Background interviews in "The Putin Files" at Frontline

Frontline PBS recently ran a two-part documentary called Putin's Revenge, focused on the story of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Part 1 focuses on Putin's experiences with and understanding of US foreign policy.

Part 2 deals more specifically with the events of 2016 in connection with Russian hacking and the US election.

Frontline has also made available hours of background interviews of the authorities quoted in the documentary. Since they largely deal with the same set of events and questions, they do begin to sound a bit repetitive after a while. But they do provide a wide range of views, all largely within a safely Establishment perspective. Which, of course, has its advantages and disadvantages.

My most interesting and informative of the ones I've listened to so far is this one, The Putin Files: Julia Ioffe, which is 1 3/4 hours long. Her columns the past year for The Atlantic on Russia have also been helpful. Unlike our typical Pod Pundits on TV, she tells stories like you would hope a journalist would. She's very good in relating a chronological narrative. And she's careful to include a lot of factual detail and meaningful context. And she gives the appearance of trying to stick with confirmed facts, or at a minimum to explain what sources on which she's relying. That emerges at the start of the interview, where she responds to the question on whether the highest levels of Russian government knew about the hacking of the Democratic Party and election system in 2016.

Her account is also notably useful in that she conveys an image of how Putin was likely to have understood events that affected him and his political career. Understanding how the "other side" sees itself is something our TV pundits aren't generally very good about doing. Understanding isn't defending, and explaining isn't defending. But it's easy for people in politics and especially international politics to forget about those two things.

Celeste Wallander's interview in interesting in that she recounts the Ukraine crisis of 2013 as though the US is a de facto military ally of the US, The Putin Files: Celeste Wallander 10/25/2017.

Although she also recognizes that the Russians had the ability and the intent to escalate with additional Russian troops if they judged it necessary.

Victoria Nuland strikes me as a particularly unsympathetic public figure, and this interview didn't do anything to disabuse me of that impression, The Putin Files: Victoria Nuland 10/25/2017:

She insists on starting off by making the dubious point that the Clinton Administration was serious in trying to make Russia a part of NATO in the early 1990s. Of the interviews in this series that I've heard, Nuland's seemed the most carefully worded to further a hawkish foreign policy narrative. She talks as though the US approach in everything she's talking about are obviously pure and noble. And manages to sound condescending and remarkably smug through most of it. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to think that someone who can keep an expression like this for most of a 1 1/4 hour interview is probably trying to con her listeners:

It's striking in her interview that she speaks as if Russia had no legitimate security concerns about NATO expansion. Which reinforces the perception that she's making a hawkish political pitch rather than speaking as a foreign policy expert in a more technical sense here.

Nuland is so immersed in Cold War hawkish thinking that she even rolls out the hoary old Domino Theory for Europe today. Just after 47:00, we hear this interchange:

Frontline: Of course, there's another argument that some people have come in here and said, which is, [if] you don't stop Putin there, y'know, where do you stop Putin, when do you stop Putin, that's the moment.

Nuland: Well, that was the argument that those of us favoring at least defense lethal systems made, was that, you know, if he really wanted it, he would be in Kiev, and the next thing you knew he would be in Warsaw if we weren't careful.

One difference: Poland is a member of the NATO mutual-defense alliance. Ukraine is not. Nuland's words would indicate that she doesn't understand even a basic distinction like that. (I'm guessing she's faking it on that point!)

From this interview, I would have to conclude that her only regret about the 2013 Ukraine crisis is that we didn't Americanize the conflict and expand the war even more.

This interview with a former Obama adviser gives us an idea of how it sounds for someone to take Putin's outlook seriously - whether it's right or wrong - as contrasted with the strict advocacy perspective of Victoria Nuland, The Putin Files: Antony Blinken 10/25/2017:

Just after 16:30, Blinken straightforwardly explains the basic fact that makes Nuland's point about Putin marching from Kiev to Warsaw is so silly, that Poland is a NATO member.

New York Times Reporter David Sanger's interview is also notable it his seemingly pragmatic and realistic take on the topics covered, The Putin Files: David Sanger 10/25/2017:

Much of screen time on the two-part documentary itself is composed of excerpts from the set of interviews that Frontline placed on YouTube and from which these five were taken.

Rachel Maddow and the New Cold War narrative

I don't recall off-hand whether I've ever quoted Radio Free Europe on this blog before. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a US government-sponsored news agency. It can legitimately be called a propaganda service, although that doesn't mean that their stories are false. So far as I'm aware, RFE/RL has a pretty good record for accuracy. But they make no secret about their government funding:

Q. How is RFE/RL funded and managed?
A. RFE/RL is funded by the U.S. Congress through the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The BBG is a bipartisan federal agency overseeing all U.S international broadcasting services. In addition to RFE/RL, this includes Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, Radio Sawa, and Radio Marti.

Under IRS rules, RFE/RL is a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation. Chartered in Delaware, it receives federal grants as a private grantee. RFE/RL maintains a corporate office in Washington, D.C.

Here's the reason I'm quoting it here. The perennially perky Rachel Maddow has not been shy about covering the Russia-Russia-Russia story. Here's one of her more substantial reports, Republicans To Put Russian Bank Lawyer In Coveted DoJ Position MSNBC 09/28/2017:

This is substantial because it deals with the Trump team's business entanglements with Russian entities of various kinds. I'm still in the camp that thinks the dubious business dealing will be the main thing bringing him down - or at least leading to major members of his team being indicted - rather than Boris and Natasha meetings to scheme about the Presidential campaign.

