The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing
Published on
Thursday, August 04, 2016
by
Consortium News
The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing
The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House alarms many people but
bashing him over his contrarian views on NATO and U.S.-Russian relations
could set the stage for disasters under President Hillary Clinton
by
Robert Parry
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a
campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21,
2016. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)
The widespread disdain for Donald Trump and the fear of what his presidency
might mean have led to an abandonment of any sense of objectivity by many
Trump opponents and, most notably, the mainstream U.S. news media. If Trump
is for something, it must be bad and must be transformed into one more club
to use for hobbling his candidacy.
While that attitude may be understandable given Trump's frequently feckless
and often offensive behavior - he seems not to know basic facts and insults
large swaths of the world's population - this Trump bashing also has
dangerous implications because some of his ideas deserve serious debate
rather than blanket dismissal.
Amid his incoherence and insults, Trump has raised valid points on several
important questions, such as the risks involved in the voracious expansion
of NATO up to Russia's borders and the wisdom of demonizing Russia and its
internally popular President Vladimir Putin.
Over the past several years, Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy
establishment has pushed a stunning policy of destabilizing nuclear-armed
Russia in pursuit of a "regime change" in Moscow. This existentially risky
strategy has taken shape with minimal substantive debate behind a "group
think" driven by anti-Russian and anti-Putin propaganda. (All we hear is
what's wrong with Putin and Russia: He doesn't wear a shirt! He's the new
Hitler! Putin and Trump have a bro-mance! Russian aggression! Their athletes
cheat!)
Much as happened in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War in 2002-2003, the
neocons and their "liberal interventionist" allies bully from the public
square anyone who doesn't share these views. Any effort to put Russia's
behavior in context makes you a "Putin apologist," just like questioning the
Iraq-WMD certainty of last decade made you a "Saddam apologist."
But this new mindlessness - now justified in part to block Trump's path to
the White House - could very well set the stage for a catastrophic
escalation of big-power tensions under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Former
Secretary of State Clinton has already surrounded herself with neocons and
liberal hawks who favor expanding the war against Syria's government, want
to ratchet up tensions with Iran, and favor shipping arms to the right-wing
and virulently anti-Russian regime in Ukraine, which came to power in a 2014
coup supported by U.S. policymakers and money.
By lumping Trump's few reasonable points together with his nonsensical
comments - and making anti-Russian propaganda the only basis for any public
debate - Democrats and the anti-Trump press are pushing the United States
toward a conflict with Russia.
And, for a U.S. press corps that prides itself on its "objectivity," this
blatantly biased approach toward a nominee of a major political party is
remarkably unprofessional. But the principle of objectivity has been long
since abandoned as the mainstream U.S. media transformed itself into little
more than an outlet for U.S. government foreign-policy narratives, no matter
how dishonest or implausible.
Losing History
To conform with the neocon-driven narratives, much recent history has been
lost. For instance, few Americans realize that some of President Barack
Obama's most notable foreign policy achievements resulted from cooperation
with Putin and Russia, arguably more so than any other "friendly" leader or
"allied" nation.
For instance, in summer 2013, Obama was under intense neocon/liberal-hawk
pressure to bomb the Syrian military supposedly for crossing his "red line"
against the use of chemical weapons after a mysterious sarin gas attack
outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2103.
Yet, hearing doubts from the U.S. intelligence community about the Assad
regime's guilt, Obama balked at a military strike that - we now know - would
have played into the hands of Syrian jihadists who some intelligence
analysts believe were the ones behind the false-flag sarin attack to trick
the United States into directly intervening in the civil war on their side.
But Obama still needed a path out of the corner that he had painted himself
into and it was provided by Putin and Russia pressuring Assad to surrender
all his chemical weapons, a clear victory for Obama regardless of who was
behind the sarin attack.
Putin and Russia helped Obama again in convincing Iran to accept tight
restraints on its nuclear program, an agreement that may mark Obama's most
significant foreign policy success. Those negotiations came to life in 2013
(not coincidentally after Secretary of State Clinton, who allied herself
more with the bomb-bomb-bomb Iran faction led by Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, had resigned and was replaced by John Kerry).
As the negotiating process evolved, Russia played a key role in bringing
Iran along, offering ways for Iran to rid itself of its processed nuclear
stockpiles and get the medical research materials it needed. Without the
assistance of Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the landmark
Iranian nuclear deal might never have happened.
Obama recognized the value of this Russian help but he also understood the
political price that he would pay if he were closely associated with Putin,
who was already undergoing a thorough demonization in the U.S. and European
mainstream media. So, Obama mostly worked with Putin under the table while
joining in the ostracism of Putin above the table.
