By
Ray McGovern
June 03, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Russian
hopes dashed: Whatever hopes Russian President Vladimir
Putin may have had for a more workable relationship with
the Trump administration have been “trumpled,” so to
speak. This came through loudly and clearly in acerbic
remarks by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey
Ryabkov in an
interview Friday
with The National Interest.
Ryabkov lamented the sad
state of Russia-U.S. relations, while pointing, not very
subtly, to China as Russia’s ace in the hole. He was
simply acknowledging that what the Soviets used to call
“the correlation of forces” has changed markedly, and
strongly implied that the U.S. should draw the
appropriate conclusions.
No amateur diplomat,
Ryabkov used unusually sharp, almost certainly
pre-authorized, words to drive home his message:
“We don’t believe the
U.S. in its current shape is a counterpart that is
reliable, so we have no confidence, no trust
whatsoever. So our own calculations and conclusions
are less related to what America is doing … we
cherish our close and friendly relations with China.
We do regard this as a comprehensive strategic
partnership in different areas, and we intend to
develop it further.”
In other words: We Russians
and Chinese will stand together as the U.S. tries to
paint both of us as arch-villains, all the while
isolating itself and painting itself into a corner.
Sic Transit Trust
Putin has come to accept
that potent forces favoring high tension with Russia —
the
Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Adademia-Think-Tank
complex (MICIMATT, if you will) — are far stronger than
any president; and that, in that context, trying to
cultivate a relationship of personal trust with a
president, may be largely a waste of time.
The system in which Putin
spent his early life put a premium on what the Soviets
called yedinonachaliya,
meaning leadership by a person at the top who is fully
empowered to make decisions and have them carried out by
subordinates — or else. Putin’s personal experience
working successfully with President Barack Obama in
early September 2013 to head off wider war on Syria
[more on that later] may have deceived him into assuming
that presidents of the United States can exercise that
kind of power, at will. And, if that were the case,
personal dealings at the very top were the preferred way
to untie Gordian knots — and even cooperate for mutual
advantage.
In the years since, the
notion was fully dispelled that a U.S. president is
completely “his own man” and is rather hemmed in by the
MICIMATT — and particularly by its Security State
component with entrenched, exceedingly powerful
intelligence and law enforcement agencies. President
Donald Trump calls this reality the “Deep State.”
Trump with Big
[Oral] Stick
There must be a Siberian
equivalent to the expression “All hat, no cattle.” If
there is, I can almost hear it coming from the Kremlin
in reaction to some of Trump’s rhetoric, like his
remarks on May 23 in an
interview with
journalist Sharyl Attkisson:
“What am I doing? I’m
fighting the deep state; I’m fighting the swamp…If
it keeps going the way it’s going, I have a chance
to break the deep state. It’s a vicious group of
people. It’s very bad for our country.”
Trump has not hesitated to
name the Deep State actors that he keeps in his sights —
ex-FBI Director James Comey; ex-CIA Director John
Brennan, and ex-National Intelligence Director James
Clapper, for example — but, so far, he has shied away
from actually taking them on. He has even thrown a few
of his closest supporters under the bus — like House
Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes when
Nunes
tried to send
criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
Thus, it remains an open
question whether Trump will allow the various
investigations now under way to bring indictments. This
is no parlor game; these would be very serious moves,
with consequences hard to predict. If it turns out that
the president does have some cattle and decides to put
them into play, those he labeled “a vicious group of
people” will be fighting back tooth and nail.
RIP: The Russian
‘Hack’ of DNC
Trump may act this time
because he was personally the target of the Russiagate
affair. Recently revealed evidence is in his favor.
Although the latest proof was released three and a half
weeks ago, most Americans are unaware that the
cornerstone of Russiagate, the charge that Russia hacked
into the Democratic National Committee computers, has
crumbled. Always evidence-impoverished, the accusation
has now been shown to be evidence-bereft by the sworn
testimony of the technical expert, Shawn
Henry, the head of CrowdStrike. This is the
cyber-security firm chosen and paid for by the Clinton
campaign and the DNC (with Comey’s blessing) to
investigate the so-called Russian hack.
