Is a Movement Afoot to Inflame US Opinion Against Russia?

Friday, 30 October 2015

Is a Movement Afoot to Inflame US Opinion Against Russia?

Posted on October 28, 2015

Yesterday it was announced by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter that the US will be sending a “small number of special operations forces” to Syria for the purpose of supporting “capable partners” in the war against ISIS. (See Reuters report here.)

This of course means that there will now be US troops “on the ground” in Syria. What if one or more of them happens to get killed in a Russian airstrike? This is a possibility analyzed in an article that includes anonymous comments from two Special Operations commanders who have expressed concern about the “scope” of the mission in Syria.

Liar Liar–Pants on Fire: Obama Sends US Ground Troops to Syria

By Chip Tatum

During lunch with old friends outside MacDill AFB in Tampa, two U.S. Special Operations Command officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, reported that the orders are in and that we will be deploying 3,000 troops to the AO (Area of Operations).

“Chip, we are concerned due to the scope of our mission there. We will be embedded with Syrian Opposition forces, we believe that many are al-Qaeda or ISIS sympathizers who are not actively engaged against the terrorist threat but rather in support of a regime change.

Continued here

A couple of days ago I posted an article regarding an online letter expressing support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, a letter that now has garnered more than 86,000 signatures. Clearly the US is worried about the outpouring of support Russia is receiving from the “global reality-based community,” which of course is made up of people who get their news from the Internet rather than the mainstream media.

A sign of how desperate US officials are becoming can perhaps be gleaned from an op-ed piece published last Friday in the Washington Post and written by David J. Kramer, a former US assistant Secretary of State.

In the piece, which can be accessed here, Kramer, who is now affiliated with the McCain Institute (yes, as in John McCain), calls for the US to freeze the assets of Russian broadcaster RT. The freeze would be carried out supposedly on the grounds of Russian non-compliance with two recent European court rulings concerning Yukos, the no-longer-existent oil company formerly run by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Kramer attempts to smear Putin, referring to his administration as “one of the most corrupt, kleptocratic regimes in the world,” while going on to assert that:

RT is the key to Putin’s propaganda effort to discredit the West and obfuscate the truth of Russian actions. It has a global reach through cable and the Internet and claims an audience, likely exaggerated, of 700 million people in 100 countries. It has a large studio in Washington and bureaus throughout the United States and Europe. Russian government financing for RT and similar propaganda outlets, including Sputnik news, is roughly half a billion dollars.

Seizing Russian Embassy and consulate property in Washington and elsewhere is not an option given the inviolability of diplomatic missions. That leaves few other possibilities for going after Russian properties — and makes RT an inviting target. Even for Russia, with more than $350 billion in hard currency reserves and the most natural-resources wealth of any country in the world, $52 billion is a lot of money, especially in the midst of an economic crisis, low oil prices and the squeeze of continued sanctions against the regime.

If US soldiers were to die in an airstrike that could be blamed on Russia, it would most likely smooth the way for a seizure of RT assets…and who knows? Maybe even a war as well.

Kramer’s article has certainly been taken note of in Russia. The following was posted Tuesday at Sputnik:

RT Chief Outraged at ‘Shocking’ Proposal to Seize Channel’s US Assets

RT television channel Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said Tuesday that she was outraged at the proposal by a former US assistant secretary of state that the United States must freeze RT assets.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — David Kramer, a former US assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights, said in an op-ed published last week by The Washington Post that RT channel assets in the country must be seized in compliance with two European court rulings against Russia stipulating shareholder debt repayment in the now defunct Yukos oil firm.

Continued here

Thanks to Russian air support, the Syrian Army is now about to launch an offensive to retake Palmyra. If the ancient city–a UNESCO World Heritage site–is rescued, and particularly if it is rescued with some of its ancient antiquities still intact, it will be another feather in Russia’s cap.

At this point, it would be well if the US simply stayed out of the way. But Russia’s successes in Syria have angered US officials, and the question now is to what lengths are they willing to go to reassert global “leadership,” which has obviously taken a beating?