The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance

Exclusive: After U.S. neocons helped stir up a crisis in Ukraine,with a big assist from the biased American press corps the Obama administration looked for a diplomatic off-ramp, but this pattern of hyped outrage and belated reconciliation is a risky way to make foreign policy, says Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The American mainstream news media has rarely bought in so thoroughly to a U.S. government propaganda campaign as it has in taking sides in support of the post-coup government in Ukraine and against Russia and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Part of this is explained by the longstanding animus toward Russian President Vladimir Putin for his autocratic style, his shirtless photographs and his government’s opposition to gay rights. Another part is a hangover from the Cold War when the Russkies were the enemy. In Official Washington, there is palpable nostalgia for the days of Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist swagger and “Red Dawn” fantasies.

Secretary of State John Kerry attending a four-way diplomatic conference in Geneva, involving the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and the European Union. (State Department photo)

Secretary of State John Kerry attending a four-way diplomatic conference in Geneva on April 17, 2014, involving the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and the European Union. (State Department photo)

But another reason for the biased coverage from the U.S. press corps is the recent fusion of the still-influential neoconservatives with more liberal “responsibility to protect” (R2P) activists who believe in “humanitarian” military interventions. The modern mainstream U.S. news media is dominated by these two groups: neocons on the right and R2Pers on the center-left.

As one longtime Washington observer told me recently the neocons are motivated by two things, love of Israel and hatred of Russia. Meanwhile, the R2Pers are easily enamored of idealistic young people in street protests.

The two elements of this alliance the neocons and the R2Pers also now represent the dominant foreign policy establishment in Official Washington, with the few remaining “realists” largely shoved to the side, including to some degree President Barack Obama who has “realist” tendencies in seeking to limit use of U.S. military power but continues to cede control over his administration’s actions abroad to aggressive neocon-R2P operatives.

During Obama’s first term, he made the fateful decision to create a “team of rivals” of powerful political and bureaucratic figures the likes of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and General David Petraeus. They skillfully funneled the President into hawkish decisions that they wanted, such as a “surge” of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan and a major confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. (Both positions were pushed by the neocons.)

In 2011, the neocons and the R2Pers teamed up for the war against Libya, which was sold to the United Nations Security Council as simply a limited intervention to protect civilians in the east whom Muammar Gaddafi had labeled “terrorists.” However, once the U.S.-orchestrated military operation got going, it quickly turned into a “regime change” war, eliminating longtime neocon nemesis, Gaddafi, to Hillary Clinton’s hawkish delight.

In Obama’s second term, the original “team of rivals” is gone, but foreign policy is being defined by the likes of Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon, and Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, a leading R2Per, with a substantial supporting role by neocon Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona. Obama defeated McCain in 2008, but McCain now is pulling the strings of Secretary of State John Kerry, who also appears enamored of the hawkish stances demanded by Nuland and Power.

Power was a passionate advocate for bombing Syria to degrade the military capabilities of President Bashar al-Assad who is in the midst of a bloody civil war. For her part, Nuland threw the weight of the U.S. government behind Ukrainian protesters who with crucial help from neo-Nazi militias ousted elected (but corrupt) President Viktor Yanukovych in February.

To the surprise of many people who knew Kerry in his early days as a Vietnam veteran against the war and as an aggressive Senate investigator in the 1980s Kerry has consistently taken the side of the neocons and the R2Pers. As Secretary of State since February 2013, he also has built a dubious reputation for himself as someone who rushes to judgments and disregards evidence when the facts are inconvenient. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What’s the Matter with John Kerry?”]

Sarin Attack

After a sarin gas attack last Aug. 21 outside Damascus, Kerry jumped to the conclusion that Assad’s government was at fault despite serious doubts within the U.S. intelligence community and among independent analysts. Then, without presenting a shred of verifiable evidence, he gave a bellicose speech on Aug. 30 claiming repeatedly that “we know” that the regime did it.

Though it still has not been ascertained whether regime forces or the rebels were responsible, it is now clear that Kerry was wrong in asserting U.S. government certainty, especially after a team of rocket scientists determined that the one rocket found to carry sarin had a maximum range of about two kilometers, much less than was needed to fit with Kerry’s claims.

One of those scientists, MIT’s Theodore Postol, told MintPress News that “According to our analysis, I would not … claim that I know who executed the attack, but it’s very clear that John Kerry had very bad intelligence at best or, at worst, lied about the intelligence he had.”

Postol compared Kerry’s presentation to the Bush-43 administration’s assertions about Iraq possessing WMD in 2002-03 and the Johnson administration citing the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964. Postol also noted the failure of the U.S. press to question the U.S. government’s accusations against Syria.

