How America's far-left gets Ukraine wrong

Here's a letter I wrote on February 26 to freelancer Eric Draitser in response to his inflammatory article "Ukraine's Sickness" in the far-left publication CounterPunch, to which, I may say, I was recently a subscriber, (so far with no reply from Eric):


Dear Eric,

I'm a proud liberal myself, and I often criticize U.S. actions abroad, but the American imperialist template in your article (http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/24/ukraines-sickness/) does not apply in Ukraine. Most Ukrainians have been begging the U.S. to get more involved these past 3 months.

The word "fascist" is a very strong, loaded term.  Before you apply it to the people who fought and died for their freedom and the rule of law in Ukraine, you should go and talk to these people. They are the most liberal, progressive and tolerant people in Ukraine: artists, teachers, students, human rights activists, journalists, etc.  Many ethnic Jews are taking part on Maidan, not at all worried that they are supporting "fascism!"  Same with the ethnic Crimean Tatars who were deported and killed by the Soviet regime: they are supporting Maidan and not all afraid that it will lead to "fascism!"  

The protesters on Maidan stood freezing in the winter ice for two months peacefully until Yanukovych cleared them by force, ignoring their calls for talks. Only when they answered violence with violence did Yanu listen, being the thug and bully that he is.  My guess is that you supported the #Occupy protests; well, this was Occupy to the 10th power. They organized their own councils, food preparation, sanitation, schools, hospital, you name it.  And fueled by hundreds of volunteers and donations from thousands of Ukrainians. They were trying to show another model of self-organization and self-governance in Ukraine, against the corrupt status quo. These are people you would feel an immediate connection with.

Have you been to Ukraine lately? Have you ever been? You should talk to these people before you call them fascists, or in some ways worse, accuse them of being puppets of fascists.  The protesters on Maidan are not all greeting Tymoschenko with roses; they understand she's a leader from the corrupt past. The same goes for Yatseniuk, Klitshcko and Tagniabok.  After the murder and corruption by Yanukovych, the main concern of Maidan has been the lack of leaders to represent them faithfully -- the same problem of the #Occupy movement.

Yes, Ukraine is an economic basket case, but it has nothing to do with the IMF, but rather stupendous levels of Ukraine's government corruption. An MP of the former ruling Party of Regions admitted as much last week: if we stop stealing, we'll have enough money for everything, he said. (See: http://tyzhden.ua/News/102978 ).  

Yes, Russia was ready to give $15 billion (in tranches) to Ukraine... but do you seriously believe without any strings attached?  The IMF at least has criteria that are transparent.  Even so, Ukraine has flouted the IMF conditions in the past and yet here is the West, talking about even more aid.  Is this not the very definition of tolerance and understanding?  Yes, pain awaits Ukraine in any case because money doesn't grow on trees, and it has stolen and mismanaged its state budget for years upon years.

As for your remark about Russia "protecting" its citizens in Ukraine.... this is a throw-away Kremlin propaganda line. Protecting them from whom?  From what?  From their own country?  Just because some Ukrainians call themselves ethnically Russian does not give Russia the right to meddle in the affairs of Ukrainian citizens.  Russia leases territory in Sevastopol (contrary to Ukraine's constitution, but whatever); it does not have an "enclave" or right to territory there. It's a renter; Ukraine is the landlord. It cannot fly its flag over state buildings, suddenly hand out Russian passports willy-nilly, or patrol around in its military vehicles; this is prelude to open military conflict because it flouts Ukraine's sovereignty.  

As for your cautionary tales of EU accession.... Points taken. But there are also EU accession success stories. Which will Ukraine be?  You cannot predict it based on events in Slovenia and Latvia. Why not take the Polish example, why is that not valid?  Also, remember that on the table is an Association Agreement, not accession. This far-reaching agreement, the most detailed ever negotiated -- over several years with the Yanukovych government! -- between a country and the EU, covers everything from the courts, to human rights, to energy efficiency.  Have you read what it says?  It basically asks Ukraine to become what all Ukrainian citizens ask for: a non-corrupt country that protects its citizens, its environment, provides health care, etc., etc.  I encourage you to read this: http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/ukraine/documents/myths_aa_en.pdf .

Again, I encourage you to travel to Ukraine and meet these people whom you label neo-fascists.  I think you will be surprised, and come to see that they are the future of Ukraine; not those who are hoping for a continuation of the past 20 years in the delusion that, with a little more Russian influence and dirty money, it will yield better results. 

Sincerely,

J

P.S. -- I do not know you or anything about you; I've tried to respond to what you've written only. I do not engage in ad hominem attacks. 