Checking Obama
But Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment - and its
allied mainstream media - check-mated Obama's double-talking game in 2013 by
aggressively supporting a regime-change strategy in Ukraine where
pro-Russian elected President Viktor Yanukovych was under mounting pressure
from western Ukrainians who wanted closer ties to Europe and who hated
Russia.
Leading neocon thinkers unveiled their new Ukraine strategy shortly after
Putin helped scuttle their dreams for a major bombing campaign against
Assad's regime in Syria. Since the 1990s, the neocons had targeted the Assad
dynasty - along with Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq and the
Shiite-controlled government in Iran - for "regime change." The neocons got
their way in Iraq in 2003 but their program stalled because of the
disastrous Iraq War.
However, in 2013, the neocons saw their path forward open again in Syria,
especially after the sarin attack, which killed hundreds of civilians and
was blamed on Assad in a media-driven rush to judgment. Obama's hesitancy to
strike and then Putin's assistance in giving Obama a way out left the
neocons furious. They began to recognize the need to remove Putin if they
were to proceed with their Mideast "regime change" dreams.
In late September 2013 - a month after Obama ditched the plans to bomb Syria
- neocon National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman wrote in
The Washington Post that Ukraine was now "the biggest prize" but also was a
steppingstone toward the even bigger "regime change" prize in Moscow.
Gershman, whose NED is funded by Congress, wrote:
"Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology
of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice,
and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but
within Russia itself."
By late 2013 and early 2014, with Gershman's NED financing Ukraine's
anti-government activists and journalists and with the open encouragement of
neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and
Sen. John McCain, the prospects for "regime change" in Ukraine were
brightening. With neo-Nazi and other Ukrainian ultra-nationalists
firebombing police, the political crisis in Kiev deepened.
Meanwhile, Putin was focused on the Sochi Winter Olympics and the threat
that the games could be disrupted by terrorism. So, with the Kremlin
distracted, Ukraine's Yanukovych tried to fend off his political crisis
while limiting the violence.
However, on Feb. 20, 2014, snipers fired on both police and protesters in
the Maidan square and the Western media jumped to the conclusion that
Yanukovych was responsible (even though later investigations have indicated
that the sniper attack was more likely carried out by neo-Nazi groups to
provoke the chaos that followed).
A Successful Coup
On Feb. 21, a shaken Yanukovych agreed to a European-brokered deal in which
he surrendered some of his powers and agreed to early elections. He also
succumbed to Western pressure that he pull back his police. However, on Feb.
22, the neo-Nazis and other militants seized on that opening to take over
government buildings and force Yanukovych and other officials to flee for
their lives.
The U.S. State Department and its Western allies quickly recognized the coup
regime as the "legitimate" government of Ukraine. But the coup provoked
resistance from the ethnic Russian populations in Crimea and eastern
Ukraine, political uprisings that the new Kiev regime denounced as
"terrorist" and countered with an "Anti-Terrorism Operation" or ATO.
When Russian troops - already in Crimea as part of the Sevastopol naval
basing agreement - protected the people on the peninsula from attacks by the
Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, the intervention was denounced in the West as
a "Russian invasion." Crimean authorities also organized a referendum in
which more than 80 percent of the voters participated and favored leaving
Ukraine and rejoining Russia by a 96 percent margin. When Moscow agreed,
that became "Russian aggression."
Although the Kremlin refused appeals from eastern Ukraine for a similar
arrangement, Russia provided some assistance to the rebels resisting the new
authorities in Ukraine. Those rebels then declared their own autonomous
republics.
Although this historical reality - if understood by the American people -
would put the Ukrainian crisis in a very different context, it has been
effectively blacked out of what the American public is allowed to hear. All
the mainstream media talks about is "Russian aggression" and how Putin
provoked the Ukraine crisis as part of some Hitlerian plan to conquer
Europe.
Trump, in his bumbling way, tries to reference the real history to explain
his contrarian views regarding Russia, Ukraine and NATO, but he is
confronted by a solid wall of "group think" asserting only one acceptable
way to see this complex crisis. Rather than allow a serious debate on these
very serious issues, the mainstream U.S. media simply laughs at Trump's
supposed ignorance.
The grave danger from this media behavior is that it will empower the
neocons and liberal hawks already nesting inside Hillary Clinton's campaign
to prepare for a new series of geopolitical provocations once Clinton takes
office. By opportunistically buying into this neocon pro-war narrative now,
Democrats may find themselves with buyer's remorse as they become the war
party of 2017.
