{"id":134778,"date":"2019-06-03T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-06-03T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=134778"},"modified":"2019-06-03T08:49:07","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T07:49:07","slug":"manufacturing-war-with-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/06\/manufacturing-war-with-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Manufacturing War with Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mr. Fish \/ Truthdig<\/p><\/div>\n

3 Jun 2019 – <\/em>Despite the Robert Mueller report\u2019s conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. It is used to justify the expansion of NATO to Russia\u2019s borders, a move that has made billions in profits for U.S. arms manufacturers. It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party\u2019s betrayal of the working class and the party\u2019s subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit d\u00e9tente between the world\u2019s two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas\u2014including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. This new Cold War predates the Trump presidential campaign. It was manufactured over a decade ago by a war industry and intelligence community that understood that, by fueling a conflict with Russia, they could consolidate their power and increase their profits. (Seventy percent of intelligence is carried out by private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton<\/a>, which has been called the world\u2019s most profitable spy operation.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThis began long before Trump and \u2018Russiagate,\u2019 \u201d Stephen F. Cohen said when I interviewed him<\/a> for my television show, \u201cOn Contact.\u201d Cohen is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, where he was the director of the Russian studies program, and professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University. \u201cYou have to ask yourself, why is it that Washington had no problem doing productive diplomacy with Soviet communist leaders. Remember Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev<\/a>? It was a love fest. They went hunting together [in the Soviet Union]. Yet along comes a post-Soviet leader, Vladimir Putin, who is not only not a communist but a professed anti-communist. Washington has been hating on him ever since 2003, 2004. It requires some explanation. Why do we like communist leaders in Russia better than we like Russia\u2019s anti-communist leader? It\u2019s a riddle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re trying to explain how the Washington establishment has dealt with Putin in a hateful and demonizing way, you have to go back to the 1990s before Putin,\u201d said Cohen, whose new book<\/a> is \u201cWar With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.\u201d The first post-Soviet leader is Boris Yeltsin<\/a>. Clinton is president. And they have this fake, pseudo-partnership and friendship, whereas essentially the Clinton administration took advantage of the fact that Russia was in collapse. It almost lost its sovereignty. I lived there in the \u201990s. Middle-class people lost their professions. Elderly people lost their pensions. I think it\u2019s correct to say that industrial production fell more in the Russian 1990s than it did during our own Great Depression. It was the worst economic and social depression ever in peacetime. It was a catastrophe for Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

In September 1993 Russians took to the streets to protest the collapse of the economy\u2014the gross domestic product had fallen by 50% and the country was convulsed by hyperinflation\u2014along with the rampant corruption that saw state enterprises sold for paltry fees to Russian oligarchs<\/a> and foreign corporations in exchange for lavish kickbacks and bribes; food and fuel shortages; the nonpayment of wages and pensions; the lack of basic services, including medical services; falling life expectancy; the explosion of violent crime; and Yeltsin\u2019s increasing authoritarianism and his unpopular war with Chechnya<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In October 1993 Yeltsin, after dissolving the parliament, ordered army tanks to shell the Russian parliament building, which was being occupied by democratic protesters. The assault left 2,000 dead. Yet during his presidency Yeltsin was effusively praised and supported by Washington. This included U.S. support for a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Russia during his 1996 re-election campaign. The loan enabled the Yeltsin government to pay huge sums in back wages and pensions to millions of Russians, with checks often arriving on the eve of the election. Also, an estimated $1.5 billion from the loan was used to directly fund the Yeltsin presidential campaign. But by the time Yeltsin was forced out of office in December 1999 his approval rating had sunk to 2%. Washington, losing Yeltsin, went in search of another malleable Russian leader and, at first, thought it had found one in Putin.<\/p>\n

