What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/03-2

President Barack Obama has been trying, mostly in secret, to craft a new foreign policy that relies heavily on cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to tamp down confrontations in hotspots such as Iran and Syria. But Obama’s timidity about publicly explaining this strategy has left it open to attack from powerful elements of Official Washington, including well-placed neocons and people in his own administration.

The gravest threat to this Obama-Putin collaboration has now emerged in Ukraine, where a coalition of U.S. neocon operatives and neocon holdovers within the State Department fanned the flames of unrest in Ukraine, contributing to the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and now to a military intervention by Russian troops in the Crimea, a region in southern Ukraine that historically was part of Russia.

Though I’m told the Ukraine crisis caught Obama and Putin by surprise, the neocon determination to drive a wedge between the two leaders has been apparent for months, especially after Putin brokered a deal to head off U.S. military strikes against Syria last summer and helped get Iran to negotiate concessions on its nuclear program, both moves upsetting the neocons who had favored heightened confrontations.

Putin also is reported to have verbally dressed down Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan over what Putin considered their provocative actions regarding the Syrian civil war. So, by disrupting neocon plans and offending Netanyahu and Bandar, the Russian president found himself squarely in the crosshairs of some very powerful people.

[Martin Eden]

1. Obama kept Gates & Petraeus, who were deeply influenced by the Neocons

The "Team of Rivals" approach is not such a good idea when key members of the team were key players in promoting policies that need to be changed.

Four paragraphs from the article:

The neocons were dealt another setback in 2008 when Barack Obama defeated a neocon favorite, Sen. John McCain. But Obama then made one of the fateful decisions of his presidency, deciding to staff key foreign-policy positions with “a team of rivals,” i.e. keeping Republican operative Robert Gates at the Defense Department and recruiting Hillary Clinton, a neocon-lite, to head the State Department.

Obama also retained Bush’s high command, most significantly the media-darling Gen. David Petraeus. That meant that Obama didn’t take control over his own foreign policy.

Gates and Petraeus were themselves deeply influenced by the neocons, particularly Frederick Kagan, who had been a major advocate for the 2007 “surge” escalation in Iraq, which was hailed by the U.S. mainstream media as a great “success” but never achieved its principal goal of a unified Iraq. At the cost of nearly 1,000 U.S. dead, it only bought time for an orderly withdrawal that spared Bush and the neocons the embarrassment of an obvious defeat.

So, instead of a major personnel shakeup in the wake of the catastrophic Iraq War, Obama presided over what looked more like continuity with the Bush war policies, albeit with a firmer commitment to draw down troops in Iraq and eventually in Afghanistan.

[KoKo]

2. More of the article regarding the Neo-Cons Involvement (Creative Commons License)

The madness of the neocons has long been indicated by their extraordinary arrogance and their contempt for other nations’ interests. They assume that U.S. military might and other coercive means must be brought to bear on any nation that doesn’t bow before U.S. ultimatums or that resists U.S.-orchestrated coups.

Whenever the neocons meet resistance, they don’t rethink their strategy; they simply take it to the next level. Angered by Russia’s role in heading off U.S. military attacks against Syria and Iran, the neocons escalated their geopolitical conflict by taking it to Russia’s own border, by egging on the violent ouster of Ukraine’s elected president.

The idea was to give Putin an embarrassing black eye as punishment for his interference in the neocons’ dream of “regime change” across the Middle East. Now, with Putin’s countermove, his dispatch of Russian troops to secure control of the Crimea, the neocons want Obama to further escalate the crisis by going after Putin.

Some leading neocons even see ousting Putin as a crucial step toward reestablishing the preeminence of their agenda. NED president Carl Gershman wrote in the Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

At minimum, the neocons hope that they can neutralize Putin as Obama’s ally in trying to tamp down tensions with Syria and Iran – and thus put American military strikes against those two countries back under active consideration.

As events spin out of control, it appears way past time for President Obama to explain to the American people why he has collaborated with President Putin in trying to resolve some of the world’s thorniest problems.

That, however, would require him to belatedly take control of his own administration, to purge the neocon holdovers who have worked to sabotage his actual foreign policy, and to put an end to neocon-controlled organizations, like the National Endowment for Democracy, that use U.S. taxpayers’ money to stir up trouble abroad. That would require real political courage.

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

[reformist2]

3. Wow, does this EVER have the ring of truth to it! +1000

[ucrdem]

4. Wow. Gotta give Parry credit for laying it all out.

Also nice to see CommonDreams emerging from its ODS delirium.

[KoKo]

5. Parry's article has interesting revelations about SOS Kerry...

This article is such a good read...connecting dots. Explains much about what those of us who have been here for a long time were wondering about what we've been observing re Obama and State Dept.

Recommend!

