Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 00:00:02 +0200
High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine
By <http://www.opednews.com/author/author1553.html> Robert Parry
<http://www.opednews.com/author/author1553.html> (about the author)
<http://www.opednews.com/articles/High-Cost-of-Bad-Journalis-by-Robert-Parry
-Journalism_Neocons_Obama_Putin-140922-842.html> Permalink
9/23/2014 at 20:10:43
The costs of the mainstream U.S. media's wildly anti-Moscow bias in the
Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to
react to alleged "Russian aggression" by investing as much as $1 trillion in
modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-ramping-up-major-renewal-in-nuclear
-arms.html?ref=us&_r=0> article justified these modernization plans by
describing "Russia on the warpath" and adding: "Congress has expressed less
interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington's escalating
confrontation with Moscow."
But the Ukraine crisis has been a textbook case of the U.S. mainstream media
misreporting the facts of a foreign confrontation and then misinterpreting
the meaning of the events, a classic case of "garbage in, garbage out." The
core of the false mainstream narrative is that Russian President Vladimir
Putin instigated the crisis as an excuse to reclaim territory for the
Russian empire.
While that interpretation of events has been the cornerstone of Official
Washington's "group think," the reality always was that Putin favored
maintaining the status quo in Ukraine. He had no plans to "invade" Ukraine
and was satisfied with the elected government of President Viktor
Yanukovych. Indeed, when the crisis heated up last February, Putin was
distracted by the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Rather than Putin's "warmongering" -- as the Times said in the lead-in to
another Monday
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/world/europe/russians-protest-putins-stan
ce-on-ukraine.html?ref=world> article -- the evidence is clear that it was
the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation
in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into the
West's orbit.
This was a scheme long in the making, but the immediate framework for the
crisis took shape a year ago when influential U.S. neocons set their sights
on Ukraine and Putin after Putin helped defuse a crisis in Syria by
persuading President Barack Obama to set aside plans to bomb Syrian
government targets over
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/07/the-collapsing-syria-sarin-case/> a
disputed Sarin gas attack and instead accept Syria's willingness to
surrender its entire chemical weapons arsenal.
But the neocons and their "liberal interventionist" allies had their hearts
set on another "shock and awe" campaign with the goal of precipitating
another "regime change" against a Middle East government disfavored by
Israel. Putin also worked with Obama to resolve the dispute over Iran's
nuclear program, averting another neocon dream to "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
The Despised Putin
So, Putin suddenly rose to the top of the neocons' "enemies list" and some
prominent neocons quickly detected his vulnerability in Ukraine, a
historical route for western invasions of Russia and the scene of
extraordinarily bloody fighting during World War II.
National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, one of the top
neocon paymasters spreading around $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers'
money,
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-rus
sia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html>
declared in late September 2013 that Ukraine represented "the biggest prize"
but beyond that was an opportunity to put Putin "on the losing end not just
in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
The context for Gershman's excitement was a European Union offer of an
association agreement to Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych, but
it came with some nasty strings attached, an austerity plan demanded by the
International Monetary Fund that would have made the hard lives of the
average Ukrainian even harder.
That prompted Yanukovych to seek a better deal from Putin who offered $15
billion in aid without the IMF's harsh terms. Yet, once Yanukovych rebuffed
the EU plan, his government was targeted by a destabilization campaign that
involved scores of political and media projects funded by Gershman's NED and
other U.S. agencies.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon
holdover who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney,
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/23/neocons-and-the-ukraine-coup/>
reminded a group of Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had
invested $5 billion in their "European aspirations." Nuland, wife of
prominent neocon Robert Kagan, also showed up at the Maidan square in Kiev
passing out cookies to protesters.
The Maidan protests, reflecting western Ukraine's desire for closer ties to
Europe, also were cheered on by neocon Sen. John McCain, who appeared on a
podium with leaders of the far-right Svoboda party under a banner honoring
Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. A year earlier, the European Parliament
had
<http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/summary.do?id=1239823&t=e&l=en>
identified Svoboda as professing "racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views
[that] go against the EU's fundamental values and principles."
Yet, militants from Svoboda and the even more extreme Right Sektor were
emerging as the muscle of the Maidan protests, seizing government buildings
and hurling firebombs at police. A well-known Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader,
Andriy Parubiy, became the commandant of the Maidan's "self-defense" forces.
Behind the scenes, Assistant Secretary Nuland was deciding who would take
over the Ukrainian government once Yanukovych was ousted. In
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957> an intercepted phone call
with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland crossed off some potential
leaders and announced that "Yats" -- or Arseniy Yatsenyuk -- was her guy.
The Coup
On Feb. 20, as the neo-Nazi militias stepped up their attacks on police, a
mysterious sniper opened fire on both protesters and police, killing scores
and bringing the political crisis to a boil. The U.S. news media blamed
Yanukovych for the killings though he denied giving such an order and some
evidence pointed toward a provocation from the far-right extremists.
As Estonia's Foreign Minister Urmas Paet
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/ukraine-bugged-call-catherine-
ashton-urmas-paet> said in another intercepted phone call with EU foreign
affairs chief Catherine Asthon, "there is a stronger and stronger
understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody
from the new coalition."
But the sniper shootings led Yanukovych to agree on Feb. 21 to a deal
guaranteed by three European countries -- France, Germany and Poland -- that
he would surrender much of his power and move up elections so he could be
voted out of office. He also assented to U.S. demands that he pull back his
police.