\u201cPutin went to Texas,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cHe had a barbecue with Bush, second Bush. Bush said he \u2018looked into his eyes and saw a good soul.\u2019 There was this honeymoon. Why did they turn against Putin? He turned out not to be Yeltsin. We have a very interesting comment about this from Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, who wrote<\/a>, I think in 2003, that his own disillusion with Putin was that he had turned out not to be \u2018a sober Yeltsin<\/a>.\u2019 What Washington was hoping for was a submissive, supplicant, post-Soviet Russian leader, but one who was younger, healthier and not a drinker. They thought they had that in Putin. Yeltsin had put Putin in power, or at least the people around Yeltsin did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Putin began talking about Russia\u2019s sovereignty, Russia\u2019s independent course in world affairs, they\u2019re aghast,\u201d Cohen said of the Washington elites. \u201cThis is not what they expected. Since then, my own thinking is we were pretty lucky after the 1990s to get Putin because there were worst contenders in the wings. I knew some of them. I don\u2019t want to name names. But some of these guys were really harsh people. Putin was kind of the right person for the right time, both for Russia and for Russian world affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have had three years of this,\u201d Cohen said of Russiagate. \u201cWe lost sight of the essence of what this allegation is. The people who created Russiagate are literally saying, and have been for almost three years, that the president of the United States is a Russian agent, or he has been compromised by the Kremlin. We grin because it\u2019s so fantastic. But the Washington establishment, mainly the Democrats but not only, have taken this seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if there has ever been anything like this in American history,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cThat accusation does such damage to our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system, to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it\u2019s done to American-Russian relations, the damage it has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians, look at America today. This whole Russiagate has not only been fraudulent, it\u2019s been a catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were three major episodes of d\u00e9tente in the 20th century,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cThe first was after Stalin died, when the Cold War was very dangerous. That was carried out by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president. The second was by Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger\u2014it was called \u2018the Nixon d\u00e9tente with Brezhnev.\u2019 The third, and we thought most successful, was Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev<\/a>. It was such a successful d\u00e9tente Reagan and Gorbachev, and Reagan\u2019s successor, the first Bush, said the Cold War was over forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wall had come down,\u201d Cohen said of the 1989 collapse of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. \u201cGermany was reunifying. The question became \u2018where would a united Germany be?\u2019 The West wanted Germany in NATO. For Gorbachev, this was an impossible sell. Twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens had died in the war against Germany in the Second World War on the eastern front. Contrary to the bunk we\u2019re told, the United States didn\u2019t land on Normandy and defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was done primarily by the Soviet army. How could Gorbachev go home and say, \u2018Germany is reunited. Great. And it\u2019s going to be in NATO.\u2019 It was impossible. They told Gorbachev, \u2018We promise if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move\u2014this was Secretary of State James Baker\u2014one inch to the east. In other words, NATO would not move from Germany toward Russia. And it did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we speak today, NATO is on Russia\u2019s borders,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cFrom the Baltics to Ukraine to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. So, what happened? Later, they said Gorbachev lied or he misunderstood. [That] the promise was never made. But the National Security Archive in Washington has produced all the documents of the discussion in 1990. It was not only [President George H.W.] Bush, it was the French leader Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, it was Margaret Thatcher of England. Every Western leader promised Gorbachev NATO would not move eastward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you end up with today?\u201d he asked. \u201cBetrayal. Any kind of discussion about Russian-American relations today, an informed Russian is going to say, \u2018We worry you will betray us again.\u2019\u2026 Putin said he had illusions about the West when he came to power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump comes out of nowhere in 2016 and says, \u2018I think we should cooperate with Russia,\u2019 \u201d Cohen said. \u201cThis is a statement of d\u00e9tente. It\u2019s what drew my attention to him. It\u2019s then that this talk of Trump being an agent of the Kremlin begins. One has to wonder\u2014I can\u2019t prove it\u2014but you have to think logically. Was this [allegation] begun somewhere high up in America by people who didn\u2019t want a pro-d\u00e9tente president? And [they] thought that Trump, however small it seemed at the time that he could win\u2014they really didn\u2019t like this talk of cooperation with Russia. It set in motion these things we call Russiagate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe forefathers of d\u00e9tente were Republicans,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cHow the Democrats behaved during this period of d\u00e9tente was mixed. There was what used to be called the Henry Jackson<\/a> wing. This was a very hard-line, ideological wing of the Democratic Party that didn\u2019t believe in d\u00e9tente. Some Democrats did. I lived many years in Moscow, both Soviet and post-Soviet times. If you talk to Russian, Soviet policymakers, they generally prefer Republican candidates for the presidency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democrats are perceived by Russian rulers as more ideological, Cohen said.<\/p>\n

