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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (772711)	3/3/2014 5:12:39 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572202

We didn't destabilize the Ukraine. The Ukrainians did. rofl! and Saddam really did have WMD's….

To: combjelly who wrote (772711)	3/3/2014 5:22:53 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572202

Kerry: “You just don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th Century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said." This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. This from a country that routinely attacks any country or people we want to kill if it's going to benefit some corporation. How would you expect the US to react if the Russians treated us this way? ++++++ OpEdNews Op Eds 2/27/2014 at 21:08:11A Shadow US Foreign PolicyBy Robert Parry (about the author) The National Endowment for Democracy, a central part of Ronald Reagan's propaganda war against the Soviet Union three decades ago, has evolved into a $100 million U.S. government-financed slush fund that generally supports a neocon agenda often at cross-purposes with the Obama administration's foreign policy. NED is one reason why there is so much confusion about the administration's policies toward attempted ousters of democratically elected leaders in Ukraine and Venezuela. Some of the non-government organizations (or NGOs) supporting these rebellions trace back to NED and its U.S. government money, even as Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials insist the U.S. is not behind these insurrections. So, while President Barack Obama has sought to nurture a constructive relationship with Russia's President Vladimir Putin especially in hotspots like Iran and Syria, NED has invested in projects in Russia's close neighbor, Ukraine, that fueled violent protests ousting President Viktor Yanukovych, who won election in 2010 in balloting that was viewed by international observers as fair and reflecting the choice of most Ukrainian citizens. Thus, a U.S.-sponsored organization that claims to promote "democracy" has sided with forces that violently overthrew a democratically elected leader rather than wait for the next scheduled election in 2015 to vote him out of office. For NED and American neocons, Yanukovych's electoral legitimacy lasted only as long as he accepted European demands for new "trade agreements" and stern economic "reforms" required by the International Monetary Fund. When Yanukovych was negotiating those pacts, he won praise, but when he judged the price too high for Ukraine and opted for a more generous deal from Russia, he immediately became a target for "regime change." Last September, NED's longtime president, Carl Gershman, took to the op-ed page of the neocon-flagship Washington Post to urge the U.S. government to push European "free trade" agreements on Ukraine and other former Soviet states and thus counter Moscow's efforts to maintain close relations with those countries. The ultimate goal, according to Gershman, was isolating and possibly toppling Putin in Russia with Ukraine the key piece on this global chessboard. "Ukraine is the biggest prize," Gershman wrote... "The opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help. The United States needs to engage with the governments and with civil society in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to ensure that the reform process underway not only promotes greater trade and development but also produces governments that are less corrupt and more accountable to their societies. An association agreement with the European Union should be seen not as an end in itself but as a starting point that makes possible deeper reforms and more genuine democracy."Russian democracy also can benefit from this process. Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. ... Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." Shadow Structure In furtherance of these goals, NED funded a staggering 65 projects in Ukraine, according to its latest report. The funding for these NGOs range from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars and created for NED what amounted to a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn't act as desired. This NED shadow structure, when working in concert with domestic opposition forces, had the capability to challenge the decisions of Yanukovych's elected government, including the recent coup -- spearheaded by violent neo-Nazis -- that overthrew him. Presumably, NED wanted the "regime change" without the neo-Nazi element. But that armed force was necessary for the coup to oust Yanukovych and open the path for those IMF-demanded economic "reforms." Beyond the scores of direct NED projects in Ukraine, other major NED recipients, such as Freedom House, have thrown their own considerable weight behind the Ukraine rebellion. A recent Freedom House fundraising appeal read: "More support, including yours, is urgently needed to ensure that Ukrainian citizens struggling for their freedom are protected and supported." Freedom House meant the "citizens struggling" against their elected government. So, over this past week, a policy dispute about whether Ukraine should accept the European Union's trade demands or go with a more generous $15 billion loan from Moscow escalated into violent street clashes and finally a putsch spearheaded by neo-Nazi storm troopers who took control of government buildings in Kiev. With Yanukovych and his top aides forced to flee for their lives, the opposition-controlled parliament then passed a series of draconian laws often unanimously, while U.S. neocons cheered and virtually no one in the U.S. press corps noted the undemocratic nature of what had just happened. [See Consortiumnews.com's " Cheering a 'Democratic' Coup in Ukraine."] An Incipient Civil War On Wednesday, Yanukovych insisted that he was still the rightful president and his supporters seized government buildings in the eastern, ethnically Russian part of the country, setting the stage for what has the look of an incipient civil war….cont. opednews.com