“To me, the fact that people are not focused on how the administration lied is very disturbing and shows how far the community of journalists and the community of so-called security experts has strayed from their responsibility,” Postol said. “The government so specifically distorted the evidence that it presented a very real danger to the country and the world. I am concerned about the collapse of traditional journalism and the future of the country.”

Just this week, Kerry further augmented his new reputation as a person who doesn’t check his facts and simply spouts propaganda. On Thursday, after a Geneva conference called to tamp down tensions in Ukraine, Kerry rhetorically poured fuel on the fire by citing a claim about pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine threatening local Jews.

“Just in the last couple of days, notices were sent to Jews in one city indicating that they had to identify themselves as Jews. And obviously, the accompanying threat implied is or threatened or suffer the consequences, one way or the other,” Kerry said.

“In the year 2014, after all of the miles traveled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable; it’s grotesque. It is beyond unacceptable. And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities, from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of, there is no place for that.”

However, in the days before Kerry spoke, the distribution of the leaflet in Donetsk had been denounced as a black-propaganda hoax designed to discredit the pro-Russian protesters.

A Reported Hoax

As JTA, “the Global Jewish News Source,” reported on Wednesday, “Pro-Russian separatists from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine denied any involvement in the circulation of fliers calling on Jews to register with separatists and pay special taxes.” Among those denying the legitimacy of the fliers was Denis Pushilin, the person whose name was signed at the bottom. He termed the fliers a “provocation” designed to discredit the resistance in eastern Ukraine against the post-coup regime in Kiev.

The issue of anti-Semitism has been a sensitive one for the Kiev regime because neo-Nazi militias played a key role in overthrowing President Yanukovych on Feb. 22, and now renamed as Ukraine’s “National Guard” these militias have joined in the repression of the protests in eastern Ukraine, including the killing of three protesters this week.

The right-wing Svoboda party and the Right Sektor, which spearheaded the decisive attacks that forced Yanukovych to flee for his life, trace their political lineage back to Stepan Bandera, a World War II Nazi collaborator whose paramilitary force took part in the extermination and expulsion of Jews and Poles to ethnically purify Ukraine.

So, the distribution of anti-Semitic fliers would have served an important political purpose for the Kiev regime by allowing it and its American backers to deflect questions about neo-Nazis in the west by fingering pro-Russians in the east for anti-Semitism. The men who passed out the leaflets were dressed up as pro-Russian paramilitaries but their identities are unknown.

On Friday, the New York Times sought to dispute the possibility that the men might have been pro-Kiev provocateurs by arguing that “there is no evidence” that pro-Kiev operatives are functioning in Donetsk.

But the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy has on its payroll a number of activists and “journalists” operating in Donetsk and elsewhere in the east, according to NED’s list of 65 projects in Ukraine. Founded in 1983, NED took over in a quasi-public fashion many of the covert operations formerly run by the CIA.

Last September, NED’s neocon president Carl Gershman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that called Ukraine “the biggest prize,” the capture of which could ultimately lead to the ouster of Putin, who “may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

By citing the suspect flier without noting that its supposed author had already denied its authenticity, Kerry reinforced the growing impression that he is an erratic and biased if not dishonest diplomat.

Obama’s Equivocation

Obama’s role in his administration’s foreign policy fiascos has mostly been to be caught off guard by mischief that his independent-minded underlings have stirred up. Then, once a crisis is touched off and the propaganda machinery starts churning out hyperbolic alarms Obama joins in the rhetorical exaggerations before he tries, quietly, to work out some compromise.

In other words, rather than driving the agenda, Obama goes with the neocon-R2P flow before searching for a last-second off-ramp to avert catastrophe. That creates what looks like a disorganized foreign policy consisting of much tough talk but little actual hard power. The cumulative effect has been to make Obama appear weak and indecisive.

One example was Syria, where Obama drew a “red line” suggesting a U.S. military strike if Assad’s regime used chemical weapons. When sarin was used on Aug. 21 resulting in hundreds of deaths, Official Washington’s neocons and R2Pers quickly fingered Assad, firmed up that “group think,” and ridiculed anyone who doubted this conventional wisdom.

With Kerry running near the front of the stampede, Obama tagged along repeating what all the important people thought they knew that Assad was guilty but Obama steered away from the war cliff at the last minute. He referred the issue to Congress and then accepted a compromise devised by Putin to have Assad surrender all his chemical weapons, even as Assad continued denying a role in the Aug. 21 attack.

After that Syrian deal was struck, the neocons and R2Pers pummeled Obama for weakness in deciding not to launch major military strikes against Syrian targets. Obama managed to avert another Mideast war but he faced accusations of vacillation.

The Ukraine crisis is following a similar pattern. The neocons and R2Pers immediately took the side of the western Ukrainian protesters in the Maidan as they challenged elected President Yanukovych who hails from eastern Ukraine.