\u201cRepublicans tend to be businessmen who want to do business in Russia,\u201d he said. \u201cThe most important pro-d\u00e9tente lobby group, created in the 1970s, was called the American Committee for East-West Accord. It was created by American CEOs who wanted to do business in Soviet Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe single most important relationship the United States has is with Russia,\u201d Cohen went on, \u201cnot only because of the nuclear weapons. It remains the largest territorial country in the world. It abuts every region we are concerned about. D\u00e9tente with Russia\u2014not friendship, not partnership, not alliance\u2014but reducing conflict is essential. Yet something happened in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n

The accusations made repeatedly by James Clapper, the former director of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, concerning the Kremlin\u2019s supposed control of Trump and Russia\u2019s alleged theft of our elections are deeply disturbing, Cohen said. Clapper and Brennan have described Trump as a Kremlin \u201casset.\u201d Brennan called Trump\u2019s performance at a news conference with the Russian president in Finland \u201cnothing short of treasonous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clapper in his memoir, \u201cFacts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence,\u201d claims Putin\u2019s interference in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump was \u201cstaggering.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, the Russian efforts affected the outcome,\u201d writes Clapper. \u201cSurprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brennan and Clapper have on numerous occasions been caught lying to the public. Brennan, for example, denied, falsely, that the CIA was monitoring the computers that Senate staff members were using to prepare a report on torture. The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor to accuse Brennan and the CIA of potentially violating the U.S. Constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to spy on and thwart her committee\u2019s investigations into the agency\u2019s use of torture. She described the situation as a \u201cdefining moment\u201d for political oversight. Brennan also claimed there was not a \u201csingle collateral death\u201d in the drone assassination program, that Osama bin Laden used his wife as a human shield before being gunned down in a U.S. raid in Pakistan, and insisted that torture, or what is euphemistically called \u201cenhanced interrogation,\u201d has produced valuable intelligence. None of these statements are true.<\/p>\n

Clapper, who at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for interpreting spy-satellite photos and intelligence such as air particles and soil samples, concocted a story about Saddam Hussein spiriting his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the documents that verified his program to Syria on the eve of the invasion. He blatantly committed perjury before the Senate when being questioned about domestic surveillance programs of the American public. He was asked, \u201cDoes the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?\u201d Clapper responded, \u201cNo, sir. \u2026 Not wittingly.\u201d It was, as Clapper knew very well, a lie.<\/a><\/p>\n

Our inability to oversee or control senior intelligence officials and their agencies, which fabricate information to push through agendas embraced by the shadow state, signals the death of democracy. Intelligence officials seemingly empowered to lie\u2014Brennan and Clapper have been among them\u2014ominously have in their hands instruments of surveillance, intimidation and coercion that effectively silence their critics, blunt investigations into their activities, even within the government, and make them and their agencies unaccountable.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the Steele dossier<\/a> that was spookily floating around American media,\u201d Cohen said of the report compiled by Christopher Steele.<\/p>\n