That last move, however, prompted the neo-Nazi militias to overrun the
presidential buildings on Feb. 22 and force Yanukovych's officials to flee
for their lives. Then, rather than seeking to enforce the Feb. 21 agreement,
the U.S. State Department promptly declared the coup regime "legitimate" and
blamed everything on Yanukovych and Putin.
Nuland's choice, Yatsenyuk, was made prime minister and the neo-Nazis were
rewarded for their crucial role by receiving several ministries, including
national security headed by Parubiy. The parliament also voted to ban
Russian as an official language (though that was later rescinded), and the
IMF austerity demands were pushed through by Yatsenyuk. Not surprisingly,
ethnic Russians in the south and east, the base of Yanukovych's support,
began resisting what they regarded as the illegitimate coup regime.
To blame this crisis on Putin simply ignores the facts and defies logic. To
presume that Putin instigated the ouster of Yanukovych in some convoluted
scheme to seize territory requires you to believe that Putin got the EU to
make its reckless association offer, organized the mass protests at the
Maidan, convinced neo-Nazis from western Ukraine to throw firebombs at
police, and manipulated Gershman, Nuland and McCain to coordinate with the
coup-makers -- all while appearing to support Yanukovych's idea for new
elections within Ukraine's constitutional structure.
Though such a crazy conspiracy theory would make people in tinfoil hats
blush, this certainty is at the heart of what every "smart" person in
Official Washington believes. If you dared to suggest that Putin was
actually distracted by the Sochi Olympics last February, was caught off
guard by the events in Ukraine, and reacted to a Western-inspired crisis on
his border (including his acceptance of Crimea's request to be readmitted to
Russia), you would be immediately dismissed as "a stooge of Moscow."
Such is how mindless "group think" works in Washington. All the people who
matter jump on the bandwagon and smirk at anyone who questions how wise it
is to be rolling downhill in some disastrous direction.
But the pols and pundits who appear on U.S. television spouting the
conventional wisdom are always the winners in this scenario. They get to
look tough, standing up to villains like Yanukovych and Putin and siding
with the saintly Maidan protesters. The neo-Nazi brown shirts are whited out
of the picture and any Ukrainian who objected to the U.S.-backed coup regime
finds a black hat firmly glued on his or her head.
For the neocons, there are both financial and ideological benefits. By
shattering the fragile alliance that had evolved between Putin and Obama
over Syria and Iran, the neocons seized greater control over U.S. policies
in the Middle East and revived the prospects for violent "regime change."
On a more mundane level -- by stirring up a new Cold War -- the neocons
generate more U.S. government money for military contractors who bestow a
portion on Washington think tanks that provide cushy jobs for neocons when
they are out of government.
The Losers
The worst losers are the people of Ukraine, most tragically the ethnic
Russians in eastern Ukraine, thousands of whom have died from a combination
of heavy artillery by the Ukrainian army on residential areas followed by
street fighting led by brutal neo-Nazi militias who were incorporated into
Kiev's battle plans. [See Consortiumnews.com's "
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/15/ukraines-romantic-nazi-storm-troopers/
> Ukraine's 'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers."]
The devastation of eastern Ukraine, which has driven an estimated one
million Ukrainians out of their homes, has left parts of this industrial
region in ruins. Of course, in the U.S. media version, it's all Putin's
fault for deceiving these ethnic Russians with "propaganda" about neo-Nazis
and then inducing these deluded individuals to resist the "legitimate"
authorities in Kiev.
Notably, America's righteous "responsibility to protect" crowd, which
demanded that Obama begin airstrikes in Syria a year ago, swallowed its
moral whistles when it came to the U.S.-backed Kiev regime butchering ethnic
Russians in eastern Ukraine (or for that matter, when Israeli forces
slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza).
However, beyond the death and destruction in eastern Ukraine, the meddling
by Nuland, Gershman and others has pushed all of Ukraine toward financial
catastrophe. As "The Business Insider" reported on Sept. 21, "
<http://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-is-on-the-brink-of-total-economic-co
llapse-2014-9> Ukraine Is on the Brink of Total Economic Collapse."
Author Walter Kurtz wrote:
"Those who have spent any time in Ukraine during the winter know how harsh
the weather can get. And at these [current] valuations, hryvnia [Ukraine's
currency] isn't going to buy much heating fuel from abroad. ...
"Inflation rate is running above 14% and will spike sharply from here in the
next few months if the currency weakness persists. Real wages are
collapsing. ... Finally, Ukraine's fiscal situation is unraveling."
In other words, the already suffering Ukrainians from the west, east and
center of the country can expect to suffer a great deal more. They have been
made expendable pawns in a geopolitical chess game played by neocon masters
and serving interests far from Lviv, Donetsk and Kiev.
But other victims from these latest machinations by the U.S. political/media
elite will include the American taxpayers who will be expected to foot the
bill for the new Cold War launched in reaction to Putin's imaginary scheme
to instigate the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim territory of the Russian
Empire.
As nutty as that conspiracy theory is, it is now one of the key reasons why
the American people have to spend $1 trillion to modernize the nation's
nuclear arsenal, rather than scaling back the thousands of U.S. atomic
weapons to around 900, as had been planned.
Or as one supposed expert, Gary Samore at Harvard, explained to the New York
Times: "The most fundamental game changer is Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically
impossible."
Thus, you can see how hyperbolic journalism and self-interested punditry can
end up costing the American taxpayers vast sums of money and contributing to
a more dangerous world.
<http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/victoria-nuland.jpg>
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who
pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland.
(image by
<http://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/23/neocons-and-the-ukraine-coup/>
Consortium News)
(image/jpeg attachment: image001.jpg)