Russia: Other Points of View

Is MH-17 Downing -- a New Tonkin Gulf Case?

Friends,  

Robert Parry, top US investigative journalist who helped break the IranContra Scandal under Ronald Reagan and many other irregularities in top political reporting continues to demonstrate that the Malaysian Airlines was a "false flag" operation.  It makes perfect sense that neither Ukraine or Washington have been willing to give crucial evidence of 1) air control reports on that fateful day nor US satellite information over the area which was definitely tracking the area. On day one, an air control report surfaced and was immediately evaporated as was the controller who gave it.  Later Washington half admitted that it wasn't Russia that shot down the plane, yet still the sum total of accusations is that Russia was somehow involved in killing the 298 passengers.  All Western onlookers still blame Russia, and this is the hook on which the "damn Russia" policy has since hung––the literal event that turned Europe against Russia.

In the following report, Parry takes us into another such false flag which took America into the scourge of Vietnam where we lost 50,000 young men––and the Vietnamese lost over a million men,women and children.  A series of other false flags have existed which took America into incursions in addition to the disastrous supposed WMDs that took us into Iraq.  What must we do to hold short-term policy makers (and their media outlets) responsible for what we Americans end up causing and paying for????  If you have solutions, please send them to me. 

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/17/mh-17-mystery-a-new-tonkin-gulf-case/

Exclusive: In 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident was used to justify the Vietnam War although U.S. intelligence quickly knew the facts were not what the U.S. government claimed. Now, the MH-17 case is being exploited to justify a new Cold War as U.S. intelligence again is silent about what it knows, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf incident of World War III, the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. As with the dubious naval clash off the coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal – and used it to ratchet up tensions against Russia.

Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17, the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Putin’s face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia. 

Russian-made Buk anti-missile battery.

In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia, supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal “anti-terrorism operation” that has slaughtered thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called “brothers” of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of the spear. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”]

Raising world tensions even further, the Russians have made clear that they will not allow the ethnic Russian resistance to be annihilated, setting the stage for a potential escalation of hostilities and even a possible nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia.

Tennison & CCI on OpEdNews.com

Friends,  please put the URL below in your browser and read the latest blog article "High-Level French Delegation to Crimea Signals "The Power of Impossible Ideas"."

International journalist, Deena Stryker, interviewed me and attached her impressions to my 15 Perspectives on Russia written in June 2015. Blogs are the only way that other points of view on Russia can get out to mainstream Americans today.  Fortunately a stellar group of world recognized academics, ambassadors, top US businessmen and former Congress members are also depending on Internet and blogs to get similar messages regarding the US-Russia relationship out to the public. I am the least of these -- but nonetheless grateful to get our three decades of direct grassroots experience across Russia known to the American public.

If you or your friends are interested in traveling on a citizen diplomacy trip to Russia, please get in touch at [email protected].  Or if you or your friends would like to be on my email list, use the same e-address.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/High-Level-French-Delegati-by-Deena-Stryker-Allies_Breakdown_Corruption_Diplomacy-150725-872.html?a=193294&submit=Back

Sharon Tennison

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Russia Scholar Stephen Cohen: Get Facts Straight

Huffington Post

July 13, 2015

Russia and the New Cold War in Historical Context: Part II of Conversations With Russia Scholar Stephen Cohen

By Dan Kovalik 

This past May, the world celebrated the 70th Anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany by Allied Forces. Professor Cohen and I began our interview with a discussion about the increasing downplaying of Russia's critical role as an ally of the U.S. and Britain in this victory. As Cohen explains, popular films like Saving Private Ryan deceptively portray World II as being won by the U.S. with the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while ignoring the three years prior in which the USSR drove the Nazis from the heart of Russia back to Germany.

Cohen cites Winston Churchill for the proposition that it was the Red Army that "tore the guts out of the German Army." And, while Cohen is quick to acknowledge and condemn Stalin's many crimes and his exertion of control over Eastern Europe after World War II, he notes that it is a factual reality, which can't be denied, that the USSR played a historic role in liberating Europe from the Nazis. As Cohen relates:

"I always taught historically . . . and it was very clear to me . . . that the Soviet Union destroyed and defeated Nazi Germany. And the United States won the war in the Pacific against Japan. . . . I have a vivid memory of a man I knew who became one of the great Western scholars of the Soviet Union, telling me . . . of knowing a number of people of his generation who vividly told him, because it was a fateful moment of their lives, that when they weighed something like 70 pounds and were dying in the camps liberated by the Red Army, some strapping, tall, young Red Army solider lifting them up and carrying them off to the makeshift infirmary where they were saved, and all of them saying to him then, no matter what Stalin did after that or before that -- and I know it all -- the fact is, it was this young Red Army soldier that saved my life. . . ." 