C 2016 Consortium News
Robert Parry
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The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing
Published on
Thursday, August 04, 2016
by
Consortium News
The Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing
The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House alarms many people but
bashing him over his contrarian views on NATO and U.S.-Russian relations
could set the stage for disasters under President Hillary Clinton
by
Robert Parry
. 20 Comments
.
. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters
at a campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona. March
21, 2016. (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)
. The widespread disdain for Donald Trump and the fear of what his
presidency might mean have led to an abandonment of any sense of objectivity
by many Trump opponents and, most notably, the mainstream U.S. news media.
If Trump is for something, it must be bad and must be transformed into one
more club to use for hobbling his candidacy.
. While that attitude may be understandable given Trump's frequently
feckless and often offensive behavior - he seems not to know basic facts and
insults large swaths of the world's population - this Trump bashing also has
dangerous implications because some of his ideas deserve serious debate
rather than blanket dismissal.
. Amid his incoherence and insults, Trump has raised valid points on
several important questions, such as the risks involved in the voracious
expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders and the wisdom of demonizing Russia
and its internally popular President Vladimir Putin.
. Over the past several years, Washington's neocon-dominated foreign
policy establishment has pushed a stunning policy of destabilizing
nuclear-armed Russia in pursuit of a "regime change" in Moscow. This
existentially risky strategy has taken shape with minimal substantive debate
behind a "group think" driven by anti-Russian and anti-Putin propaganda.
(All we hear is what's wrong with Putin and Russia: He doesn't wear a shirt!
He's the new Hitler! Putin and Trump have a bro-mance! Russian aggression!
Their athletes cheat!)
Much as happened in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War in 2002-2003, the
neocons and their "liberal interventionist" allies bully from the public
square anyone who doesn't share these views. Any effort to put Russia's
behavior in context makes you a "Putin apologist," just like questioning the
Iraq-WMD certainty of last decade made you a "Saddam apologist."
But this new mindlessness - now justified in part to block Trump's path to
the White House - could very well set the stage for a catastrophic
escalation of big-power tensions under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Former
Secretary of State Clinton has already surrounded herself with neocons and
liberal hawks who favor expanding the war against Syria's government, want
to ratchet up tensions with Iran, and favor shipping arms to the right-wing
and virulently anti-Russian regime in Ukraine, which came to power in a 2014
coup supported by U.S. policymakers and money.
By lumping Trump's few reasonable points together with his nonsensical
comments - and making anti-Russian propaganda the only basis for any public
debate - Democrats and the anti-Trump press are pushing the United States
toward a conflict with Russia.
And, for a U.S. press corps that prides itself on its "objectivity," this
blatantly biased approach toward a nominee of a major political party is
remarkably unprofessional. But the principle of objectivity has been long
since abandoned as the mainstream U.S. media transformed itself into little
more than an outlet for U.S. government foreign-policy narratives, no matter
how dishonest or implausible.
Losing History
To conform with the neocon-driven narratives, much recent history has been
lost. For instance, few Americans realize that some of President Barack
Obama's most notable foreign policy achievements resulted from cooperation
with Putin and Russia, arguably more so than any other "friendly" leader or
"allied" nation.
For instance, in summer 2013, Obama was under intense neocon/liberal-hawk
pressure to bomb the Syrian military supposedly for crossing his "red line"
against the use of chemical weapons after a mysterious sarin gas attack
outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2103.
Yet, hearing doubts from the U.S. intelligence community about the Assad
regime's guilt, Obama balked at a military strike that - we now know - would
have played into the hands of Syrian jihadists who some intelligence
analysts believe were the ones behind the false-flag sarin attack to trick
the United States into directly intervening in the civil war on their side.
But Obama still needed a path out of the corner that he had painted himself
into and it was provided by Putin and Russia pressuring Assad to surrender
all his chemical weapons, a clear victory for Obama regardless of who was
behind the sarin attack.
Putin and Russia helped Obama again in convincing Iran to accept tight
restraints on its nuclear program, an agreement that may mark Obama's most
significant foreign policy success. Those negotiations came to life in 2013
(not coincidentally after Secretary of State Clinton, who allied herself
more with the bomb-bomb-bomb Iran faction led by Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, had resigned and was replaced by John Kerry).
As the negotiating process evolved, Russia played a key role in bringing
Iran along, offering ways for Iran to rid itself of its processed nuclear
stockpiles and get the medical research materials it needed. Without the
assistance of Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the landmark
Iranian nuclear deal might never have happened.
Obama recognized the value of this Russian help but he also understood the
political price that he would pay if he were closely associated with Putin,
who was already undergoing a thorough demonization in the U.S. and European
mainstream media. So, Obama mostly worked with Putin under the table while
joining in the ostracism of Putin above the table.