I've written quite a bit about the hacking issue, and I think I've been pretty consistent in saying that it is serious and needs to be dealt with realistically.

But this report of Maddow's from the previous day strikes me as an insufficiently realistic way to look at this issue, Expansionist Russia Promotes Division Everywhere Else MSNBC 09/27/2017:

Actually, it strikes me as a frivolous Cold War 1.0 polemic, just without the Communism. Or anti-Communism, as it were. She opens it with a segment on this event, as reported by RFE/RL in Ukraine Security Chief Says Depot Blasts Dealt 'Big Blow' To Combat Capability 09/28/2017:

Massive blasts followed by a blaze at a military depot near Kalynivka in the Vinnytsya region, 270 kilometers west of Kyiv, forced the evacuation of 30,000 people on September 27. Another depot in the eastern city of Kharkiv was destroyed in March. That blast was blamed on sabotage. ...

Chief military prosecutor Anatoliy Matios on September 28 rejected earlier statements from authorities suggesting that foreign saboteurs may have set the [Kalynivka] depot on fire.

Matios said investigators were looking into possible negligence, abuse of power, or sabotage by those who were authorized to handle the ammunition.

He added that the investigation found that the fire alarm at the depot wasn't functioning and that its security team was understaffed.

"Neither the investigators, nor the Security Service, nor any law enforcement agencies found any groups of saboteurs in the Vinnytsya region that people are talking about on Facebook," Matios said, an apparent reference to comments made by several senior Ukrainian officials on social media on September 27 blaming Russian saboteurs for the fire.

In the aftermath of the blast, authorities said they launched checks at military bases across Ukraine and discovered serious violations.

Investigators found a colonel and a lieutenant colonel in charge of security at a military depot holding Soviet-era ballistic missiles who were "completely drunk," Matios said.

Listen to Maddow's report and see if you hear anything about those official denials from the Ukrainian government that they were assuming sabotage was involved in the Kalynivka incident, as reported by RFE/RL. She said that otherwise unnamed "Ukrainian authorities say that this one, too, may have been started by sabotage." And, "the Ukrainian govenrment is saying, saying today essentially that the Russians were able to get them" in the blast at the Kalynivka depot.

My point here is not that Rachel Maddow or the US propaganda channel RFE/RL has the definitive version of this blast on this past Wednesday. It is rather that her report differs significantly from the other one. Now it's entirely possible that the Trump Administration is requiring the RFE/RL to be more Russia-friendly to the point of completely distorting a report like this. But Maddow presented it as obvious that the Russians blew up this depot. Then she launches directly into a discussion of Russian expansion and "information warfare" by the Russians in support of various kinds of secessionist movements in other countries.

This is also a fascinating observation from her report:

As Russia was literally seizing territory from a neighboring country in the last few years, they became one of the only modern industrialized nations in a generation to have invaded a neighboring country and taken over part of its territory. Russia also simultaneously took to the information space to shut down activists from that country. They've also been all over the globe promoting secession movements and breakaway independence movements in all sorts of countries. They've been lit-, in other words, they've been looking to get bigger while they've been busy working to make sure that everybody else gets smaller. They're literally taking over neighboring countries' territory to make Russia a larger country while promoting, in the online space, movements that would break apart their rivals and competitors on the global stage.

She proceeds from there to promote a Twitter-style online poll that currently appears at her program's website:

I wonder what the Russian way to say "are you [bleeping] kidding me?" would be.

The English answer, of course, is that yes, she's kidding, at least in part. She's kidding by mocking the notion of Russia supporting obscure secessionist movements in the US are basically only taken seriously by people who are heavily medicated or seriously need to be.

But she seems to be very serious about her Russia-is-trying-to-undermine-the-whole-world part of her report. My first question about that part quoted above is, has Maddow ever read a book on Russia by a real historian? Or even the Britannica Online entry? The latter being perfectly respectable, BTW. Britannica also uses real historians to write those pieces. Their current online article on Russia lists 14 scholars of Russia as their contributors.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there were four significant wars in which Russia took a major role. There were two separate wars in Chechnya, an area which has been continuously part of Russia since 1860, where the Russians were fighting Muslim separatists. Or, as they are called in Trumpian-patriotically-correct terms, "radical Islamic terrorists." Naturally, our American motives against such opponents in our War on Terror are entirely praiseworthy. But Russia's were entirely reprehensible, I'm sure.

There were clashes in Georgia in 2008, where ethnic-Russian-dominated areas established two autonomous republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, actively backed by Russian. Then there were the dramatic conflicts in Ukraine from 2014, when Russia also backed ethnic Russian autonomy movements and annexed the Crimea to Russia. Let's stipulate here that these actions raised all sorts of international law issues, especially the Crimea annexation.

Backing the autonomy movements in Georgia and Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea, were geopolitical responses - right or wrong - to the expansion of NATO and moves to incorporate those two countries into NATO. If Russia is in effective control of part of those countries' territories, it makes it much more difficult to incorporate them into NATO. Because NATO would then be committed to defending borders that Georgia and Ukraine don't actually control. (Not for nothing, the status of ethnic Russian communities in those areas involves issues going back to Czarist settlement policies in territories incorporated into Russia.)

So, yes, the annexation of Crimea was an expansion of Russian territory from what it was at the beginning of 2008. This is what Rachel Maddow describes as, "They're literally taking over neighboring countries' territory to make Russia a larger country while promoting, in the online space, movements that would break apart their rivals and competitors on the global stage."