Asked on Dec. 5, 2017,
behind closed doors by then-ranking member of the House
Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff to provide “the date
on which the Russians exfiltrated [hacked] the data from
the DNC,” Henry replied, “… there are times when we can
see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But
in this case … we just don’t have the evidence that says
it actually left.”
It was only under extreme
pressure from the acting director of National
Intelligence that Schiff, now chair of the House
Intelligence Committee, released the transcript of
Henry’s Dec. 5, 2017, testimony on May 7. The Democrats
knew for more than two years that the Russian hack was a
lie but continued telling it.
But now we know. Better
late than never? Not really.
If a Tree Falls in
the Forest …
If bombshell testimony like
that of Henry is not reported by The New York Times
or other Establishment media, as has been the case
since May 7, who can hear the tree fall — or the
bombshell explode? How many Americans know that the
White House has been right about at least one thing —
that the charge that Russia “hacked the DNC” is not
supported by any evidence that can bear close scrutiny?
I suppose it is true that
most Americans would prefer not to know that, but you do
not need a PhD to understand the inevitable consequences
of letting this all go with a “So what?”
If The New York Times
is successful in suppressing bombshells like Henry’s
testimony, it can suppress anything it deems “not fit to
print.” Let’s conduct an experiment: Please FaceTime a
couple of friends — preferably those who still read the
Times — and ask if they know that there is zero
concrete evidence that the Russians, or anyone else,
hacked the DNC; then closely watch their expression. If
they send the men in the white coats to knock on your
door, you’ll know why.
The Times, of
course, just won a Pulitzer Prize for its array of
Russia-bashing articles. Not to be outdone, Obama’s
National Security Advisor Susan Rice
told Fox News on
Sunday that she “would not be surprised to learn that
the Russians are fomenting” and “funding extremists on
both sides” of the current protest demonstrations in the
U.S. Typically, Rice cited no evidence, merely saying,
“based on my experience this is right out of the Russian
playbook.”
Rice told Fox, “I’m not
reading the intelligence these days.” But who, I ask,
needs intelligence when you have The New York Times?
Perhaps she found guidance in its March 10
story, “Russia
Trying to Stoke U.S. Racial Tensions Before Election,
Officials Say.” Or maybe she was one of the Times’
sources for that story, which would amount to the kind
of WMD-style,
circular/false-confirmation-to-a-fare-thee-well
approach, not uncommon to spreading “news” in
Washington.
You cannot say we have not
been warned. After all, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told
Trump last October “All roads lead to Putin.” Not to
overlook the insight of another amateur specialist on
Russia, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), who claims, “Vladimir
Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night
trying to figure out how to destroy American
democracy.” And didn’t those lawyers testify
preposterously to Schiff’s impeachment committee that,
“We had better fight the Russians over there in Ukraine,
so we don’t have to fight them here”? when even during
the height of the first Cold War no one seriously
contemplated Soviet troops invading U.S. soil.
‘Bad Guys’ Forever
I imagine that Kremlin
officials read the Times as closely as I used
to read Pravda back in the day — to discern
what is missing, as well as the significance of what
does make it into print. Russia’s leaders must be aware
that the Times and most other Establishment
media are so deeply invested in Russian “hacking,” that
the faux-story is simply too big to fail. Besides, it
has proven all too easy to lead Americans to believe
that, in effect, the U.S.S.R. still exists and is ruled
by “bad guys” bent on aggression.
By now, Putin must realize
it is an uphill, Sisyphus-like challenge to disassociate
today’s Russia from the Soviet Union. Five years ago,
he gave it the college try. On April 16, 2015, he
alluded to that dark period, addressing “the ugly nature
of the Stalin regime” and the reaction that persists to
this day. He
conceded:
“[It] “may not be very
pleasant for us to admit. But in truth, we, or
rather our predecessors, gave cause for this. Why?
Because after World War II, we tried to impose our
own development model on many Eastern European
countries, and we did so by force. This has to be
admitted. There is nothing good about this and we
are feeling the consequences now.”
It is likely to be a mix of
sang froid and skepticism on Putin’s part, as
he watches political developments in the U.S. in the
coming months, against the background of what he has
experienced with U.S. counterparts in recent years.
