[Peace-discuss] Buchanon sympathizes with Russia?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Amazing.

Blowback from Moscow
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, November 30, 2007

Our next president will likely face a Russia led by Prime Minister  
Vladimir Putin, determined to stand up to a West that Russians  
believe played them for fools when they sought to be friends.

Americans who think Putin has never been anything but a KGB thug will  
reject accusations of any U.S. role in causing the ruination of  
relations between us.

Yet the hubris of Bill Clinton and George Bush I, and the Russophobia  
of those they brought with them into power, has been a primary cause  
of the ruptured relationship. And the folly of what they did is  
evident today, as Putin's party, United Russia, rolls to triumph on a  
torrent of abuse and invective against the West.

Entering the campaign's final week, Putin, addressing a rally of  
5,000, ripped the Other Russia coalition led by chess champion Gary  
Kasparov as poodles of the United States, "who sponge off foreign  
embassies ... and who count on the support of foreign resources and  
governments, and not of their own people."

"Those who oppose us," roared Putin, "don't want our plans to be  
completed. They have completely different tasks and a completely  
different view of Russia. They need a weak, sick state, a  
disoriented, divided society, so that behind its back they can get up  
to their dirty deeds and profit at your and my expense."

Putin is referring to the time of the "oligarchs" of the Yeltsin era,  
who looted Russia when its state assets were sold off at fire-sale  
prices.

Putin is also accusing his opponents of attempting to use the Western- 
devised tactics of mass street protests to bring down his government.  
"Now that they have learned some things from Western specialists and  
tried them in the neighboring republics, they are going to try them  
on our streets."

Putin is talking here about the "color-coded" revolutions that the  
U.S. and NATO embassies, the National Endowment for Democracy, and  
allied foundations and front groups engineered in Ukraine and  
Georgia. Governments tilting toward Moscow were dumped over and pro- 
Western regimes installed -- to bid for membership in NATO and the  
European Union.

Blowback is a term broadly used in espionage to describe the  
unintended consequences of covert operations. The revolution that  
brought the Ayatollah to power is said to be blowback for the U.S.- 
engineered coup to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953 and install the Shah.

The nationalism and anti-Americanism rife in Putin's Russia is  
blowback for our contemptuous disregard of Russian sensibilities and  
our arrogant intrusions into Russia's space. How did we lose a Russia  
that Ronald Reagan and Bush I had virtually converted into an ally?

We pushed NATO into Moscow's face, bringing six ex-Warsaw Pact  
nations and three ex-Soviet republics -- Lithuania, Latvia and  
Estonia -- into our Cold War alliance and plotted to bring in Ukraine  
and Georgia.

We financed a pipeline from Baku through Georgia to the Black Sea to  
cut Russia out of the Caspian oil trade. After getting Moscow's  
permission to use old Soviet bases in Central Asia to invade  
Afghanistan, we set about making the bases permanent. We pulled out  
of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty over Moscow's objection, then  
announced plans to plant ABM radars in the Czech Republic and anti- 
missile missiles in Poland.

Putin has now responded in kind, and who can blame him?

As we tried to cut him out of the Azerbaijan oil with a Black Sea  
pipeline, he is slashing subsidies on Ukraine's oil and colluding  
with Germany on a Baltic Sea pipeline to cut Poland out of the oil  
trade with Western Europe.

As we moved our alliance and bases into his front and back yard, he  
has entered a quasi-alliance with China and four nations of Central  
Asia to expel U.S. military power from the region.

As we abandoned the ABM Treaty, the Duma, in November, voted 418 to 0  
to suspend participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty,  
which restricts the size of the Russian army west of the Urals.

If we recognize Kosovo as independent, at the expense of Serbia,  
Putin is now threatening to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the  
breakaway republics of Georgia and Transneistria, claimed by Moldova.

Where we backed the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose  
Revolution in Georgia, Russia backs its favorites in Kiev and  
supports street protests in Tbilisi against the pro-American regime  
of Mikhail Saakashvili, whom the United States now seems powerless to  
help.

It was not NATO that liberated Eastern Europe. Moscow did -- by  
pulling out the Red Army after half a century. Why, then, did we  
think moving NATO into Eastern Europe was a surer guarantee of their  
continued independence than the goodwill of Russia?

Many among our foreign policy elite now talk of a Second Cold War.  
John McCain wants Russia kicked out of the G-8.

But do we not have enough enemies already that we should add the  
largest nation on earth?



Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative  
magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency:  
The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America .
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