Rush: 'Obama overthrew Mubarak'!?

"Obama is the guy who gave us this in Egypt by supporting it long before he knew what it was," said Rush Limbaugh yesterday.

Rush then elaborated on his neo-imperialistic view of the Mideast:

In fact, there were a lot of us having problems because some of the conservative media people, people on our side, were falling for this, too. They thought this was the outgrowth of some great Democracy Project.  [Read: The result of Dubya's invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq. - J] That the Arab Spring was spreading the democracy of Iraq further. The tentacles were spreading out throughout the Middle East, and it was starting to show up in Egypt, and from there it would sweep to Syria, and the problem with Israel would minimize, and a bunch of us at the time were warning, it's the exact opposite.  This is an uprising by Al-Qaeda types, by militant Islamists, by Islamist supremacists whose objective in all of this is to take over the Middle East and get rid of Israel.  That's what was happening. 

Allow me to translate: America's "spreading democracy" in the Mideast through the barrel of a gun was fine; but the most populous Arab country in the world removing its corrupt and brutal regime on its own without a bloody war was terrible, because we didn't make it happen, we didn't control it.  (Like we have controlled events in Iraq and Afghanistan: masterfully, with no unintended consequences.)  Oh, and because it made Israel uncomfortable.

Let's be clear: Romney, Rush and the Right are criticizing Obama for not condemning Egypt's peaceful, popular uprising to end 30 years of tyranny. Furthermore, they believe that because Obama did not use U.S. forces to stop it, Obama is responsible for their revolution and its aftermath.  

(This simplistic and wrong "It's Obama's fault" line is also incredibly insulting to the hundreds of thousands of brave Egyptians who protested peacefully and faced down the army to secure their freedom from president-for-life Hosni Mubarak.)

America's Founding Fathers -- who, by throwing off their colonial yoke, started a process of democratization that has spread for more than 200 years -- must be turning somersaults in their graves at such right-wing criticism.

Whenever Rush, et al start on such a neo-conservative, neo-imperialist bent, all it takes is one question to reveal their bloody fangs: What would you have us do then?  We already know the answer: Obama is still mopping up the blood & guts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  That's all they know, that's all they've got in their bag of tricks. That, and their impotent tantrums and condemnations that change nothing.  

(I could write a lot about the naivety and ignorance of Americans who think or say, "They have democracy now, so why can't they just be like us?" That is, some of us expect these brutalized and divided societies to become immediately like us, with our 230 years of bloody conflict, strife and institution-building.  But I'll leave that for another time....)

What pathetic sheep! They all turned out because Obama told them to. Revolution -- pfft!

Caller Nails It! Obama Shot Before He Aimed When He Overthrew Mubarak

September 13, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL:  http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/09/13/caller_nails_it_obama_shot_before_he_aimed_when_he_overthrew_mubarak

Tom Engelhardt: It happens there, not here (Why they hate us)

It Couldn't Happen Here, It Does Happen There 

The Value of American -- and Afghan -- Lives 

By Tom Engelhardt

June 17, 2012 | TomDispatch

It was almost closing time when the siege began at a small Wells Fargo Bank branch in a suburb of San Diego, and it was a nightmare.  The three gunmen entered with the intent to rob, but as they herded the 18 customers and bank employees toward a back room, they were spotted by a pedestrian outside who promptly called 911.  Within minutes, police cars were pulling up, the bank was surrounded, and back-up was being called in from neighboring communities.  The gunmen promptly barricaded themselves inside with their hostages, including women and small children, and refused to let anyone leave.

The police called on the gunmen to surrender, but before negotiations could even begin, shots were fired from within the bank, wounding a police officer.  The events that followed -- now known to everyone, thanks to 24/7 news coverage -- shocked the nation.  Declaring the bank robbers "terrorist suspects," the police requested air support from the Pentagon and, soon after, an F-15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base dropped two GBU-38 bombs on the bank, leaving the building a pile of rubble.

All three gunmen died.  Initially, a Pentagon spokesman, who took over messaging from the local police, insisted that "the incident" had ended "successfully" and that all the dead were "suspected terrorists."  The Pentagon press office issued a statement on other casualties, noting only that, "while conducting a follow-on assessment, the security force discovered two women who had sustained non-life-threatening injuries.  The security force provided medical assistance and transported both women to a local medical facility for treatment."  It added that it was sending an "assessment team" to the site to investigate reports that others had died as well.