Obama-Putin
Tete-a-Tete Brings Results
On Sept. 4, 2013, the day
before Obama arrived in St. Petersburg for a G-20
summit, Putin on live TV accused then Secretary of State
John Kerry of lying the day before in congressional
testimony on Syria. Kerry had continued to blame Syria
for the sarin attack, played down the role of al-Qaeda
among the rebels, and exaggerated the strength of the
“moderate” rebels. With unusual bluntness, Putin said
that Kerry “is lying; he knows he is lying; this is
sad.”
Obama, too, was being
informed at the time that Kerry was stretching the truth
well beyond the breaking point. The president
knew this from
briefings by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs; by National Intelligence Director Clapper; and
by us, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
This may help explain why the president did not ask
Kerry to accompany him to St. Petersburg; why he chose
to work out the deal personally with Putin; and why he
chose to keep Kerry completely in the dark for five
days.
At a London press
conference early on Aug. 9, 2013, Kerry had been asked
whether there was anything Assad could do to prevent a
U.S. attack. Kerry answered dismissively that Assad
could give up his chemical weapons, but “he isn’t about
to do that; it can’t be done.” Later that day Kerry got
word from
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that, oops, the
deal could be done — and was about to be announced.
By happy coincidence, that
same evening I had an unusual opportunity atop the CNN
building in Washington to watch neocons like Paul
Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman vent their frustration over
Obama “chickening out” and squandering the golden chance
to get the U.S. into direct war in Syria. [
See the
sub-section Morose at CNN in “How War
in Syria Lost Its Way.”]
Obama, it turns out, was
proud at having gone against the advice of virtually all
of his advisers to stop the juggernaut rolling downhill
to war. Two years later, in an
interview with
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Obama bragged
at having been able to defy what he called “the
Washington playbook” in calling off the attack on
Syria.
Trust is the
Exception, Not the Rule
Putin had to learn the hard
way that the circumstances in September 2013 were
sui generis. Putin was able to offer Obama a deal
he could not refuse, in order for Obama to extract
himself from a very difficult position. Without Kerry or
other advisers looking over his shoulder, Obama was able
to take advantage of the offer despite the prevailing
war lust — not only among the neocons, but among Obama’s
own advisers.
Just six days after his
successful meeting with Obama, Putin put a hopeful gloss
on prospects for improved relations with Washington: “My
working and personal relationship with President Obama
is marked by growing trust,” Putin
wrote in a
New York Times op-ed on Sept. 11, 2013.
The Russian president was
basking in the glow of having (1) gotten Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad to agree to surrender Syrian
army chemical weapons for UN-supervised destruction, (2)
personally persuaded Obama to agree, and (3) helped
prevent military escalation in Syria — which neither
Putin nor Obama wanted. The deal was very much in
Obama’a interest, taking the wind out of the sails of
most of Obama’s advisers, including Kerry, who did
nothing to disguise their lust for an open U.S. attack
on Syria.
U.S. forces were in place.
The planned attack would be “justified” as retaliation
for a sarin gas attack near Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.
Kerry led the charge against Syria’s al-Assad,
repeatedly blaming him despite abundant evidence that
the sarin attack was a
false-flag ploy
— whether Kerry knew it or not — designed to mousetrap
Obama into ordering a Baghdad-style “shock and awe” on
Syria.
The immediate reaction of
U.S. officials to this op-ed should have helped keep
everyone’s hopes down. Indeed, the reaction proved to
be a harbinger of things to come — taking the form of a
Western-sponsored coup in Ukraine, sanctions, and, of
course, Russiagate.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ),
then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
spoke for many
Washington insiders by saying, “I was at dinner, and I
almost wanted to vomit.” [For more on this topic,
see
Consortium News‘s “Rewarding
Group Think on
Syria,”]
Nor did the hardliners’
chagrin over the lost opportunity for war on Syria
dissipate much in subsequent years. Sen. Bob Corker,
(R-TN), who followed Menendez as chair of the Foreign
Relations Committee, was one of the most outspoken
critics of Obama’s decision to cancel the planned attack
on Syria in 2013. On Dec. 3, 2014, Corker complained
bitterly that, while the U.S. military was poised to
launch a “very targeted, very brief” operation against
the Syrian government for using chemical weapons, Obama
called off the attack at the last minute.
