What do Iraq and Ukraine Have in Common ?

 

September 22, 2014

Two states from two very different regions of the world, steeped in different cultures and religions, are these days in the throes of civil war and face disintegration.

I am referring, of course, to Iraq in the Middle East and Ukraine in Eastern Europe.

If anyone had the curiosity to ask why two such different states find themselves in a similar predicament, the answer would not be difficult to find: because of the unwise promotion of democracy by American neoconservatives in these countries. The process is usually accompanied by a hidden geopolitical or geoeconomic agenda. One of the problems is that neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Victoria Nuland are not political scientists. Had that been the case, they would have known from the outset that, as Francis Fukuyama explains,

“Long before you have a liberal democracy, you have to have a functioning state (something that never disappeared in Germany or Japan after they were defeated in World War II). This is something that cannot be taken for granted in countries like Iraq.” Or Ukraine …

Neoconservatives were oblivious to the fact that this essential prerequisite was not in place when they started their ill-advised drive to promote democracy in Iraq in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2013. After all, getting to the Iraqi oil or tweaking the Russians’ nose in Ukraine were very important goals of the US’s involvement in the two countries.

Victoria Nuland, wife of The New American Century Project co-founder Robert Kagan , takes a dim view not only of Ukrainians, but of the whole EU, as we all know by now. In actual fact, she helped duplicate on our continent the same mega-error committed by neocons in Iraq, and the results now speak for themselves. This calls into question the latter’s ability to learn from past experiences and “experiments” (a basic quality of truly intelligent people).

Although thoroughly discredited following the disaster in Iraq, leading neoconservatives are curiously still able to steer American foreign policy in order to advance their group’s aims, plunging entire regions of the world into war as they go along.

Their political partners in Kiev have just inaugurated the construction of “the Great Wall of Ukraine” on the Russian border, which is intended to break the unity of the Eurasian continent at a reported cost of some 3 billion dollars. This mad project, unheard of in Europe since the times of the Roman Empire, makes a mockery of neoconservatives’ emphatic claims that the United States are not about imperialism and that NATO is a purely defensive military organization.

The fact remains that as long as the Obama or any other subsequent US administration gives members of this group access to key posts in government, the peace and security of whole geographical regions will again be put at serious risk.

Who's to Blame for the Crisis in Ukraine ?

 September 14, 2014

After almost a year of sustained anti-Russian propaganda in the Western press, Foreign Policy – published by the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – has decided to print an article by John J. Mearsheimer which reads like a veritable Western mea culpa for the crisis in Ukraine.

From the very start, the article denounces the anti-Russian narrative as flawed and makes it clear that the West has knowingly crossed a Russian “red line” in Ukraine. As the author puts it, the main culprit in the events that started to unfold in Ukraine in December 2013 is the West’s triple package of policies consisting of NATO enlargement, EU expansion and the promotion of democracy in Ukraine to the tune of some 5 billion dollars.

Anyone reading the article will agree that the current Ukrainian premier, Arseny Yahtsenyuk, behaves like nothing more than Victoria Nuland’s poodle in Kiev and that his anti-Russian jibes should therefore be discarded accordingly.

Blaming the Russians for the West’s wrongdoings is a time-honored tradition in Washington. Unfortunately, American decision-makers are not known for recognizing the error of their ways or for making amends. What boggles the mind in the Ukrainian crisis is the fact that the problems and the legitimate security interests of a huge country like Russia are being “handled” within the State Department by a low-ranking official like Nuland.

It remains to be seen whether Western officialdom is still capable of taking into account the assessments of its own specialized think tanks, such as the American CFR or the European Council on Foreign Relations, and of getting Europe out of the geostrategic mess it is currently in.