I've refrained until this point from invidious comparisons involving American policies. So let me just say that I've very much looking forward to Rachel Maddow's in-depth report of the history of US regime change efforts in Venezuela. Or Chile. Or Argentina. Or Brazil. Or Guatemala. Or El Salvador. Or Paraguay. I'm sure those will be passionate and informative. And delivered in a cheerfully perky manner.

The current politics of Russia-bashing

Max Sawicky writes about the current politics of US-Russian relations, including the election-interference issue, in Russia to Our Right The Baffler 01/11/2017. He focuses in particular on Russia's ideological and other support for rightwing groups in Europe and the US:

It’s tempting but simplistic to see Russian leaders as a fairly narrow species of nationalist interlopers in U.S. domestic politics. More to the point, they are allied with germinating, reactionary forces internationally, if only lately inside the United States.

Right-wing movements in France, Great Britain, Hungary, and elsewhere do not lack domestic political support, and there is no reason to think they would not exist without Russian backing. In the same vein, Trump’s victory here is owed first and foremost to the Republican Party and its sponsors, to all the usual suspects we have been observing with revulsion for decades. In the context of domestic U.S. politics, Putin is not the dog; he’s the tail. ...

The truth of a Russian alliance with rightists does not appear to be controversial, but it suffers from a lack of deserved attention. These movements, need we be reminded, are viciously, violently racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. Similar groups run amok in Russia itself with the apparent indulgence of the authorities. The Trump campaign has brought like-minded creatures out from under the rocks of the U.S. right.

The invaluable Andrew Bacevich reminds us of what the old Cold War was like as a way of cautioning everyone about blundering or charging into a escalating New Cold War (How We Got Here TomDispatch 01/08/2017).

In his introductory note, Tom Engelhardt writes:

It’s easy to forget just how scary the “good times” once were. I’m talking about the 1950s, that Edenic, Father-Knows-Best era that Donald Trump now yearns so deeply to bring back in order to “make America great again.” Compared to the apocalyptic fears of those years, present American ones would seem punk indeed, if it weren’t for the way our 24/7 media blow them out of all proportion. I’m thinking, of course, mainly about terror attacks by various “lone wolves” that tend to dominate the news. You know, the disturbed individuals who pick up a butcher knife or assault rifle and head for the nearest mall or club or college campus, or point a deadly vehicle toward a crowd with mayhem and murder in mind. In 2016, in our increasingly securitized world (and language), such individuals have even gained their own official acronym: homegrown violent extremists, or HVEs. [internal hyperlinks omitted]

Bacevich in this article observes:

American elites might, of course, have assigned a far different, less celebratory meaning to the passing of the Cold War [than the End of History narrative]. They might have seen the outcome as a moment that called for regret, repentance, and making amends.

After all, the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, or more broadly between what was then called the Free World and the Communist bloc, had yielded a host of baleful effects. An arms race between two superpowers had created monstrous nuclear arsenals and, on multiple occasions, brought the planet precariously close to Armageddon. Two singularly inglorious wars had claimed the lives of many tens of thousands of American soldiers and literally millions of Asians. One, on the Korean peninsula, had ended in an unsatisfactory draw; the other, in Southeast Asia, in catastrophic defeat. Proxy fights in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East killed so many more and laid waste to whole countries. Cold War obsessions led Washington to overthrow democratic governments, connive in assassination, make common cause with corrupt dictators, and turn a blind eye to genocidal violence. On the home front, hysteria compromised civil liberties and fostered a sprawling, intrusive, and unaccountable national security apparatus. Meanwhile, the military-industrial complex and its beneficiaries conspired to spend vast sums on weapons purchases that somehow never seemed adequate to the putative dangers at hand. [internal hyperlinks omitted]

Is the End of History finally over? And do we have a New Cold War?

"We do not have to talk about avoiding cold war. It is here already — at Moscow’s initiative. What we can do is to contain the damage, protect our allies, and try to prevent the cold war from becoming hot." - Michael Rywkin, Russia: An Adventure to Restore the Empire American Foreign Policy Interests 37:2 (2015)

"[P]ost-Cold War US relations with Russia and China have never been simple or smooth. They appeared tolerable but have been deteriorating for years. Moscow and Beijing never abandoned the 'inherent bad faith' model of the Cold War. They always suspected US motives and still do. Moscow and Beijing harshly criticized their recent United States ambassadors, Michael McFaul and Gary Locke respectively, something rare in diplomacy that indicates deep hostility and cannot be resolved by reset buttons." - Michael Roskin, The New Cold War Parameters 44:1 (2014)

New Cold War talk has been in the air the last couple of years, with the Obama Administration's latest sanctions against Russia in response to Russian hacking attacks - and probably in response to other undisclosed events - racheting up the talk during the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Family Business Administration.

Andrew Cockburn talks about this latest round in an article published before the new US sanctions were announced (The New Red Scare Harper's Dec 2016):

Despite some esoteric aspects, the so-called Russian hacks, as promoted by interested parties in politics and industry, are firmly in the tradition of Cold War threat inflation. Admittedly, practitioners had an easier task in [the 1960s]. The Cold War was at its height, America was deep in a bloody struggle against the communist foe in Vietnam, and Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain, behind which millions chafed under Soviet occupation.

Half a century later, the Soviet Union is long gone, along with the international communist movement it championed. Given that Russia’s defense budget is roughly one tenth of America’s, and that its military often cannot afford the latest weapons Russian manufacturers offer for export, resurrecting this old enemy might seem to pose a challenge to even the brightest minds in the Pentagon. Yet the Russian menace, we are informed, once again looms large. According to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Russia “has clear ambition to erode the principled international order” and poses “an existential threat to the United States” — a proclamation endorsed by a host of military eminences, including General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his vicechairman General Paul Selva, and NATO’s former Supreme Allied Commander, General Philip Breedlove.

