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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/8/14

Putin's Subtle Message to Obama

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Kerry also nearly scuttled the interim nuclear agreement with Iran in fall 2013 when he was sent to Geneva to sign the accord and instead tried to insert some new language. Finally, under White House orders, he returned to Geneva to finalize the interim deal, which also had been pushed along by Putin.

Stymied by Putin

So, on both Syria and Iran, Kerry found himself not only stymied by Obama and the President's ad hoc foreign policy team, but by the influence of the Russian president who had developed a surprisingly close odd-couple relationship with Obama. One outside analyst even compared the Obama-Putin relationship to the close collaboration between President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, albeit without the warm public appearances.

In other words, the fury toward Putin has been building inside the State Department, which is still dominated by neoconservative leftovers from the Bush years along with liberal "humanitarian" hawks who are also eager to unleash U.S. firepower against unsavory enemies. The pent-up frustration over Obama's failure to bomb Syria and possibly Iran was let loose over Ukraine, with Putin the primary target of the anger.

The Ukraine crisis started in 2013 with a reckless dangle from the European Union of a possible future membership for Ukraine, an association offer that was then followed by draconian austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund. But the easy villains in the U.S. narrative were Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected the IMF's demands, and Russia's President Putin, who trumped the EU's offer with a $15 billion loan without the austerity.

As anger among western Ukrainians led to mass demonstrations at the Maidan in Kiev, the State Department's neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (who happens to be Frederick Kagan's sister-in-law), cheered on and encouraged the increasingly violent protests. The U.S. press corps shed any pretense of objectivity and took the side of the Maidan protesters.

So, when neo-Nazi militias, allied with the Maidan protests, launched a putsch on Feb. 22, the State Department and the U.S. press fully embraced the ouster of the democratically elected president in what was deemed a "pro-democracy" uprising.

The events that followed, including the appointment of Nuland's hand-picked politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be prime minister and his prompt enactment of the IMF austerity plan, were viewed through the U.S. narrative's lens of "white hat" good guys -- the coup regime in Kiev -- versus "black hat" bad guys, i.e., anyone who objected to the putsch.

Reactions from Ukrainians who felt disenfranchised by the overthrow of their elected president or worried about the IMF's austerity plan were dismissed as confused locals deceived by Moscow's "disinformation," which continued to cite the role of neo-Nazis and question the legitimacy of the post-coup regime.

In March, when the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the U.S. media portrayed the vote as "rigged" or forced on the population by a Russian invasion.

To this day, the New York Times and other major publications insist that Putin had denied that Russian troops were in Crimea at the time of the secession and only later admitted that they were present, all the better to dispute his denials that Russian troops are now operating in eastern Ukraine. It doesn't seem to matter to the U.S. press that Putin and other Russian officials always said there were thousands of Russian troops in Crimea, operating under a longstanding agreement with Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Twisting Putin's Words on Ukraine."]

The Putin Conspiracy Theory

The demonization of Putin in the U.S. news media was so total that virtually anything could be said or written about him and anyone who objected to the "group think" was immediately dismissed as a "Putin apologist" or a conveyor of "Russian propaganda."

Because of this endless vilification, Official Washington couldn't see straight when it came to what Putin actually wanted. Amid the waves of U.S. propaganda, the State Department and the mainstream U.S. media promoted wild speculation about Putin planning to seize large sections of Ukraine and even reach into Moldova, if not the Baltic states.

Yet, Putin faced challenges enough in accepting Crimea's request for annexation, including the expenditure of billions of dollars to upgrade the peninsula's decaying infrastructure and building a bridge or tunnel from the Russian mainland. Putin wasn't eager to take on the care and feeding of tens of millions of Ukrainians.

Putin's military threats appeared mostly designed to stay the hand of the coup regime in Kiev which kept announcing plans to crush the "terrorists" in eastern Ukrainians who had taken up arms against what they considered an illegitimate government.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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