[Autumn]

6. Great article. Thank you for that.

[BelgianMadCow]

7. Neocons? Crisis?

Can the IMF shock doctrine be far behind? Ah yes, it only took a day.

[magical thyme]

8. K&R. excellent analysis. nt

[summerschild]

9. NEOCONS = PNAC (..... a rose by any other name ..... )

Will we let the government and the media continue this farce? It's driving me crazy that so many are running around wringing their hands like this is a brand new threat or this is the cold war warmed up for old reasons. The same people that brought us Iraq are bringing us this dangerous drama. And they only had to deviate slightly from their old map on their road to empire.

These are the same SOBs who navigated us into Iraq, the deaths of over 4000 servicemen and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Re-read their defining document “Rebuilding America's Defenses,” written in September of 2000, a full year before the 9/11 attacks, they acknowledged:
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor. ...” They named their targets and they have not changed, except that Iraq has already been conquered and ruined.

We have all watched these scumbags parade and pretend to be experts: Wolfowitz, Kristol, Kagan, Cheney, Bolton - the list goes on and on. They grin and preen and roll in their bloody defense money. If there was any justice, they would all be in prison. Instead the little self-congratulatory shits pontificate and pursue their original evil intents. Their original list included Syria, Iran, Turkey, and North Korea and part of their strategy was fighting multiple wars simultaneously. The premise actually dates back to 1992, when "the Wolfowitz Doctrine" was produced for Dick Cheney as Sec. of Defense. That's how old these dreams are.

And now they are doing the same thing with the Ukraine - stirring up fear - goading - leading US citizens to believe military intervention is necessary for the safety of the U.S.

"Though I’m told the Ukraine crisis caught Obama and Putin by surprise, the neocon determination to drive a wedge between the two leaders has been apparent for months, especially after Putin brokered a deal to head off U.S. military strikes against Syria last summer and helped get Iran to negotiate concessions on its nuclear program, both moves upsetting the neocons who had favored heightened confrontations."

Obama knows what he was trying to accomplish by getting an agreement with Putin to help ease us into a peaceful existence with Iran rather than the war the Neocons want. I'd feel better about it if I had any confidence that Kerry was not aiding the neocons. He did vote to go to war in Iraq, and I don't see him supporting Obama here like he should.

[okaawhatever]

10. Ahem...the neo-cons worked for the Yanukovych government. Sorry to burst your bubble, in fact,

one of McCain's former campaign managers worked on Yanukovych's campaign. The lawfirm Trouth and Cacheris got the contract to investigage Yulia and her party.


Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's administration has hired a “dream team” of U.S. lawyers and private investigators with a track record of defending the country’s oligarchs and even ex-President Leonid Kuchma. Their current mission: To uncover proof of massive abuse by the government’s No. 1 foe, former premier and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, whom top administration officials have already accused of misspending billions of dollars in state funds.

The government hired high-profile U.S. law firm Trout Cacheris on May 5 to audit Ukraine’s spending under Tymoshenko’s management between 2008 and 2010. Trout Cacheris’s star is criminal defense lawyer Plato Cacheris. In addition to defending Monica Lewinsky in ex-U.S. President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, Cacheris has also represented Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent who was caught passing on secrets to the Soviet KGB spy agency.

Akin Gump has 14 offices around the world and employs a team of multilingual lawyers and political insiders. Its co-founder, Robert S. Strauss, has advised and represented three American presidents: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Under the elder Bush, Strauss served as an ambassador to the Soviet Union and then Russia.

In Ukraine, Akin Gump lawyers had for years represented the interests of two of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs and strongest backers of Yanukovych: Party of Regions deputy, Rinat Akhmetov, and gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash.
The law firm has defended the reputations of these men, who got rich in the years of crony capitalism that followed Ukrainian independence. Sometimes the firms pressured or threatened lawsuits against journalists who wrote critical reports.


http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/us-firms-hired-for-probe-67370.html


Recall that Yanukovych was, as the New York Times put in in 2007, “often portrayed as the archvillain” of Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution.” Yanukovych ostensibly won the presidential election that year, but the race was denounced as fraudulent and widespread protests prompted another election, which he lost. The following year, he hired veteran U.S. political consultant Paul Manafort, a longtime veteran of GOP politics. Perhaps not coincidentally, Yanukovich’s fortunes had changed – certainly his style did, according to reports.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2014/02/21/ukraines-long-history-with-us-political-consultants-and-lobbyists

That article also states that former Clinton campaign adviser worked for the Fatherland party reps.

[KoKo]

11. Robert Parry is a Great Read and outweighs your links..because of his History

of Reporting that so many of us have followed for years!

This is a "Breakthrough" article for Parry...Well Worth the Read!

[KoKo]

12. Recommend!