Assistant Secretary Nuland openly supported the rebellion, reminding Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” literally passing out cookies to the protesters and secretly plotting who should replace Yanukovych. Her choice, “Yats” or Arseniy Yatsenyuk, not surprisingly ended up as prime minister after the Feb. 22 coup, and he quickly pushed through the parliament a harsh austerity plan demanded by the International Monetary Fund.

R2Pers also rallied to the cause of the Maidan protesters, citing a principled responsibility to protect civilians resisting government repression. However, the R2Pers have taken a remarkably different stance toward the Ukrainians in the east who have risen up against the unelected post-coup regime in Kiev. Those protesters are simply dismissed as pawns of the Russians, deserving whatever they get.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a prominent R2Per, even wants the U.S. government to arm the Kiev regime so it can put down the pro-Russian protesters violently. On Thursday, Kristof wrote from Kiev: “For decades, Ukrainians have been starved, oppressed and bullied by Russians, and with Russia now inciting instability that could lead to an invasion and dismemberment of eastern Ukraine, plenty of brave Ukrainians here say they’ve had it and are ready to go bear-hunting.”

So, while virtually no one in the mainstream U.S. media will acknowledge the well-documented role played by American neocons and other operatives in inciting instability in Kiev, leading to the violent overthrow of the elected president, almost everyone in the MSM accepts as indisputable fact that the eastern Ukrainian protests against the post-coup regime in Kiev are simply Russian provocations deserving of a violent response.

Economic Pressures

But an oddly discordant note was sounded in the Washington Post of all places. On Thursday, correspondent Anthony Faiola reported from Donetsk that many of the eastern Ukrainians whom he interviewed said the unrest was driven by fear over “economic hardship” and the IMF austerity plan that will make their lives even harder.

“At a most dangerous and delicate time, just as it battles Moscow for hearts and minds across the east, the pro-Western government is set to initiate a shock therapy of economic measures to meet the demands of an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund,” Faiola reported.

In other words, even as Kerry, the neocons and the R2Pers blame only the Russians for the unrest in the east, a rare case of actual reporting from the scene finds a more realistic explanation, that many people in eastern Ukraine feel disenfranchised by the violent overthrow of their candidate Yanukovych and are frightened at the prospects of soaring heating bills and other cuts in their already austere lifestyles.

As for President Obama — as a timid “realist” — he has played his typical double game. He responded to the pro-Kiev bias of Official Washington by piling on with angry denunciations of Putin, but recognizing the painful consequences that would come from a full-blown confrontation with Russia Obama authorized negotiations to reduce tensions, an agreement that was announced on Thursday in Geneva.

Yet, even if the Ukrainian crisis is gradually walked back from the edge, I’m told that lasting damage has been done to the working relationship that had developed, behind the scenes, between Obama and Putin, collaboration that helped avert a U.S. war on Syria and hammered out a compromise to constrain Iran’s nuclear program.

Putin had hoped that Russian cooperation on those two dangerous issues would open the door to other collaboration with Obama. But the Ukraine crisis brought those prospects to a halt. The Russians are particularly sensitive to the harsh rhetoric emanating from Kerry but also from Obama.

One adviser to the Russian government told me that the people around Putin feel that they are being treated shabbily even as Obama has benefited from their help.

The adviser summed up the Russian attitude: “How can you expect me to work with you during the day when you sleep with my wife at night? How can you whisper in my ear that we are friends and then go out in public and say terrible things about me? It doesn’t work that way.”

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

5 comments for “The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance

  1. K P Fabian
    April 21, 2014 at 08:04

    US policy under Obama on Ukraine needs much to be desired.With Kerry as Secretary of State rhetoric replaces logical thinking and planning. Even before they met in Geneva Russia was threatened with sanctions. The threat was ineffective as Putin knew that Germany, Italy, and UK were not for an all out economic war. In short, it was an empty threat, indeed dangerous in diplomacy.

    Ambassador K P Fabian

  2. Johnson
    April 19, 2014 at 21:48

    I really don’t understand why people refer to ‘neocons’ and ‘Obama’ as two separate people or groups. Who do you think put Ms. Nuland in charge? And if for some reason that had occurred without Mr. Kerry or Mr. Obama desiring that, then either Obama or Kerry could put a new person in charge of policy in the region with a single phone call.

    Its very obvious that Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry want Ms. Nuland and the neo-cons in charge and have deliberately assigned them to that position. So, why on earth would any intelligent writer refer to the ‘neo-con’ policy and the ‘Obama’ policy as if there was any difference.

    Please don’t tell me Consortium news still believes the wall street funded pr campaign of ’08 that spread the lie that Obama is a ‘progressive’.

