July 30, 2014
Imperial Washington is truly running
amuck in its insensible confrontation with Vladimir Putin. The pending
round of new sanctions is a counter-productive joke. Apparently, more of
Vlad’s posse will be put on double probation, thereby reducing demand
for Harry Macklowe’s swell new $60 million apartment units on Park
Avenue. Likewise, American exporters of high tech oilfield equipment will
be shot in the foot with an embargo; and debt-saturated Russian state
companies will be denied the opportunity to bury themselves even deeper in
dollar debt by borrowing on the New York bond market. Some real wet
noodles, these!
But it is the larger narrative that is
so blatantly offensive—that is, the notion that a sovereign state is being
wantonly violated by an aggressive neighbor arming “terrorists” inside its
borders. Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Tony Blanken, stated that
specious meme in stark form yesterday:
“Russia bears responsibility for
everything that’s going on in Eastern Ukraine” and “has the ability to actually
de-escalate this crisis,” Blinken said.
Puleese! The Kiev government is a
dysfunctional, bankrupt usurper that is deploying western taxpayer money
to wage a vicious war on several million Russian-speaking citizens in the
Donbas—-the traditional center of greater Russia’s coal, steel and
industrial infrastructure. It is geographically part of present day
Ukraine by historical happenstance. For better or worse, it was Stalin who
financed its forced draft industrialization during the 1930s; populated it with
Russian speakers to insure political reliability; and expelled the Nazi
occupiers at immeasurable cost in blood and treasure during WWII. Indeed,
the Donbas and Russia have been Siamese twins economically and politically not
merely for decades, but centuries.
On the other hand,
Kiev’s marauding army and militias would come to an instant halt
without access to the $35 billion of promised aid from the IMF, EU and US
treasury. Obama just needs to say “stop”. That’s it. The civil war would
quickly end, permitting the US, Russia and the warring parties of the Ukraine
to hold a peace conference and work out the details of a separation agreement.
After all, what is so sacrosanct about
preserving the territorial integrity of the Ukraine? Ever since the middle
ages, it has consisted of a set of meandering borders in search of a nation
that never existed owing to endemic ethnic, tribal and religious differences.
Its modern boundaries are merely the fruit of 20th century wars and
the expediencies of a totalitarian state during the decades of its rise,
rule and disintegration.
There was until recently a
neighboring “state” of equally artificial lineage called
Czechoslovakia. It was carved out of the German and Austrian
empires by the vengeful victors at Versailles, urged on by scheming Czech
nationalists who coveted the resources of the Slovaks. But notwithstanding
revolutions, the Stalinist oppression, the Cold War, the Prague
Spring and all the rest of the 20th century mayhem—-the machinations
at Versailles didn’t birth a state that was viable or sustainable. Accordingly,
separation has been had, and the parties are better off for it—as are its
neighbors and the larger world.
And on the topic of partition there is
the ghost of Yugoslavia–another state that emerged in whole cloth from
the madness of Versailles. Yes, it has been partitioned now into half
a dozen smaller states—-Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia,
Kosovo and Bosnia. But the operative point is that the
partitioner was none other than Washington and its European groupies who
had no regard for those happenstance 20th century-made borders when it suited
their purpose.
So the sanctimonious yelping from
Washington about the sacred territorial integrity of the Ukraine is ahistorical
tommyrot. In fact, however, it is a thin fig leaf for a far more insidious
purpose. Namely, the self-aggrandizement of the Warfare State machinery that
was left stranded in Imperial Washington without purpose or
justification when the Cold War ended two decades ago.
So the Warfare State
machinery—including its spy network, state department, aid agencies
and NGO supplicants— invented enemies and missions to justify their
continued existence and their massive dissipation of fiscal resources.
Those are upwards of $1 trillion annually if you count everything including veterans
and homeland security.
Thus, after arming the mujahedeen in
Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, their Taliban
successors were deemed our enemy after the cold war ended—even
though they never poised a scintilla of threat to the citizens of Lincoln
NE or Worcester MA. So too with our 1980′s ally Saddam Hussein, and also with
Khadafy, Assad and the warring tribal potentates and cutthroats of Yemen,
Somalia and Waziristan, to name just a few.
