Forget 'evil' Putin - we are the bloodthirsty warmongers

[KoKo]

132. Russia, Cuba and the truth about Putin the U.S. media doesn’t want you to know

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Wednesday, Dec 24, 2014 04:45 PM EST

Russia, Cuba and the truth about Putin the U.S. media doesn’t want you to know

We are making mayhem in Russia, and reality is almost the opposite of what is being described in the press

Patrick L. Smith

I cannot be the only one to note the remarkable sequence of events in the Obama White House last week. It tells us all we need to know—for now, anyway—about what Washington is up to as it puts Russia in an illegal police chokehold. This will end neither soon nor well.

On Wednesday the president announced his out-of-nowhere move to lift sanctions against Cuba and reestablish diplomatic ties. I cannot be the only one to do this, either: I wept. Half a century of suffering pointlessly inflicted on a humane and very brave people will now come to an end.

On Thursday Obama signed HR 5859, the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, into law. One is always suspicious of bills with Boy Scouty names like this, and one is always justified: Obama just gave himself permission to inflict pointless suffering on the humane and very brave Russian people more or less arbitrarily and indefinitely. And in all our names, the Pentagon will now arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. Funny, the $350 million committed as an opener just about matches what Truman gave the Greek monarchists in 1947, so commencing the Cold War.

Let us end the Cold War 90 miles off our coast and far too late. Let us prosecute it full bore against Russia and along its borders, far too irrationally and nostalgically. I find one key to Washington’s reasoning, if this is the word, on Russia in this contradiction, because it is apparent, not real.

“It is clear that decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our enduring objective of promoting the emergence of a democratic, prosperous and stable Cuba,” Obama said Wednesday. “We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse.”

With this statement a president who has consistently betrayed principle and common decency in deploying American power abroad went some way to redeeming himself in my household. Egypt, Syria, endless indulgence of Israel, the fight with China over the Pacific sphere of influence, those aggressively corporate trade deals Washington wants to impose across both oceans—and now the opening to Cuba: This guy has the lumpiest foreign policy record of any president I can recall, but he bested 10 predecessors when he reached his hand across the water to Havana.

So went our 44th president’s 24 hours in the sun.

The Ukraine bill, a straight-ahead cave to unreconstructed cold warriors on Capitol Hill, ranks among Obama’s most craven and cowardly foreign policy decisions. Sanctions are pointless on Wednesday, but let us provide for more of them on Thursday because the Russophobes, blunt instruments all, require them.

The Russian press wants to think Obama signed the Ukraine bill reluctantly. I want to think the Cuba move was an expression of who the man buried in America’s version of the deep state truly is. Maybe we are both right. But the Russian press and I have to get off the question of obscured intent. In the end this is a distraction.

Obama’s State Department and Treasury are not stocked with end-of-history neoliberals by coincidence or some kind of carryover from the Bush II years. They are staffed as they are because Obama subscribes as avidly as any of them to the neoliberal agenda.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/24/paging_keri_russell_russia_cuba_and_the_truth_about_putin_the_u_s_media_doesnt_want_you_to_know/