Dempsey talked of the need to “deter Russian aggression against our NATO allies” – and said that Russia had “kind of lit a fire of nationalism.”
Dempsey says he is worried about Europe, but it's Russia which has cause to be worried about the US and Europe. Just take a look at the map on how NATO, since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe twenty-five years ago – has expanded eastwards, despite promises made by the west that NATO would not expand.
When figures from the Western elite talk of ‘Russian aggression’ what they really mean is that Russia is checking Western aggression. When Putin is compared to Hitler – it is because he is standing in the way of the real heirs of Adolf Hitler, the war lobby in the West, who like the mustachioed one, have an insatiable appetite for attacking and threatening to attack independent sovereign states.
By any objective assessment, it’s the Western elites – and in particular the neocon faction within that elite – who are the biggest dangers to world peace, not Putin. Look at the havoc their policy of endless war, whether waged directly or through terrorist proxies, has caused in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Back in 2000, when he was first elected President, Western elites hoped that Putin would continue the path set by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, a man whose rule was disastrous for ordinary Russians, who saw their living standards plummet and the value of their life savings destroyed, but very good for the Western elites. Yeltsin privatized vast swathes of the economy and acquiesced while NATO destroyed Yugoslavia. Yeltsin was bad news for Russia – but he was hailed as a great ‘democrat’ by the West – and eulogized on his death – which tells us everything we need to know about who benefited most from his rule.
Putin co-operated with West over Afghanistan and the so-called 'war on terror'. “Russia will continue to provide intelligence information we have collected on the infrastructure, location and training of international terrorists,” he declared.
A CNN article on how 9/11 was a ‘turning point’ for Putin makes interesting reading today.
The truth is that it was the aggressive neocon faction within the Western elite which did that. They’ve been calling for sanctions on Russia for over a decade now – way before Russia’s non-existent ‘invasion’ of Ukraine.
The current ‘cold war’ against Russia can be traced back to 2003.
Rebuilding the economy and improving living standards for ordinary Russians inevitably meant action being taken against certain oligarchs who had made vast fortunes in the Yeltsin years. These oligarchs, such as Boris Berezovksy and Mikhail Khodorkovsky had some powerful supporters, in the West. As I detailed in an article for the New Statesman in November 2003 – influential neocons in Washington who had links to Russian oligarchs, used the arrest of Khodorkovsky for fraud and tax evasion to push for a hardening of US policy towards Moscow.
In 2003, Putin also angered hawks in Washington by opposing the war against Iraq – not only that he openly ridiculed the claims about Iraq’s WMDs.
“Earlier this year, Russia's stubborn holding of its line on Iraq infuriated the neoconservatives and increased their determination to work towards regime change at the next presidential elections in 2004 and to accelerate their plans to secure Russia's energy resources”, I wrote in the New Statesman.
The neocon propaganda stepped up again with the mysterious death of M16 agent Alexander Litvinenko, in London in late 2006. Inevitably the death was blamed on Moscow – despite the absence of proof. As I highlighted in the Guardian in an article entitled ‘In Bed with Russophobes,
In 2008, Putin, now firmly established as a NeoCon hate figure, angered the endless war lobby still further by standing up to aggression by the US client state of Georgia against the people of South Ossetia. The importance of what happened in Georgia in 2008 cannot be understated. It was as Seumas Milne notes in his book The Revenge of History “one of two events in 2008 which signalled the end of the New World Order of unchallenged US global and economic power” ( the other was the banking crash). “The former Soviet Republic (Georgia) was a particular favorite of Washington’s neoconservatives” says Milne. “Its forces, armed and trained by the US and Israel, made up the third-largest contingent in the occupation of Iraq…..The short-lived Russian-Georgian conflict marked an international turning point….. Russia had called a halt to a relentless process of US expansion.”
Ukraine was where the neocons thought they would get their revenge. The US sponsored regime change in Kiev, an enterprise in which the State Department’s Victoria Nuland the wife of the Project for a New American Century co-founder Robert Kagan played a prominent role, finally enabled the hawks to get what they been dreaming of for over ten years – the sanctioning of Russia. The ‘get tough with Russia’ stance they’ve long been calling for has finally become the official policy of the US and leading EU countries. The demonization of President Putin in the West has become ‘mainstream’.
The neocon plan is for the Russian economy to be weakened by sanctions, which they hope will lead to a reduction in support for Putin and make it easier for them to destabilize the country and bring about a ‘regime change’ in Moscow. They want a compliant stooge in the Kremlin who will surrender all of Russia’s natural resources, and allow them to get rid of President Assad and the Baathists in Syria – an essential prerequisite before any attack on Iran.
At the moment one man is getting in the way of those war plans.
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