The report was commissioned by Fusion GPS<\/a> and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Bob Woodward reported<\/a> that Brennan pushed to include the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment of Russian election interference.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe [Steele] got it from newspapers,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cI don\u2019t think he had a single source in Russia. Steele comes forward with this dossier and says, \u2018I\u2019ve got information from high-level sources.\u2019 The Clinton campaign is funding this operation. But Steele is very important. He\u2019s a former U.K. intelligence officer, if he\u2019s really former, who had served in Russia and ran Russian cases. He says he has this information in the dossier about Trump frolicking with prostitutes. About Trump having been corrupted decades ago. He got it from \u2018high-level\u2019 Kremlin sources. This is preposterous. It\u2019s illogical.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe theory is Putin desperately wanted to make Trump president,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cYet, guys in the Kremlin, around Putin, were feeding Trump dirt to a guy called Steele. Even though the boss wants\u2014does it make any sense to you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is this important?\u201d Cohen asked. \u201cRight-wing American media outlets today, in particularly Fox News, are blaming Russia for this whole Russiagate thing. They\u2019re saying that Russia provided this false information to Steele, who pumped it into our system, which led to Russiagate. This is untrue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho is behind all this? Including the Steele operation?\u201d Cohen asked. \u201cI prefer a good question to an orthodox answer. I\u2019m not dogmatic. I don\u2019t have the evidence. But all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA. Long before it hit America\u2014maybe as early as late 2015. One of the problems we have today is everybody is hitting on the FBI. Lovers who sent emails.<\/a> But the FBI is a squishy organization, nobody is afraid of the FBI. It\u2019s not what it used to be under J. Edgar Hoover. Look at James Comey, for God\u2019s sake. He\u2019s a patsy. Brennan and Clapper played Comey. They dumped this stuff on him. Comey couldn\u2019t even handle Mrs. Clinton\u2019s emails. He made a mess of everything. Who were the cunning guys? They were Brennan and Clapper. [Brennan,] the head of the CIA. Clapper, the head of the Office of [the Director of] National Intelligence, who is supposed to oversee these agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs there any reality to these Russiagate allegations against Trump and Putin?\u201d he asked. \u201cWas this dreamed up by our intelligence services? Today investigations are being promised, including by the attorney general of the United States. They all want to investigate the FBI. But they need to investigate what Brennan and the CIA did. This is the worst scandal in American history. It\u2019s the worst, at least since the Civil War. We need to know how this began. If our intelligence services are way off the reservation, to the point that they can try to first destroy a presidential candidate and then a president, and I don\u2019t care that it\u2019s Trump, it may be Harry Smith next time, or a woman; if they can do this, we need to know it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second Bush left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cIt was a very important treaty. It prevented the deployment of missile defense. If anybody got missile defense that worked, they might think they had a first strike [option]. Russia or the United States could strike the other without retaliation. Once Bush left the treaty, we began to deploy missile defense around Russia. It was very dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Russians began a new missile program<\/a> which we learned about last year,\u201d he said. Hypersonic missiles. Russia now has nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system. We are in a new and more perilous point in a 50-year nuclear arms race. Putin says, \u2018We\u2019ve developed these because of what you did. We can destroy each other.\u2019 Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate. Russiagate is one of the greatest threats to national security. I have five listed in the book<\/a>. Russia and China aren\u2019t on there. Russiagate is number one.\u201d<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for <\/em>The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and<\/em> The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at <\/em>The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the <\/em>Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The <\/em>Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in <\/em>Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his <\/em>Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at <\/em>The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 Jun 2019 – Despite the Robert Mueller report\u2019s conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. The demonization of Putin and Russia was designed to poison bilateral relations, boost U.S. war industry profits and make d\u00e9tente impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":134779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1161,239,1061,120,354,267,1126,504,378,651,234,291,91,109,287,278,911,249,70,118,172,75],"class_list":["post-134778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-arms-industry","tag-brics","tag-cold-war-ii","tag-conflict","tag-economics","tag-geopolitics","tag-hegemony","tag-international-relations","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-russia","tag-surveillance","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-war","tag-west","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}