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Blowback From Moscow
Patrick J. Buchanan
Lew
Rockwell.com
Friday November 30, 2007
Our next president will likely face a Russia led
by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to stand up to a
West that Russians believe played them for fools when they sought
to be friends.
Americans who think Putin has never been anything but a KGB thug
will reject accusations of any U.S. role in causing the ruination
of relations between us.
Yet the hubris of Bill Clinton and George Bush I, and the Russophobia
of those they brought with them into power, has been a primary
cause of the ruptured relationship. And the folly of what they
did is evident today, as Putin's party, United Russia, rolls to
triumph on a torrent of abuse and invective against the West.
Entering the campaign's final week, Putin, addressing a rally
of 5,000, ripped the Other Russia coalition led by chess champion
Gary Kasparov as poodles of the United States, "who sponge
off foreign embassies ... and who count on the support of foreign
resources and governments, and not of their own people."
(Article continues below)
"Those who oppose us," roared Putin, "don't want
our plans to be completed. They have completely different tasks
and a completely different view of Russia. They need a weak, sick
state, a disoriented, divided society, so that behind its back
they can get up to their dirty deeds and profit at your and my
expense."
Putin is referring to the time of the "oligarchs" of
the Yeltsin era, who looted Russia when its state assets were
sold off at fire-sale prices.
Putin is also accusing his opponents of attempting to use the
Western-devised tactics of mass street protests to bring down
his government. "Now that they have learned some things from
Western specialists and tried them in the neighboring republics,
they are going to try them on our streets."
Putin is talking here about the "color-coded" revolutions
that the U.S. and NATO embassies, the National Endowment for Democracy,
and allied foundations and front groups engineered in Ukraine
and Georgia. Governments tilting toward Moscow were dumped over
and pro-Western regimes installed – to bid for membership
in NATO and the European Union.
Blowback is a term broadly used in espionage to describe the
unintended consequences of covert operations. The revolution that
brought the Ayatollah to power is said to be blowback for the
U.S.-engineered coup to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953 and install
the Shah.
The nationalism and anti-Americanism rife in Putin's Russia is
blowback for our contemptuous disregard of Russian sensibilities
and our arrogant intrusions into Russia's space. How did we lose
a Russia that Ronald Reagan and Bush I had virtually converted
into an ally?
We pushed NATO into Moscow's face, bringing six ex-Warsaw Pact
nations and three ex-Soviet republics – Lithuania, Latvia
and Estonia – into our Cold War alliance and plotted to
bring in Ukraine and Georgia.
We financed a pipeline from Baku through Georgia to the Black
Sea to cut Russia out of the Caspian oil trade. After getting
Moscow's permission to use old Soviet bases in Central Asia to
invade Afghanistan, we set about making the bases permanent. We
pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty over Moscow's
objection, then announced plans to plant ABM radars in the Czech
Republic and anti-missile missiles in Poland.
Putin has now responded in kind, and who can blame him?
As we tried to cut him out of the Azerbaijan oil with a Black
Sea pipeline, he is slashing subsidies on Ukraine's oil and colluding
with Germany on a Baltic Sea pipeline to cut Poland out of the
oil trade with Western Europe.
As we moved our alliance and bases into his front and back yard,
he has entered a quasi-alliance with China and four nations of
Central Asia to expel U.S. military power from the region.
As we abandoned the ABM Treaty, the Duma, in November, voted
418 to 0 to suspend participation in the Conventional Forces in
Europe Treaty, which restricts the size of the Russian army west
of the Urals.
If we recognize Kosovo as independent, at the expense of Serbia,
Putin is now threatening to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia,
the breakaway republics of Georgia and Transneistria, claimed
by Moldova.
Where we backed the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose
Revolution in Georgia, Russia backs its favorites in Kiev and
supports street protests in Tbilisi against the pro-American regime
of Mikhail Saakashvili, whom the United States now seems powerless
to help.
It was not NATO that liberated Eastern Europe. Moscow did –
by pulling out the Red Army after half a century. Why, then, did
we think moving NATO into Eastern Europe was a surer guarantee
of their continued independence than the goodwill of Russia?
Many among our foreign policy elite now talk of a Second Cold
War. John McCain wants Russia kicked out of the G-8.
But do we not have enough enemies already that we should add
the largest nation on earth?
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