Of course, as Americans quickly learned, the dead actually included five women, seven children, and a visiting lawyer from Los Angeles.  The aftermath was covered in staggering detail.  Relatives of the dead besieged city hall, bitterly complaining about the attack and the deaths of their loved ones.  At a news conference the next morning, while scenes of rescuers digging in the rubble were still being flashed across the country, President Obama said: "Such acts are simply unacceptable.  They cannot be tolerated." In response to a question, he added, "Nothing can justify any airstrike which causes harm to the lives and property of civilians." 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey immediately flew to San Diego to meet with family members of the dead and offer apologies.  Heads rolled in the local police department and in the Pentagon.  Congress called for hearings as well as a Justice Department investigation of possible criminality, and quickly passed a bill offering millions of dollars to the grieving relatives as "solace."  San Diego began raising money for a memorial to the group already dubbed the Wells Fargo 18.

One week later, at the exact moment of the bombing, church bells rang throughout the San Diego area and Congress observed a minute of silence in honor of the dead.

[...]

Mark Danner on America's 'Athenian problem'

Interesting interview by Bill Moyers with a veteran U.S. war correspondent who has written a new book about America's democratic empire. I'm copying some excerpts below....


Interview with Mark Danner, author of Stripping Bare the Body
By Bill Moyers
October 20, 2009

"I call this in the book the Athenian problem. Which is how do you have ... a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world. And the problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a political factor that looms obviously very large in his calculations."

[...]

"Because the Bush administration was really the nightmare that the world had always feared, which is an America unbounded by anything but its own power. Unbounded by international law, judicial processes, anything. And Obama has changed that impression of the United States, which is extremely important."

[...]

"We've been told that our interests are to prevent the regathering of Al Qaeda and Afghanistan as a jihadist base of operations, from which more attacks like 9/11 can be launched. But the fact is that these people have a very light footprint. The idea that you can simply keep them out of a place by occupying it with, in effect, a handful of troops, I think is quite mistaken. There are other places they can go. Somalia, Sudan, various other countries. So, I think, you know, what happens very frequently, our goals change during a war. The one goal which, George Kennan I quote saying in the book. The reason that we go in is often forgotten, and suddenly the goals become something like maintaining our dignity. Keeping up our international authority. Preventing a loss and the damage such a loss will do to our international profile. In other words, they all become I think what rhetoricians call heuristic. They're about the mission itself, not achieving anything else."

[...]

"But I think the more reporting I do, the more I see violence used in an instrumental way. And also, I should say, our own tendency, when we use violence, because the United States does use it extensively-- to ignore what we think of as the hygienic use of force.

"You know, the Iraq war, in the first couple of weeks-- the so-called combat stage, as the George W. Bush administration called it-- the best estimate made by the Associated Press of civilian casualties, civilian deaths, which is certainly an understatement, It's a hospital count so it's only people who were brought to hospital morgues, was 3400 people. Now this is in two weeks.

"This is more than the number in the United States who died in 9/11. And of course, Iraq is a tenth or an eleventh the size of the United States. So the equivalent, on the US side, would be 35,000 people died, civilians, in that war. They were never on camera. You never saw those bodies. You saw very few bodies. It was as if the American army simply marched up the road to Baghdad. And in fact-- you know, the military before the war, estimated collateral damage at 10,000, 15,000, something like that.

"And you know, when you make a decision like that and say 10,000 to 15,000, or 7000, or whatever the number was, will probably be killed as a result of this intervention, people who have no-- you know, are not military and so on-- that it strikes me as an extremely serious thing. It's not like trying to kill civilians in a terrorist attack, needless to say. It's not, because that's your intention. But it's not entirely different. I mean, you are setting out, and knowingly, on an operation that's going to kill large numbers of civilians. And we tend not to look at it, and then we tend to forget it."

[...]

"I think that the first point to be made is there is no "solution" in Afghanistan. Solution I put in quotes. We live in an op-ed culture, which is to say, you always need to have a solution. The last third of that op-ed piece needs to say, "Do this, this, this and this." There is no this, this, this, and this, that will make Afghanistan right.

"I think the first thing we need to do is be clear about our interests there, which I think are very, very limited. I think we need to be clear about the fact that our presence on the ground is going far toward undermining the very raison d'etre for our presence, which is to say, we do not want to encourage future terrorist attacks on this country. We don't want to allow large scale jihadist organizing, if we can prevent it. But our presence in Afghanistan is a major rallying cry for those groups precisely. I would gradually disengage from Afghanistan.

"But I think the war is going badly there. And frankly, it's going badly here. And I'm glad the Obama administration, I think the President himself, has, in the wake of the Afghan elections-- because that really was the turning point, the realization that the partner on the ground there was corrupt and illegitimate. And in the wake of those elections-- all of the early perceptions about the war that Obama had set out on are being reconsidered."