  3. Coleen Rowley
    April 19, 2014 at 00:15

    Yes, there’s quite a neo-con, NED “democracy promotion”, R2P alliance! It’s a strange and phony altruism-idealism positing noble ends as in “we must bomb the village to save it” that is unhinged from and opposed to reality. If you’d like to see how the “Project for the New American Century (PNAC); NED, and Goldman Sachs are all so very entwined and working together even on college campuses, take a look at the names involved in this upcoming forum at the University of Minnesota entitled: “Global Prosperity and Democracy: Challenges for Corporations, Government, NGOs, and Civil Society.” https://www.tickets.umn.edu/umato/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=GlobalProsperity

    The two main speakers, Robert Zoellick (former head of the World Bank) and Frances Fukuyama were both members of PNAC as is Event Host (and Humphrey Institute Forum Co-Director) Vin Weber, all three having signed its famous letter sent to US President Bill Clinton in 1998, advocating “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power” along with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and 29 other notable Republicans.

    The NED Board of Directors (Carl Gershman, Marilyn Carlson Nelson, Vin Weber, and The Honorable Norm Coleman) are listed as hosts. The Carlson Foundation is a huge donor to the University of Minnesota for which the business building is named. In the last couple weeks, Carlson and the Humphrey Institute (note that Dean Eric Schwartz also formerly worked on democracy promotion and R2P under Albright and Clinton) promoted Condi Rice and Elliott Abrams in separate events.

  4. F. G. Sanford
    April 18, 2014 at 19:03

    For those following this, American hypocrisy is certainly on full display. But so too is the Strangelovian detachment from reality. A NATO General’s comment about “a purely defensive posture to reassure our allies” hardly conceals what can only be interpreted as a strike force given the absence of any credible threat. There was something eerily Goeringesque about his corpulent stature, to say nothing of the deceitful smile on that lubricious gash of a mouth. Consider that in tandem with his boss’s unfettered reckless comment: “The Russians know our military is far superior to theirs”. It’s hard to fathom exactly where any restraint or unwilling reluctance plays a part in this dialogue. Despite the lip service to deescalation in Geneva, Western demands appear to have been so one-sided and unreasonable that the anti-fascist protestors have rejected them outright.

    Once upon a time, another army took a similar attitude. “Kick in the front door, and the entire rotten edifice will collapse” was the wisdom of the day. 214 German divisions and 3.3 million dead German soldiers later, the Russians rolled into Berlin. It cost them 12 million soldiers. Arithmetically, the German Wermacht was a killing machine four times as effective as their Russian opponents. They still lost.

    Today, Russia has 766,000 active duty troops, and perhaps as many reserves. Lines of communication and supply on their home soil are a tactical advantage. Their air force and missile defense capabilities are perhaps ‘state of the art’. They have no need to rely on the consent of host nations or allies to coordinate their tactical maneuvers. Rearward collateral damage will weaken the resolve of the allies upon which their opponents must depend. They do not have to borrow money from China to finance their military strategy. War with them would bankrupt the allies upon which the United States must depend. There is something to be said for quality, but as the saying goes, “quantity has a quality all its own”.

    If the United States chooses to start a war with Russia, it will lose…unless it resorts to the nuclear option. Europe would be left uninhabitable. But the Neocons may simply invoke the wisdom of Madeline Albright: “It was worth it”. I think that’s their strategic assessment, and I don’t hear any dissent.

  5. incontinent reader
    April 18, 2014 at 16:54

    What consistently amazes me is something you’ve pointed out so incisively here- namely, how oblivious Kerry has been to the facts, how wrong he’s consistently been, and how much he thinks bombastic delivery can be substituted for substance (maybe the debating prize at Yale went to his head?), indeed, the more bombastic he is, is a tipoff that the more wrong he is- and every time he’s been wrong he’s looked like more the fool than he did the time before.

    One example I’ve harked back to is the photo of dead bodies lying side by side draped in white that he waved in front of the cameras last year, as he kept intoning that it was incontrovertible evidence that the Assad government had been responsible for the Ghouta massacre- supposedly to justify his R2Pee (in a very limited space, mind you- or so he wanted us to believe). In fact, that photo had been shot in 2004 by Marco di Lauro, an AP photograher, of a massacre in the South of Baghdad, and, furthermore, was later recycled by the BBC or Reuters to show Assad’s responsibility for the Houla massacre in 2012. (The Brits thought they could get away with it until they were bagged by di Lauro- god bless him and his soul.) I half expect that Kerry- and almost certainly expect Samantha Power- to wave it again, with the same or more false allegations about Ghouta, or of some other massacre that occurred in Syria or elsewhere, to prove that Hugo Chavez was the responsible party. It’s Alice in Wonderland to the power of ten, (or, the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’, with all of them- apparachiks and apparchicks- strutting buck naked). Mr. Cleese, Mr. Palin, how about resuscitating Monty (Python) to return as the ‘Full Monty’ and deliver a final coup de grace to these people (including the Brits who deserve)?

Comments are closed.