The Ukraine conflict has been ‘westsplained’ enough. On Gravitas Plus, Palki Sharma tells you how Western arrogance & NATO’s expansionism are also to blame, how their actions precipitated the crisis in Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s profile in leadership
March 15, 2022
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, unpopular as he was in Ukraine before the war, made a critical decision once Russia began its attack.
He stood on a street in Kyiv, made a selfie-style cell phone video and said: I am here.
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“He knows that he might well die there, but he is not going to leave,” historian Margaret MacMillan says. “He’s talked not just to the Ukrainians, he’s talked to people around the world.”
Zelenskyy has masterfully harnessed the media. And galvanized the world.
“It’s just amazing the diversity of people who this person has resonated with,” Gina Scott Ligon, director of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha, says. “It’s not something we have seen in a very long time.”
Today, On Point: A profile in leadership.
Guests
Gina Scott Ligon, director of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha. (@ginaligon)
Max Hastings, military historian, journalist, author and columnist for the London times and Bloomberg. Author of Winston’s War and Soldiers: Great Stories of War and Peace and the forthcoming book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Abyss.
Also Featured
Oleksiy Honcharuk, former prime minister of Ukraine. (@O__Honcharuk)
Sen. Bill Bradley, former Democratic senator from New Jersey.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/03/15/volodymyr-zelenskyys-profile-in-leadership
Where Russia is Winning: The World War of Ideas
Kim Iversen breaks down what the ‘New World Order’ is. President Joe Biden speaks about status of the country’s fight against COVID-19 in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, Wednesday, March 30, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote address for the 2022 World Economic Forum virtual session in Beijing, Monday, Jan. 17, 2022.
Xi called Monday for greater world cooperation against COVID-19 and pledged to send an additional 1 billion doses of vaccine to other countries, while urging other powers to discard a “Cold-War mentality” at a time of rising geopolitical tensions — a veiled swipe at the United States. (Huang Jingwen/Xinhua via AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his speech at a concert marking the eighth anniversary of the referendum on the state status of Crimea and Sevastopol and its reunification with Russia, in Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 18, 2022. (Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik Pool Photo via AP)
Guest: Andrew Feinstein is Founding Director of Shadow World Investigations. He is the author of The Shadow World and After the Party and he was the writer for the 2016 documentary film also called The Shadow World.
EUROPE
Reporter describes an astounding amount of military hardware going in to help Ukraine
March 24, 2022 2:27 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
LISTEN· 41:29
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Cars drive past a mural of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Krakow, Poland. More than 3 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion of that country began in February — many have ended up in Poland.
Omar Marques/Getty Images
On a recent reporting trip to cover Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Time reporter Simon Shuster visited an air base on the Polish side of the Ukrainian-Polish border. Watching as U.S. planes brought in loads of weapons for Ukraine, Shuster felt like he was standing on the brink of something massive.
“What you see is basically a constant cycle of these enormous C-17 military cargo planes landing, unloading their cargo, taking off again, day and night,” he says. “Standing there, there is a bit of a feeling in the pit of your stomach that we are on the edge of a really era-defining war. We’re already in it.”
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/24/1088480292/ukraine-russia-war-simon-shuster
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an empire, everything looks like a crisis to justify a multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex as dictatress of the world. The crisis du jour for the American empire is Russia‘s aggression against Ukraine. The political establishment and the mainstream media assign responsibility to President Putin’s megalomaniac ambition to recreate the Soviet empire. The Committee welcomes Ray McGovern and John Mearsheimer as a breath of fresh air.
They shoulder the United States with a fair share of the blame: the never-ending expansion of NATO cheek by jowl to Russian borders provoked the invasion ( https://www.youtube.com/?v=K-alx… ); Russia fears nuclear weapons on its borders as more menacing than the Cuban Missile Crisis was to the United States. Ray and John will offer some thoughts regarding how to bury the hatchet and move forward. We all look forward to what we know will be a robust discussion.
John Mearsheimer returns for the third time as a salon speaker. We hosted John for his trenchant analysis of the abject failure our quest for global dominance and for his courageous book with Steve Walt on the liability of American support for Israel. John is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point (1970), has a PhD in political science from Cornell University (1981), and has written extensively about security issues and international politics. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020, he won the James Madison Award, given by the American Political Science Association to “an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.” His principal work on Ukraine is “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” appearing in September-October Foreign Affairs 2014. The video of his talk has been viewed more than 14 million times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiS….
