too rich coming from the same people forcing the IMF on Ukraine, after pouring in $5 billion to destabilize it, and ramming the IMF down their throats with the complicity of a rump Parliament and an interim coupster right before the upcoming elections that these bozos had no chance of winning.