To: combjelly who wrote (772711)	3/3/2014 5:51:27 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Respond to of 1572202

Another way to look at this is: "White man speak with forked tongue." counterpunch.org MARCH 03, 2014 Russia, Crimea and the Consequences of NATO Policy Ukrainian Hangovers by JEFFREY SOMMERS and MICHAEL HUDSON Russia’s incursion (invasion if you prefer) into Crimea, with prospects for movement into Eastern Ukraine, is the culmination of US/NATO policy since 1991. The unraveling of the USSR and its Soviet bloc (the Warsaw Pact) dismantled the largest empire in modern history. Even more striking, it was the most peaceful dissolution of a major empire in history. The fact that an empire stretching over a dozen time zones that included hundreds of ethnic groups with concrete historical and contemporary grievances with each other broke up without a bloodbath is nothing short of a miraculous – and a reflection of the destruction of spirit and even of economic understanding that marked the distortions of Stalinism, neither capitalist nor socialist but a bureaucratic collectivism whose final stage proved to be kleptocracy. Part of the reason that this went off with such little violence was due to the mutual desire of President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War’s threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Gorbachev for his part recognized that the Warsaw Pact nations needed to be let go, in order to free resources to build up a more middle class consumer economy. Demilitarization was to be achieved by disarmament, all the more remarkable in view of the largest human losses suffered in world history from military invasion had occurred just two generations earlier. Germany became the focus, pending its reunification in1990. It had invaded its neighbors every generation or so since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In World War II it laid waste to the USSR and left 25 million of its people dead. Other East European nations, including Romania (and, along with victims of Stalinist oppression, e.g., the Baltics and Ukrainians, welcomed the Nazis and fought against Russia). The NATO alliance thus remained the main threat that had held the Soviet Union together So Russia had vital security concerns that could only be met by assurances that NATO would not move into the Warsaw Pact states, where so much Soviet blood had been shed in World War II. President George H. W. Bush (#41) made assurances that if the Soviets were to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, Russia must be assured that the NATO would not fill the vacuum. But his successor, Bill Clinton, broke this promise by quickly taking the former Warsaw Pact states into NATO, and then moved into territory formerly occupied and incorporated into the USSR with the Baltics. It should have been foreseen – and probably was inevitable – that these new entrants wanted NATO, given their own experience with Soviet occupation. But the eagerness of a triumphalist United States to surround Russia militarily rather than disarm led Russian leaders to feel betrayed by the US breaking its word. Russia today has watched covert attempts from the US State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs to break up their country as part of what is becoming a triumphalist global pattern. This threatens to remake their “near abroad” into a neoliberal periphery. Today’s confrontation has taken on an existential character for Russia since it saw NATO’s moves toward Georgia as cutting too close to the bone. The prospects of NATO assimilating Ukraine (Kiev) represents a seizure of Russia’s “heart”: the very ancestral home where Russia was founded and on which it repelled the fascist invasion in the Great Patriotic War–as it had a millennium earlier against the German Crusading Knights pledged to exterminate the Russian-Greek Orthodox population. Most Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the deal he made with NATO. Russian diplomats have stated clearly that Ukraine is a line that cannot be crossed regarding potential NATO expansion. It is as if foreign agents worked in Texas to mobilize a violent ethnic minority to rejoin Mexico and then place a hostile military alliance on the US border. The Crimea has been part of Russia for three hundred years. It is populated overwhelmingly by Russian speakers, who watch with alarm the rightwing nationalist violence in Kiev, all the more as many of its leaders are establishing symbolic and outright ideological ties with the old German Nazis. Viktor Yanunkovych was as much a crook as Ukraine’s previous kleptocratic leaders who wielded political power to rob the state and its public domain, neoliberal style. The Crimean population has reason to fear that their elected President was illegally deposed not for his kleptocracy, but as part of a regional and ethnic identity politics of the sort that the Americans are sponsoring throughout the world, from the Shite/Sunni split to similar splits in countries they seek to control. The only protection available is from Russia. That is the gift that Obama has given Putin, making him a defender of Ukraine rather than the aggressor. Khrushchev’s drinking bout in 1954 when he turned Crimea over to Ukraine has caused a massive hangover. The West’s response to cure it with neoliberalism and NATO is not helping.