True, relations with Moscow have been disintegrating since the Bush Administration. Yet Russia achieved formal restoration to threat status only after Putin’s takeover of Crimea in February 2014 (which followed the forcible ejection, with U.S. encouragement, of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government just a few days earlier). Russia’s intervention in Syria, in the fall of 2015, turned the chill into a deep freeze. Still, the recent accusation that Putin has been working to destabilize our democratic system has taken matters to a whole new level, evoking the Red Scare of the 1950s. [my emphasis]

And, yes, the US military-industrial complex is real, as is it's much less formidable Russian counterpart. And still making money. And wanting to make even more:

There would seem to be one major difference between the fine art of threat inflation as practiced during the Cold War and the current approach. In the old days, taxpayers at least got quite a lot for their money, albeit at inflated prices: the 900 ships, the 15,000 planes, and so forth. Things are different today. The so-called global war on terror, though costing more than any American conflict apart from World War II, has been a comparatively lackadaisical affair. Iraq at its height absorbed one fifth the number of troops sent to Vietnam, while Air Force sorties ran at one eighth the earlier level. Though the weapons cost more and more, we produce fewer and fewer of them. For example, the Air Force originally told us they were buying 749 F-22 fighters at a cost of $35 million each. They ended up with 187 planes at $412 million apiece. The trend persists across the services — and sometimes, as in the case of the Army’s Future Combat Systems, no weapons are produced at all.

This may be of comfort to those who worry at the prospect of war. Yet the threat inflation that keeps the wheels turning can carry us toward catastrophe. Among the token vessels deployed to reassure Eastern European NATO countries have been one or two Aegis Destroyers, sent to patrol the Baltic and Black Seas. The missiles they carry are for air defense. Yet the launchers can just as easily carry nuclear or conventional cruise missiles, without any observer being able to tell the difference. [my emphasis]

Kari Roberts recalls that we earlier had another round of fretting about a New Cold War (Why Russia will play by the rules in the Arctic Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 21:2 (2015):

Talk in 2007–2008 of a “new Cold War” ..., while it abated under Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, has been revived in Putin’s third term. Recently, and in addition to Russia’s agitation of the political instability in Ukraine, Russia’s harboring of Edward Snowden, and its stance of perpetual opposition to Western initiatives in dealing with the Assad regime in Syria, have revived the demonization of Russia and reawakened concerns that the West has much to fear from Russia. Such concerns were amplified by former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who likened Putin’s seizure of Crimea to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia and Poland in the 1930s....

Julia Ioffe suggests Russian leaders weren't necessarily being delusional when they began worrying about Western regime change attempts in the late End of History period (The End of the End of the Cold War Foreign Policy 12/21/216):

To some conservative Russian thinkers, many of whom came to influence Vladimir Putin in his third turn at the presidency, the very idea of Russia as a democracy was itself a kind of defeat. It was an imposition of a foreign system of government ill-suited to Russia’s traditions and historical insistence on greatness, unity, and the subservience of the individual to a strong, centralized state. They, and Putin, resented Westernization, especially in its geopolitical manifestations, like NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia in spite of Moscow’s protestations.

Then, in the 2000s, George W. Bush’s program of regime change and democracy promotion supported democratic uprisings in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. This terrified Putin, who feared Washington would support something similar in Moscow. He responded by actively marginalizing his opposition, creating a militant pro-government youth movement, and castrating what was left of the independent press at home. Then came the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and, quite nearly, Bashar al-Assad — all in the name of Western democracy. And it came against the backdrop of protests under the Kremlin walls of Westernized, urban, white-collar Muscovites demanding a more transparent, accountable form of government. They stood in the winter cold of December 2011 and explicitly asked for a European-style government.

Ioffe believes that Russian influence in the 2016 Presidential election was effective. But not precisely because of the Democratic National Committee hacks:

But the real victory here is landing these armies on American shores. In 2016, Putin did just that, thoroughly Russifying the U.S. presidential election. The hacks aside (which, Putin could argue, are no different than what America has done for decades during and after the Cold War in supporting “color revolutions” and regime change), what made it a victory was the imposition of a Russian model of politics onto the West, an effective and very tangible reversal of the status quo that had been in place since 1991. An American presidential election became rife with Russianesque conspiracy theories, fake news, absurdity, and the steady, strategic flow of kompromat (compromising information). It was, in other words, a downright Russian election.

Dr. Alex Pravda of the University of Oxford wrote in 2014, obviously before the US election controversy of 2016, that Western countries "micro-toughness with macro-flexibility we should concentrate on working to improve Russian compliance with jointly agreed norms" while avoiding "the kind of broadsides against Russia and its values that forms part of the New Cold War approach." (Don’t call it a new Cold War: partnership with Russia is not damaged beyond repair European Leadership Network 12/24/2014) Since Trump obviously shares more than a little of Putin's autocratic values, theoretically a Trump Family Business Administration could avoid those kind of broadsides easily. But we'll see what pops up on Twitter.