In my view, the downplaying of the good that Russia did during World II (and it did so at the sacrifice of approximately 27 million Soviet lives) is a necessary part of attempting to vilify and demonize that country now. After all, it is difficult to manipulate Americans into equating the current Russian leader with Hitler (as Hillary Clinton has attempted to do) if we are reminded that Russia did more than any other country to eliminate Hitler and that Russia celebrates this triumph as its most important secular holiday. I might also add that the attempts to compare Putin to Hitler appear to be transparent attempt to deflect attention from the fact that the U.S. has been training neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. 

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP

by Patrick Armstrong

EID AL-FITR. Interesting video that shows Russia is also a rather Muslim country. The Chief Mufti supports Putin, by the way. (For those of you who think it's some evil scheme cooked up by Orthodoxy).

MH17. Watch this BBC interview. Shootdown by Buk "most credible scenario" but also looking at Buk fired "from another region, another place" and scenario of "an air-to-air missile." Can only mean 2) Buk fired from the Kiev side or 3) Kiev aircraft shot it down. Somebody's lost control of the narrative. We are told by a Ukrainian official that the report will be published 10 August but not made public. (If scenarios 2 and 3 are really being considered, why is Ukraine even part of the investigation?) Retired US int professionals again call on Washington to release what it has. Simply put, here's all you need to know: the absence of evidence is the evidence.

UKRAINE: THE WAR. The rebels have announced a pull-back of weapons under 100mm calibre (Minsk II requires 100mm+ weapons moved out of range). Why? I think the Saker is correct: to show they are abiding by Minsk II; but it's also a trap. OSCE observers corroborate that at least some weapons have been withdrawn and they are off to confirm full withdrawal. But they have also said – I don't recall this before – that Kiev forces are shelling civilians: "In both cases, the SMM was able to conclude the direction of fire to have been from the area of government-controlled Pisky (11km north-west of Donetsk) and Pervomaiske (17km north-west of Donetsk)." So much for the US Ambassador's retort "How do you know? Were you personally present for this?". Or RL's reprinting Kiev claims that the rebels are shelling themselves.

UKRAINE: TRANSCARPATHIA. Ethnically mixed, many former owners, little enthusiasm for Kiev regime. Smuggling: tobacco and borders. Right Sector people got into a fight in Mukachevo; Poroshenko ordered the Interior Ministry to restore order (perhaps a regime split on how to handle it? Certainly no one is very popular in Ukraine today.) Right Sector ran for cover and now the place is full of Interior Ministry forces and small-scale fighting. Stay tuned. (Of course, maybe Putindunnit.)

UKRAINE: RIGHT SECTOR. A headline to remember: "Kiev Forced to Fight Its Own Fascist Militias". After Mukachevo, Right Sector declared mobilisation, demanded resignations all round and set up blockposts here and there. There was a sizeable demonstration in Kiev on Tuesday; Yarosh demanded a referendum on confidence in the government and an end to obedience to it. Analyses of the situation from Gordon Hahn, Alexander Mercouris and Nikolai Petro. BBC actually notices. Many of us have been awaiting the next stage of the Ukrainian demolution (a new word coined by Miquel Puertas: demolition + revolution) – Nazi Spring, as it were. We are a step closer. But it's extremely fluid: witness what Yarosh is saying now. A weak government to be sure but Right Sector may not have the street power it thinks it has.

UKRAINE: NEIGHBOURS. Veryinteresting article by a Polish writer who contemplates where the burning fuse is going: a Ukrainian "Banderland" is not in Poland's interests and (so much for NATO and the EU) "if the West needs Poland, it's only as a battlefield for a possible conflict with Russia"; maybe better if Ukraine were partitioned. Other Poles are concerned about the glorification of Bandera and the OUN; and a movie is on the way. Hungary has cleared its throat, so to speak, about Hungarians living in Transcarpathia. The violence in Transcarpathia has made neighbouring countries strengthen their borders – after all the armed Right Sector people are hiding somewhere nearby. Meanwhile, Schengen members are cutting down on issuing visas to Ukrainians. Remember "the end of history"? Neither do they.

???!!! Did Washington supply Stingers to Kiev? Anyway, the Donbass fighters now have them. This may make sense in some universe, but not the one we're living in.

KYRGYZ REPUBLIC. Several people have suspected an American attempt to start a "colour revolution" there – to many the choice of mission head is diagnostic. In this respect the announcement of a "human rights" award to a dissident was protested by the government. When the US did nothing, the PM denounced the 1993 assistance agreement with the USA.

IRAN DEAL. We'll see. Many in the USA want to denounce it and that may happen. In which case who will follow Washington and who won't? It's good (and proper) that Obama thanked Russia, but I don't expect much. As to European missile defence being cancelled, let's ask Putin. But undeniably a major event.

© Patrick Armstrong Analysis, Ottawa, Canada Websites: ROPV, US-Russia, Russia Insider

Russia, the Greatest Strategic Threat to America!