Checking Obama
But Washington's neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment - and its
allied mainstream media - check-mated Obama's double-talking game in 2013 by
aggressively supporting a regime-change strategy in Ukraine where
pro-Russian elected President Viktor Yanukovych was under mounting pressure
from western Ukrainians who wanted closer ties to Europe and who hated
Russia.
Leading neocon thinkers unveiled their new Ukraine strategy shortly after
Putin helped scuttle their dreams for a major bombing campaign against
Assad's regime in Syria. Since the 1990s, the neocons had targeted the Assad
dynasty - along with Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq and the
Shiite-controlled government in Iran - for "regime change." The neocons got
their way in Iraq in 2003 but their program stalled because of the
disastrous Iraq War.
However, in 2013, the neocons saw their path forward open again in Syria,
especially after the sarin attack, which killed hundreds of civilians and
was blamed on Assad in a media-driven rush to judgment. Obama's hesitancy to
strike and then Putin's assistance in giving Obama a way out left the
neocons furious. They began to recognize the need to remove Putin if they
were to proceed with their Mideast "regime change" dreams.
In late September 2013 - a month after Obama ditched the plans to bomb Syria
- neocon National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman wrote in
The Washington Post that Ukraine was now "the biggest prize" but also was a
steppingstone toward the even bigger "regime change" prize in Moscow.
Gershman, whose NED is funded by Congress, wrote:
"Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology
of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice,
and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but
within Russia itself."
By late 2013 and early 2014, with Gershman's NED financing Ukraine's
anti-government activists and journalists and with the open encouragement of
neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and
Sen. John McCain, the prospects for "regime change" in Ukraine were
brightening. With neo-Nazi and other Ukrainian ultra-nationalists
firebombing police, the political crisis in Kiev deepened.
Meanwhile, Putin was focused on the Sochi Winter Olympics and the threat
that the games could be disrupted by terrorism. So, with the Kremlin
distracted, Ukraine's Yanukovych tried to fend off his political crisis
while limiting the violence.
However, on Feb. 20, 2014, snipers fired on both police and protesters in
the Maidan square and the Western media jumped to the conclusion that
Yanukovych was responsible (even though later investigations have indicated
that the sniper attack was more likely carried out by neo-Nazi groups to
provoke the chaos that followed).
A Successful Coup
On Feb. 21, a shaken Yanukovych agreed to a European-brokered deal in which
he surrendered some of his powers and agreed to early elections. He also
succumbed to Western pressure that he pull back his police. However, on Feb.
22, the neo-Nazis and other militants seized on that opening to take over
government buildings and force Yanukovych and other officials to flee for
their lives.
The U.S. State Department and its Western allies quickly recognized the coup
regime as the "legitimate" government of Ukraine. But the coup provoked
resistance from the ethnic Russian populations in Crimea and eastern
Ukraine, political uprisings that the new Kiev regime denounced as
"terrorist" and countered with an "Anti-Terrorism Operation" or ATO.
When Russian troops - already in Crimea as part of the Sevastopol naval
basing agreement - protected the people on the peninsula from attacks by the
Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, the intervention was denounced in the West as
a "Russian invasion." Crimean authorities also organized a referendum in
which more than 80 percent of the voters participated and favored leaving
Ukraine and rejoining Russia by a 96 percent margin. When Moscow agreed,
that became "Russian aggression."
Although the Kremlin refused appeals from eastern Ukraine for a similar
arrangement, Russia provided some assistance to the rebels resisting the new
authorities in Ukraine. Those rebels then declared their own autonomous
republics.
Although this historical reality - if understood by the American people -
would put the Ukrainian crisis in a very different context, it has been
effectively blacked out of what the American public is allowed to hear. All
the mainstream media talks about is "Russian aggression" and how Putin
provoked the Ukraine crisis as part of some Hitlerian plan to conquer
Europe.
Trump, in his bumbling way, tries to reference the real history to explain
his contrarian views regarding Russia, Ukraine and NATO, but he is
confronted by a solid wall of "group think" asserting only one acceptable
way to see this complex crisis. Rather than allow a serious debate on these
very serious issues, the mainstream U.S. media simply laughs at Trump's
supposed ignorance.
The grave danger from this media behavior is that it will empower the
neocons and liberal hawks already nesting inside Hillary Clinton's campaign
to prepare for a new series of geopolitical provocations once Clinton takes
office. By opportunistically buying into this neocon pro-war narrative now,
Democrats may find themselves with buyer's remorse as they become the war
party of 2017.
C 2016 Consortium News