And he outlined the different priority zones that he sees shaping Russian perception of their national interest under Putin:

It is worth highlighting the variation in the intensity of conflict of interests across the arenas of our interaction with Russia. The first zone is Russia’s ‘near abroad’, the former Soviet space where it claims ‘privileged’ interests. There, it is willing to take combative action to prevent the extension of NATO and a degree of EU association that would enable neighbouring states to sustain external policies Moscow deems hostile. Russia’s sense of entitlement to a sphere of influence clashes with Western support for the sovereignty of all states in the neighbourhood. Here the conflict of interest is most direct and the West most likely to be seen by Moscow as an opponent. We need to reconfigure through consultative engagement some components of the badly shattered partnership and construct it on a new basis. In the case of Ukraine, this might include ‘devolution-max’ arrangements that would enable Kiev to sustain stable development and allow for sufficient economic ties with Russia to reassure Moscow.

In other areas of strategic importance further afield, such as the Middle East and South Asia, Russian stakes are lower and less rooted in a sense of historical identity and entitlement to dominance. National interests are defined in largely geopolitical terms. The aim is to be an indispensable player. Here, the West is a rival rather than an inveterate adversary, and Moscow is willing to negotiate deals to maximise its economic and strategic advantage. There is scope for repairing this part of the partnership as room exists for more consultation and cooperation to tackle common problems: chaotic instability and the threat posed by militant Islamic movements.

At the global level, Moscow sees itself aligning with other BRIC states to help counter-balance what it perceives as a U.S. effort to prolong dominance over a world system in which Russia is one of several emerging poles. The current pivot to China and Asia is likely to become more prominent, yet Moscow remains aware of its potential conflicts of interest with Beijing. And we should remember that Moscow’s ruling elite consider Russia historically and culturally to be an integral part of Greater Europe, not Asia. We should make a better use of this identity and European aspirations when dealing with Russia, particularly on Ukraine and its neighbours.

Syria and Russia, in foreign policy and domestic politics

Emile Nakhleh presents a humanitarian-hawk case for escalating US-NATO intervention in the Syrian civil war in Syria: Time to Reassess American Strategic View of the Middle East 10/12/2016 in LobeLog Foreign Policy, where the contributors are are typically skeptical of US intervention in the Middle East.

It becomes harder all the time to distinguish the neocon case for intervention here, there and everywhere from the case made by neoconservatives for the same. He presents his policy recommendations in bullet-point form:

• Bring about the end of the Assad regime and the territorial defeat of the Islamic State, which could require targeted military operations by the United States.

• Negotiate with Turkey, Jordan, secular and Islamic anti-Assad groups, other than IS, on setting up a post-Assad provisional government that would pave the way for national elections within a practical timeframe.

• Utilize in conjunction with the UN Secretary General, the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice the appropriate mechanisms to charge Assad and his gang with war crimes for their actions against the people of Syria.

• These charges could extend to Russian military and civilian leaders for their participation in the destruction of Aleppo.

• Negotiate with regional and European states on how and where to settle the massive numbers of Syrian refugees and to return many of them back to their home country.

• Balance American national interest—economic, political, commercial, and security—with American values of good governance.

• Engage regional autocrats on the need to hold fair and free national elections and respect for human rights.

• Engage Saudi Arabia and other regional states on how to curb the spread of extremist religious ideology.

He wants to US to commit to regime change in Damascus and use military means both directly and through allied nations and groups to achieve it. At the same time, the US should commit to the military defeat of one of the main opposition groups ISIS/Islamic State, itself a product of the ambitious US regime-change operation in Iraq during the Cheney-Bush Administration. And pursue international war crimes trials against Syrian and Russian officials. Solve the massive refugee problems created by the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War and the Libyan intervention through some kind of magic diplomatic conjuration. We will also "balance" and "engage" to bring about Jeffersonian democracy and "good governance" throughout the Middle East.

Nakhleh even works in the favorite US piece of anti-Russian propaganda of the moment. "The recent aggressive Russian hacking of American government institutions, including the electoral system and the Democratic National Committee communications, is only the tip of the iceberg," of the cyber-security threat which he also sees as a significant threat from the Mideast.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are committed to escalating US participation in the Syrian civil war. And the corporate media is cheerfully playing along, having in practice learned very little from the Iraq War fiasco, it seems.

This is pretty far from anything resembling foreign policy realism. Juan Cole talks about some of the rapidly evolving complication in Russia and Turkey Make up: What implications for Syria, Kurds? Infomrmed Comment 10/11/2016:

Putin and [Turkish President Tayyip] Erdogan are said to have agreed that civilian humanitarian aid should be allowed to reach the rebel-held East Aleppo pocket. Reuters says that Erdogan said, “We discussed … how we can cooperate on this matter, especially on humanitarian aid to Aleppo, what strategy can we implement so people in Aleppo can find peace ...” In fact, the Syrian government is besieging and bombing the 250,000 civilians in East Aleppo, and Russia is helping. If Putin’s pledge to Erdogan really is implemented, that is huge.

Russian sources suggested (and I would take this with a grain of salt) that Erdogan and Putin had made a secret deal with one another whereby Russia has taken a neutral stance on Turkey’s incursions into Iraq to strike at the separatist PKK Kurdish guerrillas based there, who come over the border to hit Turkish security forces and sometimes to engage in terrorism. In return, Erdogan has ceased regularly demanding that Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad immediately leave office.

If this report has any truth to it, then Turkey may have begun acquiescing in the survival of the Syrian government, which would be huge for the Syrian crisis.

The Obama Administration has shown more restraint than hawks of either the liberal or neocon variety would prefer to have seen in Syria. But their recent initiative to get up war crimes charges against both Syrian and Russian officials plays to both anti-Russian and anti-Assad positions.