But it is in eastern Europe that the
Warfare State machinery has most egregiously made an enemy and mission out
of whole cloth. As the Cold War was drawing to a close in the late 1980s, then
Secretary of State James Baker made a sensible deal with Gorbachev. In return
for Soviet acquiescence in the reunification of Germany, the US would
insure that NATO did not expand by a “single inch”.
Since then, of course, there has been a
senseless bipartisan betrayal and stampede in the opposite direction. Starting
under Clinton and extending through Bush and Obama, NATO has been expanded from
16 nations at the end of the Cold War to 28 countries today.
Yet the very recitation of its new
members underscores the historical farce that this needless expansion
amounted to. For better or worse, the formation of NATO in the late 1940′s involved what were perceived to be
vital national security interests against a Stalinist policy that by the
lights of the hawks and militarists of the day amounted to a violation
of his Yalta obligations. Accordingly, NATO constituted an alliance
of real nations—England, France, Italy and West Germany—-that could make a
meaningful contribution to collective security against the
perceived Soviet threat of the times.
But Albania, Bulgaria, Latvia,
Slovakia and Slovenia? And that is not to forget Moldova, Georgia,
Macedonia and the Ukraine—all of which are still coveted for
membership by the NATO apparatchiks. What could these micro-states
possibly contribute to American security? That’s especially the case
since the Warsaw pact had been dissolved; the Soviet Empire
has erased from the pages of history; and
the Russian successor was left with an Italian-sized
GDP encumbered with the destructive legacy of a state-dominated economy
that had been appropriated by a passel of thieves, opportunists and oligarchs.
In short, today’s Ukrainian crisis is
the outcome of the mindless 20-year drive of the Warfare State to push an
obsolete NATO to the very doorstep of Russia, and into the messy remnants of
the Soviet disintegration. Stated differently, Putin has been in power for 15
years, yet during 13 of those years there was no hue and cry from
Washington, London and Brussels that he was an incipient Hitler bent on
sweeping conquest. Even the so-called invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a
tempest in a teapot provoked by local pro-Russian separatists who did
not want to be ruled by a de facto American interloper in Tbilisi.
In any event, it was the $5 billion
that Washington spent during the last decade meddling in Ukrainian politics,
and finally inciting and financing the February overthrow of the country’s
constitutionally elected government that precipitated the current civil war. It
brought to power a new gang of crooks and thugs who could not govern for a day
without tapping the Washington/Western financial lifeline. Indeed, the civil
war now raging, the brutal military attacks on civilian populations and the
hundreds of thousands of refugees now streaming out of the eastern regions are
the result of a crisis made in Washington, not the Kremlin.
So the rebels— who
properly fear for their lives and property were the nationalists and
neo-fascists who run the Kiev government to prevail—are not “terrorists” by any
stretch of the imagination. That is just insipid Washington
propaganda. Instead, they are the Russian-speaking remnant of the
Soviet empire who fear an ethnic cleansing and who noted well the fate of
their kinsmen in the hands of Ukrainian thugs during the fire at Odessa.
Once again, the American Warfare State
has confected a false narrative to justify policies and missions that have
nothing to do with the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE and
Wooster MA. About 55 years ago such a false narrative arose in the form of the
“domino theory” that lead to the carnage of Vietnam. Ten years ago it cropped
up in the form of the WMD story that led to the disastrous invasion and
occupation of Iraq. Today, it is the preposterous story of
Ukrainian territorial integrity, terrorists in the East and a latter-day
Hitler in the Kremlin.
Unfortunately, false narratives are
what the Warfare State does.
Reprinted
with permission from David
Stockman.
Former Congressman David A. Stockman
was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about in his best-selling book, The
Triumph of Politics. His latest book is The
Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. He's the editor
and publisher of the new David Stockman's Contra Corner. He was an original
partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads LRC the first thing every morning.
Copyright © 2014 David Stockman
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