Ray McGovern is a long-time Russian specialist. After serving as an Army combat intelligence officer in the early 60s, Ray joined the CIA’s analyst ranks. His first portfolio focused on the Sino-Soviet conflict, which was deftly exploited by Nixon/Kissinger (with more than just interpreter assistance from our own Chas Freeman). As chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, Ray’s analytical team supported the SALT negotiations and he was in Moscow for the signing of the ABM Treaty, cornerstone of strategic stability for the next three decades. Ray correctly predicted Brezhnev’s invasion of Czechoslovakia but incorrectly predicted Putin would not invade Ukraine. Ray thinks the new Russia-China entente helps explain Putin’s gamble.
See Ray’s website http://raymcgovern.com/ and posts on http://antiwar.com/
TECHNOLOGY
The role cyberattacks and information campaigns have played in the war in Ukraine
March 30, 2022 4:43 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
JENNA MCLAUGHLIN Twitter LISTEN· 3:48
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In the weeks leading to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, experts said cyber war could be imminent. It turns out, cyber attacks and information campaigns have played a subtle, nuanced role in the conflict.
Volunteer hackers form ‘IT Army’ to help Ukraine fight Russians
March 27, 2022
NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben speaks with Dina Temple-Raston, host of the Click Here podcast, about an international effort involving hackers to fight Russia’s invasion of Ukraine online.
https://www.wbur.org/npr/1089072560/volunteer-hackers-form-it-army-to-help-ukraine-fight-russia
- Ukraine is inventing a new way to fight on the digital battlefield Time magazine’s Vera Bergengruen says Ukraine’s citizen IT force, led by a 31-year-old minister of digital transformation, is blunting Russian disinformation and galvanizing international support. Mar 31, 2022 Listen 38 min https://www.wnyc.org/shows/freshair
US-NATO PROXY WAR MARKS THE END OF A FREE AND BALANCED WESTERN PRESS
Dan Abrams is against cancel culture, but favors banning RT because it is spreading disinformation. But “Pushback” host Aaron Mate thinks it’s shortsighted.
Piers Morgan goes head to head with Russia Today presenter Afshin Rattansi over reporting around the Russian poisoning allegations.
CIA documents acknowledge its role in Iran’s 1953 coup
Published20 August 2013Share
https://emp.bbc.com/emp/SMPj/2.44.14/iframe.htmlMedia caption,
BBC Persian’s Khashayar Joneidi looks at events surrounding the 1953 coup
The CIA has released documents which for the first time formally acknowledge its key role in the 1953 coup which ousted Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq.
The documents were published on the independent National Security Archive on the 60th anniversary of the coup.
They come from the CIA’s internal history of Iran from the mid-1970s.
“The military coup… was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy,” says one excerpt.
The US role in the coup was openly referred to by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000, and by President Barack Obama in a 2009 speech in Cairo.
But until now the intelligence agencies have issued “blanket denials” of their role, says the editor of the trove of documents, Malcolm Byrne.
This is believed to be the first time the CIA has itself admitted the part it played in concert with the British intelligence agency, MI6.
Mr Byrne says the documents are important not only for providing “new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency’s actions before and after the operation”, but because “political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup”.
The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institution based at George Washington University.
Iranians elected Mossadeq in 1951 and he quickly moved to renationalise the country’s oil production, which had been under British control through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – which later became British Petroleum or BP.
That was a source of serious concern to the US and the UK, which saw Iranian oil as key to its post-war economic rebuilding.
The Cold War was also a factor in the calculations.
“[I]t was estimated that Iran was in real danger of falling behind the Iron Curtain; if that happened it would mean a victory for the Soviets in the Cold War and a major setback for the West in the Middle East,” says coup planner Donald Wilber in one document written within months of the overthrow.
“No remedial action other than the covert action plan set forth below could be found to improve the existing state of affairs.”
The documents show how the CIA prepared for the coup by placing anti-Mossadeq stories in both the Iranian and US media.
The coup strengthened the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – who had just fled Iran following a power struggle with Mossadeq and returned following the coup, becoming a close ally of the US.
The US and UK intelligence agencies bolstered pro-Shah forces and helped organise anti-Mossadeq protests.
“The Army very soon joined the pro-Shah movement and by noon that day it was clear that Tehran, as well as certain provincial areas, were controlled by pro-Shah street groups and Army units,” Wilber wrote.
“By the end of 19 August… members of the Mossadeq government were either in hiding or were incarcerated.”