Friends, I assume you have registered the stampede to see which of Washington's top brass (NATO Chief Breedlove, Defense Secy.Ashton Carter, Commander of European Forces General Hodges, and of course Victoria Nuland piping up again along with McCain and others) can out-do each other's declaration "Russia being the greatest strategic threat to America!" 

Amazing, it sounds like the order from someone has gone out: "It's time to all repeat this slogan again and again until all of America gets it!"   Even Kerry seems disinterested.

Sharon

~~~~~~~~~~

The Nation

July 14, 2015

Is Russia Really 'the Greatest Threat' to US National Security?

Ashton Carter, Victoria Nuland, and Gen. Joseph Dunford want us to think so.

By James Carden 

James W. Carden is a contributing writer at The Nation and the executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord's EastWestAccord.com. 

The war party is growing restive.

Reports of a deadly shootout between neofascist Right Sector volunteers and Ukrainian police in government-controlled western Ukraine was quickly followed by news that the international community reached a historic deal with Iran over its nuclear program.

As news of these developments began to ricochet through the corridors of Capitol Hill, the frustration and alarm of some of the leading members of Washington's war party increased markedly.

With legions of allies in the Congress, in the administration, and in the military, the faction led by Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove has, to date, successfully pushed the president towards taking a more hawkish line towards Russia, with NATO stationing, for the first time, tanks, troops and ordnance on Russia's western frontier. In addition, on Monday, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of US Army forces in Europe, told reporters at the Pentagon that he is planning to train Ukrainian army troops beginning in November. This would come on the heels of the US Army's current program of training Ukrainian Interior Ministry forces.

The hysteria over Russia's alleged provocations in Ukraine has reached such a point that at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week, President Obama's nominee to succeed Gen. Martin Dempsey as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, testified that he believed Russia posed "the greatest threat" to US national security. The hearing, chaired by none other than Senator John McCain, was less a confirmation hearing than a forum for the War Party to vent its copious frustrations with what it sees as President Obama's dangerously naive foreign policy.

Ukrainian "Democracy" by Gordon Hahn

FRIENDS, PLEASE READ! 

This is the revolution in Ukraine that our tax dollars have and are paying for.

We as a nation must come to our senses and demand stopping support for these dangerous elements in other countries

Are we forgetting that ….

Washington policy makers financially supported and trained Osama bin Laden and followers in Afghanistan to get the USSR involved in war there. The result has been the impossible-to-contain Middle East conflagration today which could at any time be brought to our shores.

We MUST stand together to insist on constructive, not destructive policy decisions.

The world is becoming an armed camp and we are spearheading this dangerous direction.

And yes, Russia is afraid Washington/NATO will take over their country and natural resources.  The result is they are trying to match our military capabilities so as not to be taken down. 

If we back off, Russia for sure will gladly back off!

The article below is written by Gordon Hahn who wrote for our Russiaotherpointsofview.com blog for several years. I came to know him quite personally during those years.  He is an absolute fanatic and sleuth at getting accurate facts and seems to have a photographic mind. His facts can be relied on without question.  Gordon is a serious Republican of the older breed, and to him democracy counts big. To see what's going on in Ukraine today must be an anathema to him.

A Day in the Life of 'Ukrainian Democracy' by Gordon Hahn

Samantha Power’s delusions notwithstanding, due to the inordinate presence of non-democratic elements inside and outside the Maidan government, ‘Ukrainian democracy’ remains a distant dream.

We learned from the shortcomings of early ‘transitology’ in the 1990s that free and fair elections do not a democracy make.

Rule of law, minimal corruption, state monopoly over the means of coercion, judicial independence, and a political culture of some trust and compromise rather than distrust and conflict, among other factors are prerequisites for the consolidation of a democracy. Ukraine lacks almost all of these key characteristics.

Moreover, after a violent revolution from below led by a coalition of neo-fascists, ultra-nationalists, national socialists, and both national and liberal democrats, the Maidan regime’s unity is tenuous at best.

Ukraine’s Maidan regime seems to be melting down slowly, split between moderate nationalists, on the one hand, and ultra-nationalists and neo-fascists, on the other. A small democratic faction plays an unofficial second fiddle to the former.

NEOCONS setting policy for Obama

Friends, investigative journalist, Robert Parry,  who brought the Iran-Contra Scandal to light, is the chief U.S. journalist forcing truth in the public forum re the Washington/Ukraine/Crimea/Russia domain.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/10/obamas-deadly-cold-war-legacy/ 

Exclusive: President Obama is endangering his legacy by letting neoconservatives still set his foreign policy, including the creation of a new and costly Cold War with Russia that could have been easily avoided and that now risks spinning off into a nuclear showdown, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Whatever positive legacy that President Barack Obama might point to – the first African-American president, the Affordable Care Act, the changed social attitudes on gay rights, etc. – his ultimate legacy may be defined more by his reckless stewardship guiding the United States into a wholly unnecessary new Cold War.

