Author: John Glaser

The short documentary news pieces from Vice News on the situation in Crimea have been very enlightening, as reporter Simon Ostrovsky is on the ground and speaking to real people, instead of the uninformed punditry we hear on both U.S. and Russian propaganda outlets. They are very interesting. Here are the latest two.

Vice President Joe Biden, who has been traversing Europe in the aftermath of the pro-Russian referendum in Crimea, announced on Tuesday that the U.S. “may consider rotating units of its ground and naval forces through the [Baltic] region for training exercises.”

This is meant as a show of force ostensibly to demonstrate America’s military commitment to Europe in the face of Russian assertiveness and military incursions in Ukraine. I also heard Fox News panelists this morning demand the Obama administration send warships to the Black Sea to show Putin who is boss.

Let’s make one thing clear: these useless military exercises and demonstrations of force do absolutely nothing to alter the reality or Russia’s strategic calculations. They are essentially for domestic consumption, to satisfy political hardliners who are attacking the president for being too weak.

They also hold the odious pretense that America owns the world and that Russian gains in its traditional sphere of influence represent a defiance of Uncle Sam, ruler of planet Earth.

Three years ago, the UN approved NATO action in Libya to impose a no-fly zone and head off an allegedly imminent bloodbath perpetrated by the Gadhafi regime. Days before this third anniversary, the Libyan parliament basically impeached the Prime Minister following the government’s inability to do anything about armed groups in the east taking control of oil resources. There is veritable power vacuum in the country that continues to generate instability there and throughout the region.

Notably, the US-led NATO action in Libya immediately violated the parameters of the UN Resolution, when the pretense of imposing a no-fly zone quickly manifested into a regime change operation. Clever legal advisers in the Obama administration then made the ridiculous claim that U.S. military action did not count as “hostilities” and thus did not need Congressional approval, as required by the the Constitution and the War Powers Act. The intervention was legally dubious from the beginning.

But how about the practical effects of the intervention? Was it successful? The Republican Party’s manic obsession with the Obama administration’s fumbling in the days following the raid on the State Department’s Benghazi compound has obscured any real debate about the wisdom of the overall intervention. But taking a look at the facts on the ground, it seems eminently clear the consequences of the intervention have gone from bad to worse.

Continue reading “The Libya Intervention Was an Illegal Failure. Thus: Hooray for Intervention!”

Bill Kristol is not shy about his fetish for war. His latest piece at the neoconservative Weekly Standard borders on self-parody in the way that it openly longs for a return to a time when Americans were eager to send the U.S. military off on unnecessary, imperialistic adventures.

Kristol is frustrated by the “war-weariness” of the nation. He laments the reluctance on the part of the Republican Party to “challenge” “the idol of war-weariness.”

“A war-weary public can be awakened and rallied,” Kristol cheers. “Indeed, events are right now doing the awakening. All that’s needed is the rallying. And the turnaround can be fast.”

People like Kristol are so blinded by ideology that they breach the etiquette which calls on elite commentators to camouflage their enthusiasm for war with superficial appeals to peace. He loves death and destruction and wars of choice and he doesn’t care who knows it! He is way out of the closet. That he can explicitly call for Americans to be “awakened and rallied” for new wars and not be embarrassed by the Hitler-esque tone of such despicable cravings is an indication of how lacking in self-awareness he is. His foreign policy beliefs are the kind that are not susceptible to reasoning or disconfirming evidence. His worship for the warfare state is religious in its persuasion.

Kristol condemns using war-weariness “as an excuse to avoid maintaining our defenses or shouldering our responsibilities.” In other words, the fact that Kristol’s preferred policies were implemented throughout the Bush administration and it led to war crimes, hundreds of thousands killed, trillions of dollars wasted, region-wide instability in the Middle East, and clear geo-political losses for the United States shouldn’t deter us from continuing to spend more than the rest of the world combined on our military or from “shouldering our responsibilities” of ruling the world through force and war.

To Kristol, war-weariness is a kind of ailment that Americans need to be cured of. He calls for war-weary Americans to be rallied to some unspecified military crusade just around the corner. Iran, Russia, China…anything will do, I suppose.

I’m reminded of what Noam Chomsky wrote in his book Media Control about this ailment, or “malady” of being averse to extreme violence and war.

“The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as ‘the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,'” Chomsky writes. “There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn’t understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them.”

“It’s very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there’s a limit on foreign adventures,” he explains. “It’s necessary, as the Washington Post put it rather proudly during the [first] Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people a respect for ‘martial value.’ That’s important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial values and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence.”

That’s the real threat of our resistance to extreme violence. Anything that puts a limit on foreign adventures is like kryptonite to Kristol and his ilk.

More than 90 percent of Crimean voters have voted to join Russia. Putin and the rest of Moscow are praising the power of democracy, however disingenuously, and Obama and all of Washington are condemning the referendum as an illegal act.

As has been true throughout this whole crisis, the U.S. position is fundamentally hypocritical. When Washington condemns the the referendum as a violation of sovereignty and territorial integrity, Russians sort of giggle and point to Kosovo, for which NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 and which voted for full secession and independence in 2008 with full U.S. support.

The most popular reason Americans have for opposing the referendum is the fact that it was held under Russian military occupation and, therefore, how legitimate can it really be? This is a position I agree with: democratic votes should not be influenced by military occupation.

But did these same Americans condemn the democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq as being illegitimate because of the nefarious influence of an overbearing U.S. military occupation? Where was this criticism when Kosovo voted for independence while thousands of U.S. and NATO troops continued to base there? Have they been condemning the fact that Washington pressures democratically elected representatives in Japan to swear off any plans to move the tens of thousands of U.S. troops occupying Okinawa, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Okinawans call for an immediate end to that occupation?

There is a question about just how much the referendum in Crimea would have differed without Russian troops and it very well may be the case that it would not have differed much, given the large ethnic Russian majority there. The U.S. will continue, nevertheless, to condemn the vote and retaliate on the margins by digging in its diplomatic heels in Kiev and by sanctioning Russian officials (with no utility).

The reason is not one of principle, as the Obama administration claims, but of spite. Russia seems to have won this geo-political spat, and Washington isn’t going to take it laying down.

But perhaps they should. “Although Westerners (and the Ukrainian government) profess the importance of defending Ukrainian territorial integrity,” writes Taras Kuzio in Foreign Affairs, “most Ukrainians wouldn’t seem to mind letting Crimea go.”

“[M]ost Ukrainians,” Kuzio explains, “have always been ambivalent about Crimea.”

The region was transferred from Russian to Ukrainian control in 1954, and Russians still feel a much stronger sense of attachment to the region, and specifically to the port city of Sevastopol, than do Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians even believe that Crimea has a right to secede, although they may have wished that Crimea had done so in more orderly fashion. “If there is a clear majority of the people on a certain territory that do not want to accommodate themselves with the state they live in,” Ukrainian writer Mykola Riabchuk said before the Russian incursion, “they should have a right to secede, which would require some negotiations, international mediation, referendums, and post-separation settlements for national minority rights.”

The interim Ukrainian government is too weak to do anything about the referendum, even if Crimea meant enough to them to start such a dispute. The U.S. has little to no leverage and is only continuing down the road of hostility and confrontation with Russia out of spite. And whatever validity rests in the U.S. condemnation of legal violations and Russian occupation is undermined by the fact that it is entirely insincere, given America’s routine practice of precisely the policies for which they now condemn Russia.