Corker’s
criticism was scathing:
“I think the worst
moment in U.S. foreign policy since I’ve been here,
as far as signaling to the world where we were as a
nation, was August a year ago when we had a 10-hour
operation that was getting ready to take place in
Syria but it didn’t happen. … In essence and – I’m
sorry to be slightly rhetorical — we jumped in
Putin’s lap.”
Sound familiar?
The events of autumn 2013
are a case study in itself. Putin garnered a great deal
from the unique experience of dealing personally with an
Obama-in-need. Putin then found, as a result of his
subsequent dealings with Obama and Trump, that he had to
re-arrange his thinking about how much power a U.S.
president actually has when it comes to confronting the
entrenched Security State — even if a president’s desire
to improve relations is authentic.
Social Media as
‘Proof’
The Russian president
understood, as the years went by, that ordinarily Obama
would defer to the “Washington playbook” and the
MICIMATT. And so would, most times, Trump.
But the neocons got even
with Putin for his key role in cheating them out of
doing shock and awe on Syria. To an appreciable degree,
that accounted for the neocon boldness in carrying out
the coup in Kiev a half-year later, and in their
contrived exploitation of the terrible loss of 298 lives
on MH17, blaming the Russians sans any
convincing proof.
As with the 2013 sarin
attack near Damascus, so too in the case of MH17, Kerry
emphasized that “social media” are an “extraordinary
tool.” Right. But equally useful for deception as for
truth. The lame attempts of various imaginative (but not
imaginative enough) folks, many of whom seem to be
employed by Western intelligence services to use their
imaginations in applying “social media” to the MH17
affair, are transparent to any discerning observer.
While he kept blaming the
Russians, Kerry never produced the evidence he told
NBC’s David Gregory he had three days after the plane
went down. Here’s Kerry to Gregory on July 20, 2014:
“We picked up the
imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We
know where it came from. We know the timing. And it
was exactly at the time that this aircraft
disappeared from the radar.”
Remember: In the wake of
the shoot down of MH17, the U.S. successfully pressured
many other countries to impose economic sanctions on
Russia.
Agreements at the
Top Thwarted
On Syria, Putin witnessed
the lack of yedinonachaliya in the U.S.
political and military system. At the behest of Putin
and Obama, Kerry and Lavrov worked very hard for 11
months to arrange a ceasefire. One was signed Sept 9,
2016. On Sept. 17 U.S. aircraft bombed fixed Syrian
Army positions killing between 64 and 84 Syrian army
troops; about 100 others wounded — evidence enough to
convince the Russians that the Pentagon was intent on
scuttling meaningful cooperation with Russia.
Here’s Lavrov on Sept 26:
“My good friend John
Kerry … is under fierce criticism from the US
military machine. Despite the fact that, as always,
[they] made assurances that the U.S. Commander in
Chief, President Barack Obama, supported him in his
contacts with Russia (he confirmed that during his
meeting with President Vladimir Putin), apparently
the military does not really listen to the Commander
in Chief. … It is difficult to work with such
partners. …”
A month later Putin
publicly lamented: “My personal agreements with the
President of the United States have not produced
results.” Putin complained about “people in Washington
ready to do everything possible to prevent these
agreements from being implemented in practice” and,
referring to Syria, decried the lack of a “common front
against terrorism after such lengthy negotiations,
enormous effort, and difficult compromises.”
In sum, Deputy Foreign
Minister Ryabkov’s remarks on Friday strongly suggest
that at this juncture the Russian leadership does not
put much store in commitments by Washington — including
those that may come from the president. For the next
few months, at least, Moscow will be in a passive, wait
and see posture. With so much mutual work to do —
particularly on arms control — this is a pity.
Ray McGovern works with
Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his
27-year at the CIA, he was Chief of the Soviet Foreign
Policy Branch and a presidential briefer. In retirement
he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS). - "Source"
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