Originally published March 28, 2014
This week [at the time this was written] marks the fifteenth anniversary of the bombing of Serbia by President Bill Clinton – and the beginning of Antiwar.com as a full-time full-coverage news site. It’s a double anniversary fraught, for me, with irony. Back then the Big Bad Bogeyman wasn’t al-Qaeda, which had barely crept into the American consciousness, although Osama bin Laden was a known quantity. No, the Enemy of the Moment was Russia, which was desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to block Washington’s eastward expansion – and it looks like that moment has returned with a vengeance.
With Russophobia all the rage – they’re even warning us Putin, not content with Crimea, is about to invade the North Pole! – we’ve come full circle, back to where we started. But we aren’t exactly in the same place.
In 1998 the anti-interventionist movement was tiny, and our readership reflected that. With the cold war over, and many conservatives deciding it was time to "Come Home, America," as Pat Buchanan put it, our audience and base of support came increasingly from the right side of the political spectrum. Liberals were deserting the antiwar movement in droves, cowed – or won over – by the "humanitarian" interventionists and the 24/7 cycle of war propaganda beamed at them by CNN, back then the one and only cable news station. We called it the "Clinton News Network" because there was Christiane Amanpour, married to State Department spokesman James Rubin, lying nonstop for hours on end.
And while the idiotic Slobodan Milosevic was the official Enemy, standing behind him were the Russians, who were furiously resisting the eastward advance of the NATO-crats. Putin soon dumped Milosevic, however, and reconciled himself to the subjugation of Serbia – but the West was hardly finished. Russia was still standing, and, worse, Boris Yeltsin, the West’s favorite drunkard, was gone. In his place stood Vladimir Putin, former KGB official and hater-of-oligarchs, who went after Yeltsin’s crowd of parasites and drove them out of the country. If the former Warsaw Pact countries were going to be plundered by Commies-turned-"capitalists" and then looted by the IMF, Putin was determined that Russia would avoid their fate.
The West, led by the United States, had other plans, but Putin managed to sidestep them and get on with his task of rebuilding a country wrecked by Bolshevism, decimated by alcoholism, and threatened with outright hooliganism. In the process, he created a system that was neither free nor particularly efficient – but it was far better than what had gone before.
On the international front Putin reverted back to the defensive foreign policy of his Tsarist forebears, the first principle of which was to preserve the Slavic core of the Russian nation against foreign incursions. He continued and escalated the Chechen war started by Yeltsin as the Central Asian former Soviet republics fell into chaos, and Islamist radicals led by Chechens and the first stirring of al-Qaeda wreaked havoc in Russian cities. Yet there was no expansionist agenda: in spite of Western propaganda premised on the ridiculous assumption that Putin seeks to restore the old Soviet empire, what the Russian leader was and is trying to do was simply keep Russia in one piece. With the economy imploding, the death rate from alcoholism, AIDS, and suicide rising dramatically, and the birthrate falling below replacement levels, Russia was standing at the edge of the abyss. Putin saved the country from falling in.
Say what you like about him – he’s no friend of freedom, but neither is he another Stalin – Putin has long sought accommodation and even friendship with the West. A common enemy – Islamist terrorism – and common economic interests with Europe should have drawn Russia closer to Europe and America. In a 1999 op-ed for the New York Times, he wrote:
"I ask you to put aside for a moment the dramatic news reports from the Caucasus and imagine something more placid: ordinary New Yorkers or Washingtonians, asleep in their homes. Then, in a flash, hundreds perish in explosions at the Watergate, or at an apartment complex on Manhattan’s West Side. Thousands are injured, some horribly disfigured. Panic engulfs a neighborhood, then a nation.”
A few years later, we didn’t have to imagine it, because we were living it.
Yet the warlords of Washington and London would have none of it; they missed Yeltsin, who rolled over for them without being told to. This guy Putin, on the other hand, rolled over for no one: he would have to learn. But he refused to be taught.
Putin has been one of the most eloquent critics of US hegemonism and the "international order" enforced by Washington and its allies since the end of the first cold war, and this is one big reason why our wise rulers hate him. The elaborate propaganda campaign designed to demonize him and the country he presides over is motivated in large part by this hatred, as well as by the usual – greed, power-lust, and all the rest of the vices that disfigure our political class.
The American agenda in Ukraine is the same as it was in the former Yugoslavia: the humbling of Russia, its encirclement and eventual absorption into the "international system" lorded over by the US and its allies. Against this campaign Putin can only play defense: and as we all know by now the West only knows how to play offense.
Critics of our Ukraine policy have been attacked as "Putin apologists" – as if this debate is about the political character of the Russian state. But the internal arrangements of the Russian polity – the state of the media, the relative freeness of the electoral process, the status of homosexuals – has zero to do with whether Russia represents a threat and is similarly unrelated to the question of who is the aggressor in Ukraine. The neoconservative myth that democracies are inherently less aggressive than other forms of government is disproved by the example of the Western democracies, which have rampaged over a good part of the earth and in recent years have taken a toll in lives that easily reaches the millions.
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