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If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
"Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high
officials who does what he’s told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA
operator," laughs Ray McGovern,
who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. "It
used to be the CIA doing these things," he tells Democracy Now. "I know
that for a fact." Now it's the State Department, with its coat-and-tie
diplomats, twitter and facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to
build support for American policy.
A retired apparatchik, the now repentant McGovern was
debating Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a self-described left-winger and
the author of two recent essays in The New York Review of Books – "The Haze of Propaganda" and "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine." Both men speak Russian, but they come from different planets.
On Planet McGovern – or my personal take on it –
realpolitik rules. The State Department controls the prime funding
sources for non-military intervention, including the controversial National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), which Washington created to fund covert and clandestine action
after Ramparts magazine and others exposed how the CIA channeled money
through private foundations, including the Ford Foundation. State also
controls the far-better-funded Agency for International Development
(USAID), along with a growing network of front groups, cut-outs, and
private contractors. State coordinates with like-minded governments and
their parallel institutions, mostly in Canada and Western Europe.
State's "democracy bureaucracy"
oversees nominally private but largely government funded groups like
Freedom House. And through Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, State had Geoff Pyatt coordinate the
coup in Kiev.
The CIA, NSA, and Pentagon likely provided their
specialized services, while some of the private contractors exhibited
shadowy skill sets. But if McGovern knows the score, as he should,
diplomats ran the campaign to destabilize Ukraine and did the hands-on
dirty work.
Harder for some people to grasp, Ambassador Pyatt and
his team did not create the foreign policy, which was – and is – only
minimally about overthrowing Ukraine's duly elected government to
"promote democracy." Ever since Bill Clinton sat in the Oval Office,
Washington and its European allies have worked openly and covertly to
extend NATO to the Russian border and Black Sea Fleet, provoking a badly
wounded Russian bear. They have also worked to bring Ukraine and its
Eastern European neighbors into the neoliberal economy of the West,
isolating the Russians rather than trying to bring them into the fold.
Except for sporadic resets, anti-Russian has become the new anti-Soviet,
and "strategic containment" has been the wonky word for encircling
Russia with our military and economic power.
Nor did neoconservatives create the policy, no matter
how many progressive pundits blame them for it.
NED provides cushy jobs
for old social democrats born again as neocons. Pyatt's boss, Victoria
Nuland, is the wife and fellow-traveler of historian Robert Kagan, one
of the movement's leading lights. And neocons are currently beating the
war drums against Russia, as much to scupper any agreements on Syria and
Iran as to encourage more Pentagon contracts for their friends and
financial backers. But, encircling Russia has never been just a neocon
thing. The policy has bi-partisan and trans-Atlantic support, including
the backing of America's old-school nationalists, Cold War liberals,
Hillary hawks, and much of Obama's national security team.
No matter that the policy doesn’t pass the giggle
test. Extending NATO and Western economic institutions into all of a
very divided Ukraine had less chance of working than did hopes in 2008
of bringing Georgia into NATO,
which could have given the gung-ho Georgian president Mikheil
Saakashvilli the treaty right to drag us all into World War III. To me,
that seemed like giving a ten-year-old the keys to the family Humvee.
Western provocations in Ukraine proved more
immediately counterproductive. They gave Vladimir Putin the perfect
opportunity for a pro-Russian putsch in Crimea, which he had certainly
thought of before, but never as a priority. The provocations encouraged
him to stand up as a true Russian nationalist, which will only make him
more difficult to deal with. And they gave him cover to get away with
that age-old tool of tyrants, a quickie plebiscite with an unnecessary
return to Joseph Stalin's old dictum once popular in my homestate of Florida: "It's not the votes that count, but who counts the votes."
Small "d" democrats should shun such pretense. Still,
most journalists and pollsters on the scene report that – with the
exception of the historic Tatar community – the majority of Crimeans
want to join the Russian Federation, where they seem likely to stay.
Tensions will also grow as the US-picked interim prime
minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – our man "Yats" – joins with the IMF to
impose a Greek, Spanish, or Italian style austerity. Hard-pressed
Ukranians will undoubtedly fight back, especially in the predominantly
Russian-speaking east. According to Der Spiegel,
a whopping three quarters of the people there do not support the coup
or government. What a tar patch! A domestic conflict that could split
Ukraine in two will inevitably become even further embroiled in the
geo-strategic struggle between Russia and the West.
On Planet Snyder, as in most Western media, these
realistic considerations make absolutely no difference. Ideology rules,
masked as idealism. Fine sounding abstractions fill the air. Ukrainians
are making their own history. They are acting with great courage. They
are seeking the rule of law and their rightful place in "European
Civilization." They are defending "sovereignty" and "territorial
integrity."
Russians remain vicious. Big bad Vlad is the new Hitler. He
is seeking his own Eurasian empire (as opposed to NATO's), which could
soon include parts of Moldova, Belarus, and Kazakhstan that the West
needs like a "lok in kop," a hole in the head. And those watching
in the West must abandon what Snyder calls "our slightly self-obsessed
notions of how we control or don't control everything."
"It was a classic popular revolution," proclaims the professor. An undeniably popular uprising against "an unmistakably reactionary regime."
Writing in The Nation, Professor Stephen Cohen shreds Snyder's argument.
My concern is more pointed. Popular uprisings deserve our support or
opposition depending on who comes to control them and to what ends. As
McGovern puts it, "The question is: Who took them over? Who spurred
them? Who provoked them for their own particular strategic interests?"
Detailed evidence provides the answers. For all the
courage of the Ukrainian minority who took to the barricades, US
Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and his team spurred the protests in Kiev and
exercised extensive – though never complete – control over them.
Tactically, Pyatt and his fellow diplomats showed unexpected skill.
Strategically, they should have stayed home.
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