The neo-Cold War approach to relations with Russia promises to cause a lot of unnecessary trouble. Fred Kaplan cautions about the hyperventilating over the election-relating hacking that the Administration and the Clinton campaign are blaming on Russia (How Does Obama Respond to Russia’s Cyberattacks? Slate 10/11/2016):

Nobody knows much about “cyberdeterrence” — what it means, what it requires. At this moment, a panel of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board is writing a report on cyberdeterrence, the first official report on the subject, even though cyberweapons have been in existence for decades. We might be witnessing an attempt at forming a cyberdeterrence policy in the midst of an actual international confrontation. Whether it succeeds (if that, in fact, is what it is) may be determined by what happens, or doesn’t happen, on Nov. 8.

Hillary's partisans need to dial it back a bit on trying to tie Trump's imploding campaign to Russian espionage and subversion. Yesterday, even-the-progressive Ceny Uygur did this credulous report, Trump Caught Quoting Russian Propaganda The Young Turks 10/11/2016:

Josh Marshall explains more soberly that Trump's white supremacist base pays attention to rightwing Russian propaganda and has been for a while (The Russia Channel TPM 10/11/2016):

News from Russian propaganda sources are pervasive in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. As a secondary matter we know from Adrian Chen's work that there are a decent number of faux 'pro-Trump' accounts on Twitter that are actually run from troll farms operated by Russian intelligence services. By whichever path, Russian propaganda is ubiquitous on the alt-right/racist web - particularly on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan and similar sites.

It happens that we know the Trump world is awash in the alt-right/neo-Nazi web. After all, that's where all the retweeting of #WhiteGenocide accounts and the like comes from. So anything is possible. Perhaps there's a more complex explanation. But the simplest one is that it's organic. Russian propaganda stories from outlets like RT, Sputniknews and other similar sites spread freely on the alt-right/white supremacist web. And that's where the Trump camp lives. So it's entirely plausible that that's why material that appears only on these Russian propaganda sites shows up so frequently in Trump's speeches.

In other words, don't worry. The Trump campaign isn't infiltrated by Russian intelligence (probably). They're just awash in neo-Nazi and white supremacist propaganda.

And he links to an earlier post of his that looked the same issue, Mapping the Trump Hate Bubble TPM 08/17/2016:

How can it possibly make sense to Trump and his top staffers to turn their campaign over to the head of the junk-right gonzo site Breitbart News? Do they think this is going to make winning more likely as opposed to striking a nail into whatever chance they have to turnaround a terrible trend? Who knows? A perfectly plausible answer that Trump is a committed white nationalist who simply wants to run this kind of campaign. To some extent it's definitely true. But again, there's speculation and then there are looser judgments that are nonetheless very edifying. And these little hints picked up by Ollstein and Brown are views into this world. A major party candidates, the nominee of the Republican party just in advance of the Fall campaign awash in the world of racist white nationalism, anti-American Russian propaganda and more. It's quite a spectacle to behold.

Josh also sketched the current positioning of Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik News in Into the Alt-Left, Alt-Right Russian Alt-Universe TPM 08/16/2016:

Most of us know about RT. What I wasn't aware of was something new called Sputnik News. I'm definitely not the first to write about it. Many others have since it launched in 2014. I just wasn't familiar with it myself until I started seeing it referenced by various alt-left folks on Twitter. At first I thought it was some US outfit with just an arch name. But no, like RT, it's produced by the Russian government for foreign audiences. As Foreign Policy put it two years ago, if RT is a Russian mix of Deutsche Welle and VOA [Voice of America], Sputnik News is their propaganda Buzzfeed or maybe more like some combination of Free Beacon and the supermarket weekly world news. It's punchy, conversant or maybe more more like sorta conversant in all the new-fangled Internetn memes. At least in its American incarnation it's basically Russian propaganda for millennials.

Russia talk from threat-inflating politicians

The rhetoric against Russia from the Obama Administration and our presumptive next President Hillary Clinton has gotten pretty hair-raising lately.

Russia has been a bogeyman for the Western nations many times before

I'm including this long excerpt from yesterday's debate here to convey the Cold-War-like flavor of her comments on Russia, much of it in connection with her plan to escalate US participation in the Syrian civil war:

RADDATZ: And, Secretary Clinton, let me ask you about that, because you have asked for an increase from 10,000 to 65,000 Syrian refugees. We know you want tougher vetting. That's not a perfect system. So why take the risk of having those refugees come into the country?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I will not let anyone into our country that I think poses a risk to us. But there are a lot of refugees, women and children -- think of that picture we all saw of that 4-year-old boy with the blood on his forehead because he'd been bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces.

There are children suffering in this catastrophic war, largely, I believe, because of Russian aggression. And we need to do our part. We by no means are carrying anywhere near the load that Europe and others are. But we will have vetting that is as tough as it needs to be from our professionals, our intelligence experts and others. ...

... But, you know, let's talk about what's really going on here, Martha, because our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days that the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks, the hacking on American accounts to influence our election. And WikiLeaks is part of that, as are other sites where the Russians hack information, we don't even know if it's accurate information, and then they put it out.

We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election. And believe me, they're not doing it to get me elected. They're doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump.

CLINTON: Now, maybe because he has praised Putin, maybe because he says he agrees with a lot of what Putin wants to do, maybe because he wants to do business in Moscow, I don't know the reasons. But we deserve answers. And we should demand that Donald release all of his tax returns so that people can see what are the entanglements and the financial relationships that he has...

RADDATZ: We're going to get to that later. Secretary Clinton, you're out of time.

CLINTON: ... with the Russians and other foreign powers. ...

RADDATZ: Mr. Trump, we're going to move on. The heart-breaking video of a 5-year-old Syrian boy named Omran sitting in an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble after an air strike in Aleppo focused the world's attention on the horrors of the war in Syria, with 136 million views on Facebook alone.