The Shah returned to Iran after the coup and only left power in 1979, when he was overthrown in the Islamic revolution.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23762970
Note: This piece should have made it clear Slava Levin, quoted at 1:33 raising concerns about the CRTC’s process, does not support RT and favors its removal. Canada’s telecommunications regulator, the CRTC, has removed the state-controlled Russian television network RT from Canadian airwaves. The channel has long been described by critics as a propaganda outlet for the Kremlin.
0PPOSING THE WAR DOES NOT MEAN SIDING WITH THE ENEMY–IT MEANS CONCERN WITH US PROXY WAR
Norman Solomon in War Made Easy: How Presidents And Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death (2007) documents how the US is easily sleepwalked into unwinnable wars. Using the Vietnam as background, Norman Solomon posits that during the mid-1960s, as President Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, he grew accustomed to defaming Americans who voiced opposition. They were prone to be shaky and irresolute, he explained—and might even betray the nation’s servicemen. “There will be some Nervous Nellies,” he predicted on May 17, 1966, “and some who will become frustrated and bothered and break ranks under the strain. And some will turn on their leaders and on their country and on our fighting men.” [Since we have no fighting men that we know of in Ukraine, this does not apply.]
Blaming dissent at home for problems on the battlefield became a standard tactic for easing PR problems while the Vietnam War went from bad to worse. At the time, I.F. Stone called it “the oldest alibi of frustrated generals”—they could have won the war if it hadn’t been for those unpatriotic civilians back home. In April 1967, a month when several hundred thousand Americans participated in antiwar protest, General William Westmoreland spoke to an Associate Press luncheon and asserted that–despite “repeated military defeats”–the Vietnamese communist enemy was able to continue the anti-US struggle “encouraged by what he believes to be poplar opposition to our efforts in Vietnam.
Delivering a speech in mid-March 1968, President Johnson contended that as long as the foe in Vietnam “feels that he can win something by propaganda in the country–that he can undermine the leadership–that he can bring down the government that he can get something in the Capital that he can’t get from our men out there he is going to keep on trying.” Johnson went on: “But I point out to you that the time has come when we ought to unite, when we ought to stand up and be counted.”
LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon, was quick to brandish similar innuendos. “Let us be united for peace.” Nixon said early in his presidency. “Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”
Even Martin Luther King Jr. found that former allies could become incensed when he went out of his way to challenge the war. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, he said, the US was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.”
King asked why the United States was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them. That kind of talk draw barbs and denunciations from media quarters that had applauded his efforts to end racial segregation. Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post warned that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
Strong critics of US foreign policy are likely to encounter charges of “anti-Americanism.” Such epithets often raise the specter of irrational hostility toward the United States. A more subtle implication might be that zeal to wage aggressive war is an inherently American trait. (At times it also seems that male support for war is assumed to be properly masculine.) Yet accepting militarism runs directly counter to the views of vast numbers of American citizens. Even at the height of domestic support for the war on Iraq in early spring 2003, pollsters discovered that fully a quarter of the population was opposed. [Propaganda covers this up in the US’s zeal for regime change in Russia.]
Ever since the loss of the war in Vietnam, a myth has blamed antiwar activism in the United States. In many cases, fear of being called “anti-American” seems to cripple the ability or willingness of US journalists to confront officials who are determined to wage war. Likewise, politicians are quite aware that if they step too far out of line, they’re liable to be accused of lacking patriotism and giving comfort to the enemy.
According to Russia historian Stephen F. Cohen, Russian political leaders see NATO expansion as an ongoing threat. This Carnegie Council event took place on May 19, 2010.
For complete video, audio, and transcript, go to: http://www.cceia.org
Why Does America Love The Russia-Ukraine War? Arnab Goswami Cuts To The Chase
SHARING THE BLAME FOR THE PROXY WAR WITH THE US-NATO PAC
Why Cold War Again?
Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus, Russian Studies and Politics, New York University and Princeton University; Contributing Editor, The Nation In conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club The consensus view in Washington and in the U.S. mainstream media is that the Ukrainian crisis, which some have called the worst international crisis of our time, is due solely to Russian aggression under President Vladimir Putin.
Stephen F. Cohen’s view, on the other hand, is that U.S. policy since the 1990s is largely responsible, and that unless this is acknowledged at least in part by Washington, no successful negotiated end to the crisis will be possible.
Professor Cohen’s Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War and his The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin are now in paperback. Come hear the provocative views of this influential and noted Russian scholar.
Stephen F. Cohen: The Ukrainian Crisis – It’s not All Putin’s Fault (Recorded in 2015)
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