The costs of this Cold War II will be vast, emptying out what’s left of the U.S. Treasury in a new arms race against Russia, assuming that the new East-West showdown doesn’t precipitate a nuclear war that could end all life on the planet. Already, the United States military has altered its national security policies to treat Russia as the principal foreign threat. 

President Barack Obama and President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine talk after statements to the press following their bilateral meeting at the Warsaw Marriott Hotel in Warsaw, Poland, June 4, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

“If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia,” said General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., at Senate hearings on his nomination to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “And if you look at their [the Russians’] behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.”

Stephen Cohen's Latest: Huffington Post

Huffington Post

July 7, 2015

Rethinking Russia: A Conversation With Russia Scholar Stephen F. Cohen

By Dan Kovalik

Last week I had the honor of interviewing Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at NYU and Princeton University, where for many years he was director of its Russian Studies program. Professor Cohen, a long-time friend of Mikhail Gorbachev, is one of the most important Russia scholars in the world and a member of the founding board of directors of the American Committee for East-West Accord, a pro-detente organization that seeks rethinking and public discussion of U.S. policy toward Russia.

Despite his impressive credentials and intimate knowledge of Russia and its history, you will rarely hear Cohen's voice in the mainstream press. And it is not for a lack of trying; his views, and those of others like him, are simply shut out of the media, which, along with almost every U.S. politician, has decided to vilify Russian and Putin, irrationally equating Putin with such tyrants as Adolf Hitler. As Cohen explains:

Even Henry Kissinger -- I think it was in March 2014 in the Washington Post -- wrote this line: "The demonization of Putin is not a policy. It's an alibi for not having a policy." And then I wrote in reply to that: That's right, but it's much worse than that, because it's also that the demonization of Putin is an obstacle to thinking rationally, having a rational discourse or debate about American national security. And it's not just this catastrophe in Ukraine and the new Cold War; it's from there to Syria to Afghanistan, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to fighting global terrorism. The demonization of Putin excludes a partner in the Kremlin that the U.S. needs, no matter who sits there.

Russia Hosts the BRICS Countries this week

DEAR FRIENDS,  IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY….

Russia would have gladly cooperated and become a member of the Western community.

Offered no responses to their continual questing to be accepted, below is the final result.

Although no one mentions it, we now have a bi-polar world again––both armed to the teeth militarily.This was and is still needless.

Will we ever learn????

Sharon

Published on Russia Insider News (http://russia-insider.com) 

Russia Warmly Accepted in Non-West Community

Marko Marjanovich

This article originally appeared at China Daily by Dmitri Trenin 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will host two important international summits, one of the BRICS group on July 8-9 and the other of Shanghai Cooperation Organizations members on July 9-10.

For public relations, this will allow him to send a message to the world that despite the rupture with Europe and a new “standoff” with the United States, Russia is anything but isolated.

With leaders of China, India, Brazil, Pakistan, South Africa, Iran and several other countries in attendance, together representing roughly half of the world’s population, Putin will be able to project an image of Russia joining the global “new wave” of non-Western countries raising their profile and expanding their role in the world. 

RUSSIAN FEDERATION SITREP

by Patrick Armstrong

SAME AGAIN. The USA's new National Military Strategy finds threats everywhere: "the most unpredictable I have seen in 40 years of service". Russia, Iran, North Korea and China are specifically named as, in order, undermining, destabilising, threatening and adding tension. Some questions it neither asks nor answers: since, say 2002, is jihadism a bigger threat or a smaller threat? Iraq more stable or less stable? Afghanistan ditto? Russia more friendly or less friendly? China ditto? What makes them think that another dozen years of the same thing will get different results?

PUTIN'S RESPONSE. In what I agree was probably not an accident, Putin uses the expression "our geopolitical opponents" rather than his more usual "partners" at a recent meeting of the Security Council. "We cannot hope that some of our geopolitical opponents will change their hostile course anytime in the foreseeable future." This is as close as I have seen him come to publicly stating Russia is under attack. He remains confident: "It is clear today that attempts to split and divide our society, play on our problems, and seek out our vulnerable spots and weak links have not produced the results hoped for by those who imposed these restrictive measures on our country and continue to support them." He is correct to be confident, in my opinion.

N"G"Os. The Russian Federation Council has listed foreign organisations operating in Russia it considered to be undesirable and asked the Prosecutor General to rule on them. The idea presumably being to get a ruling that allows them to be expelled. They are the usual array of so-called non-government organisations which are part and parcel of Suzanne Nossel's "smart power". That is to say, agents of US foreign policy usually funded by the US State Department (eg, NDI, Freedom House, NED). These are the incubators of "colour revolutions".