But there are much worse images coming out of Aleppo every day now, where in the past few weeks alone, 400 people have been killed, at least 100 of them children. Just days ago, the State Department called for a war crimes investigation of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its ally, Russia, for their bombardment of Aleppo.

So this next question comes through social media through Facebook. Diane from Pennsylvania asks, if you were president, what would you do about Syria and the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo? Isn't it a lot like the Holocaust when the U.S. waited too long before we helped? Secretary Clinton, we will begin with your two minutes.

CLINTON: Well, the situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the regime by Assad in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, the Russians in the air, bombarding places, in particular Aleppo, where there are hundreds of thousands of people, probably about 250,000 still left. And there is a determined effort by the Russian air force to destroy Aleppo in order to eliminate the last of the Syrian rebels who are really holding out against the Assad regime.

Russia hasn't paid any attention to ISIS. They're interested in keeping Assad in power. So I, when I was secretary of state, advocated and I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones. We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution, unless there is some leverage over them. And we have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground.

But I want to emphasize that what is at stake here is the ambitions and the aggressiveness of Russia. Russia has decided that it's all in, in Syria. And they've also decided who they want to see become president of the United States, too, and it's not me. I've stood up to Russia. I've taken on Putin and others, and I would do that as president.

I think wherever we can cooperate with Russia, that's fine. And I did as secretary of state. That's how we got a treaty reducing nuclear weapons. It's how we got the sanctions on Iran that put a lid on the Iranian nuclear program without firing a single shot. So I would go to the negotiating table with more leverage than we have now. But I do support the effort to investigate for crimes, war crimes committed by the Syrians and the Russians and try to hold them accountable. ...

CLINTON: I would not use American ground forces in Syria. I think that would be a very serious mistake. I don't think American troops should be holding territory, which is what they would have to do as an occupying force. I don't think that is a smart strategy.

I do think the use of special forces, which we're using, the use of enablers and trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening, but let me just ...

The Obama Administration and the Clinton campaign have laid a lot of stress on the claimed Russian interference in the election campaign. As I've said before, Trump's ties to Russia and to Putin's regime are legitimate issues. And when we look at Nixon's secret dealings with the South Vietnamese government to delay the Vietnam War peace talks in 1968, or the Reagan campaign's 1980 "October Surprise" maneuvers with Iran (for which the evidence is circumstantial but nevertheless substantial), we could argue that the Democrats have been too timid in calling out the Republicans for dubious dealings with foreign powers over national elections.

Still, as justified as the outrage over Trump's thuggish threat Sunday night to toss Hillary in jail is, Hillary also walked up to the edge of accusing Trump of conspiring with a foreign power to illegally influence the outcome of the American Presidential election. Which would be a felony in itself.

And while the Democrats are wrong to give the Republicans the kind of passes they've gotten on incidents like those of the 1968 and 1980, this is also the kind of accusation that shouldn't be made lightly.

And so I'm glad to see some healthy skepticism about these charges from people like Marcy Wheeller, who looks at the Russian hacking charge in Argument: The DNC Hadck Attribution Was a Response to Brick and Mortar Events Emptywheel 10/10/2016. She notes that when the Administration's brief October 7 statement on the DNC computer hack is not worded in nearly as definitive a manner as the political and press discussion of it might imply. (The statement is on the Homeland Security website, Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security.) Marcy argues that "the most obvious explanation for why Putin would do all this so blatantly is because in his view the US carried out a coup in Ukraine and is attempting regime change in Syria to choke Russia strategically."

And she cites this article by Jack Goldsmith, The DNC Hack and (the Lack of) Deterrence Lawfare 10/09/2016, in which he also suggests, "For all we know the Russian DNC hack is a response to sanctions for Ukraine and an attempt to win leverage in Syria."

I notice that Goldsmith in that article uses "cyber" as a noun like Donald Trump does.

Marcy also raises a related but different factor that may be influencing the Administration's timing on making the DNC hack accusation:

But Goldsmith doesn’t consider the possibility that things may also work in the reverse way.

The US released this statement at a time when it was also making a big diplomatic push against Russia — proposing a ceasefire at the UN it knew Russia would veto, after having failed to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia directly because it asked for things (a no fly zone, basically) that Russia has neither the interest nor the legal necessity to agree to, because Russia is in Syria at the behest of the still-recognized government of the state, we’re not. As it happens, the US is ratcheting up this effort at a time when our Saudi allies’ activities in Yemen make it hard to make a principled stance against Russia, because we’re implicated in Yemen in the same way Russia is in Syria.

More importantly, things are getting very very hot, with Russia moving missiles to Kaliningrad and threatening retaliation for any strikes on Syrian controlled territory.

So I would suggest the timing of this announcement — basically confirming the same certainty and uncertainty the IC has had for months, then using it to accuse Putin of trying to intervene directly in our country — is actually our response to more concrete events elsewhere, not the reverse (though there admittedly may be some chicken-and-egg stuff here, in that we may have held off on attribution in hope we could negotiate directly with Russia).

That is, both sides seem intent on ratcheting up the conflict between Russia and the US, and blaming Putin for interfering in our elections is one tool to do that.

If I’m right, the statement may have nothing to do with deterrence. Rather, it may have everything to do with escalation of other conflicts, providing a reason to pitch Russia’s strategic moves elsewhere as a direct threat to the US. I’m not saying Russia isn’t a dangerous adversary. I’m saying that the release of this statement will do nothing to prevent more hacks, but it will provide cause to claim the increasingly hot conflict with Russia directly threatens the US. [my emphasis]

In other words, even true claims can be used in defense of questionable policy. And we should all be paying attention, including our vigilant Fourth Estate. Of course, we see in the quote above it was moderator Martha Raddaz, not Clinton or Trump, who introduced the Holocaust analogy for the Syrian civil war. Because the enemies of the United States are always Hitler.

Former British diplomat Craig Murray argues that the Homeland Security statement's claim that the Russian govenrment is behind the hack is flatly false (A Blatant Neo-Con Lie Craig Murray 10/08/2016

It is a plain lie that Russia was responsible for the leak of the Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks. It is quite extraordinary that the Obama administration formally adopted the accusation yesterday.

The US motivation is apparently to attempt to discredit in advance the further Hillary material that WikiLeaks plans to release in the coming month. The official statement that the leak was “consistent with the methods and motivation of Russian directed efforts” is carefully written by the NSA and, when you analyse it, extremely weak. What it says is “there is no evidence whatsoever but this is the sort of thing we think the Russians do”. [The latter statement in quotes is Murrahy's paraphrase.] ...

That the Obama administration has made a formal accusation of Russia based on no evidence is, on one level, astonishing. But it is motivated by desperation. WikiLeaks have already announced that they have a huge cache of other material relating to Hillary’s shenanigans. The White House is simply seeking to discredit it in advance by a completely false association with Russian intelligence.

It fascinates me that the media reports the story widely with no reference anywhere to what the DNC leak actually revealed – that the body organising the Democratic election had a consistent and active bias, doing everything possible to tilt the plating field and ensure that Hillary “won” against Bernie Sanders.

The US government cares so little about its relationship with Russia that it is prepared to launch completely false allegations at the Kremlin in order to influence a domestic election. The implications of that are chilling.

The sentence I elided there reads, "As it happens, I have direct knowledge that there could not have been any evidence as it was not the Russians." But he doesn't elaborate that comment any further to indicate the nature of his source.

Going back to Hillary comment, "We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election."

But of course, Trump and the Republicans aren't going to leave fearmongering and threat inflation over Russia to the Democrats and Martha Raddaz. Trump in Sunday's debate in a typically marginally-coherent rant warned about a supposedly surging nuclear threat from Russia. Jonathan Marshall does a reality-check in Trump’s Lies About a Nuke ‘Gap’ Consortium News 10/11/2016:

The United States currently has more deployed nuclear missiles and heavy bombers than Russia: 741 versus 521. The United States also has almost as large an inventory of nuclear weapons as Russia: 7,000 versus an estimated 7,300. The difference is meaningless: detonation of even a fraction of that total would annihilate not only both countries, but kill a large portion of the world’s population.

Washington can potentially also count on the United Kingdom and France for another 400 deployed nuclear warheads to make the rubble in Russia bounce higher in case of an all-out war.

The two countries’ nuclear arsenals are nearly matched by design — the result of many rounds of nuclear arms negotiations and treaties. By contrast, the U.S. military far outpaces Russia’s in most conventional categories.

Being realistic about combating terrorism and "naming" the enemy

Paul Pillar cautions against conceiving combatting terrorism in the framework of a War on Terror or the like (The Cold War Mindset and Counterterrorism The National Interest 08/20/2016):

We have seen this with references to “World War IV” (the idea being that the Cold War was number III) and “Islamofascism”. The same pattern crops up in numerous other ways. The recent memoir of a former deputy director of the CIA, for example, is grandiosely titled The Great War of Our Time.

Several things are fundamentally wrong with framing counterterrorism this way. One is that this badly misrepresents the nature of the threat from international terrorism in suggesting a foe with a degree of unity and organization comparable to the enemy powers in the twentieth century world wars or to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. If terrorism is what we are worried about, then we need to remember that terrorism is not a foe or an organization or an ideology but instead a tactic used by many different perpetrators with many different ideologies. Even focusing just on the radical Islamist variety of terrorism, there is neither this kind of organizational unity (as indicated by several of the very attacks Trump mentions in his speech, in which the perpetrators had no organizational ties to any larger group) or even ideological unity (as reflected in the Sunni-vs.-Shia conflicts that dominate much of the current strife in the Middle East).

He also makes this observation about one of the Republicans' favorite rhetorical obsessions of the day: "Particularly stupid is the insistence on 'naming' Islamic terrorism. Not only President Obama but also President George W. Bush understood that such 'naming' has nothing to do with understanding threats and instead only alienates more Muslims."

There's also something downright superstitious about the notion. It's as though they think saying the name of someone gives them some magical power over the person.

There actually is a concept in some varieties of Christian fundamentalism called "name it and claim it." Particularly in the "prosperity gospel" trend. Essentially the idea is that if you ask God for some specific thing in prayer and have true faith that He will provide it, then you will get it.

Viewed in a less theological way, it's a mind-over-matter belief.

Pillar is also concerned about the neo-Cold War approach that has, unfortunately, bipartisan support:

The Cold War mindset that is involved here wasn't even an entirely appropriate way of looking at the Cold War itself. It saw global communism as more monolithic than it really was, a misconception that led to such misdirections as the Vietnam War. But at least there really was a USSR, which was a nuclear power and had a global policy of expanding its influence. Applying the mindset to current policy challenges is even less appropriate than it was during the Cold War. And it's not only Donald Trump we have to blame for corruption of public thinking about such challenges.

Grandiose, Manichean Christian fundamentalist thinking is also analogous to overblown Cold War notions.