libertybelle diaries

“Still, the influence of all that youthful television-watching is present today. In a book on the inner workings of Obama’s presidential reelection campaign, Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that although Obama’s biographers “have been more enamored with his complexity,” Obama himself “seeks shallower waters, especially in times of crisis.” When the going gets tough in the White House, Thrush says, the president plays sports and watches ESPN. Indeed, while Obama’s administration was beset by scandals regarding improper IRS investigations and the death of U.S. officials in Benghazi, the New York Times’s Peter Baker reported that Obama “talked longingly of ‘going Bulworth,’ a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought.” Thrush, it seems, was right that movies and TV served as Obama’s version of “comfort food.”” –

– Commentary Magazine – “The Pop Presidency of Barack Obama”, 10-01-13

So, once again the President is nowhere to be seen yesterday, as the situation escalated in Crimea.  Reports surfaced that the National Security Team huddled at the White House for a meeting, but the leading from behind captain of the team skipped the meeting.  Of course, his handlers rushed to assure America and the world, that the President was briefed.

Anyone with some functioning brain cells should have seen Putin’s moves in Crimea coming.  Putin comes from the Cold War era geopolitical school, where he learned from hard school of knocks experiences.  He reads history, he studies maps, he actually takes his leadership responsibilities deadly serious.  Russian influence in Crimea looms vastly important to Russian national security and obviously, he will not cede control of Sevastapol to protestors  or Ukrainian authorities hostile to Russia or blustering Western Neville Chamberlains (thanks to David Duff for bringing up Chamberlain).  They won’t allow a power vacuum to threaten their Black Sea Fleet and beyond that Putin surely possesses some grand strategic visions for Russia and at the moment, who in the West will do more than issue hollow threats?

For a pragmatic view of Ukraine’s crisis, here is David Duff’s, ‘In which I laud, the One and Only Obama’.  The Russians have had their Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol for centuries, so let them keep it.  If you want to get your dander up, start paying attention to Russian, Iranian and Chinese military moves in the Western Hemisphere (Monroe Doctrine, anyone)- where they’re creeping up on us.  If the Europeans want to do more about Ukraine, let them muster up more than rhetoric.  The world stage offers  plenty of room from some upstarts to take center stage, since President Obama prefers to loaf in the spectator seats, surreptitiously munching on his chips.  Definitely more concerned about hiding from Michelle’s food police than he is about international crises.

Power vacuums keep expanding and unlike our leader from behind, many of our adversaries don’t wait for polite discussions to fill them.  Rant all you want at Putin, but it’s President Obama and wimpy western resolve that Putin gauged and he sure understands this sort of capitalization.  The cost of acting is minimal and the potential rewards are great, wow, Putin the adventure capitalist …. the world gone mad, I say.

Oh yes, “the past is prologue”.

And, as the world spins closer to chaos, let us remember that oft-quoted sage once more – “I believe it is peace in our time.”  Let’s at least give President Obama credit for surpassing  Henry Kissenger’s  measure of a country’s diplomacy, “No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.”  President Obama, the inept,  doesn’t act at all….. but Putin the new adventure capitalist takes all the risks.  Don’t worry though, this waffler-in-chief, hiding somewhere in the White House watching ESPN,  can sure stand tough on gutting our military, even though he can’t read a world map and he doesn’t have time for international crises.  Simultaneously, Putin is securing his Black Sea Fleet and Russian influence in Ukraine.

Over the past several days the airwaves have been filled with loud demands that we do more to support the Ukrainian protestors (frequently dubbed a struggle for freedom against the evil Russians).  This reaction comes quite natural to America, with our long Cold War history, but I have some questions about the situation that I haven’t found clear answers to yet.

First, let me say I am weary of the American media latching onto these international crises and presenting everything as a “fight for freedom”, without providing much in the way of historical background information.  It’s very easy to jump onto foreign causes when they are presented as “struggles against Russian oppression” or “fighting against tyranny”, but truthfully the internal politics in these areas usually are fraught with corruption with a capital C, excesses of violence, abuses of power, and  long-held ethnic animosity.  The situation in the Ukraine is no different.  You can go read about the Holodomor, where the Soviets starved millions of Ukrainians to death, to get a taste of the animosity that still ripples below the surface among many ethnic Ukrainians.

In this latest violence, it sure looks like the protestors are the ones who have been on a torching buildings spree in Kiev, not the government.  Not sure how I would feel if protestors in America started setting buildings ablaze, because those 1-percenters with their destruction of other people’s property sure angered me – urinating and defecating anywhere like animals…  Why does no one in the West tell the protestors to quit torching Kiev, yet all you hear about are how the police need to calm down?  I am not condoning police or military forces shooting unarmed civilians, I’m merely asking why our reporting always champions protestors, even when the protestors are setting a city aflame?

The CIA Factbook offers these statistics as to the demographic make-up of present-day Ukraine: “Ukrainian 77.8%, Russian 17.3%, Belarusian 0.6%, Moldovan 0.5%, Crimean Tatar 0.5%, Bulgarian 0.4%, Hungarian 0.3%, Romanian 0.3%, Polish 0.3%, Jewish 0.2%, other 1.8% (2001 census)”  As to the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election, irregularities ran rife, as usual.  International monitors gave varying accounts.  A report by a group of monitors which included Russia, Poland, France, Armenia, Kyrgyzistan and Belarus (Centre for Monitoring Democratic Processes) offered their verdict here.  A Christian Science Monitor explanation of the election can be found here.  Yanukovich won with a less than 50% of the vote, but it seems like he had a good bit of ethnic Ukrainian support or the ethnic Ukrainians didn’t turn out in sizable enough numbers given this huge ethnic Ukrainian numerical advantage. Here’s a NY Times report on the 2010 election, replete with plenty of criticisms – (NY Times story here).  Any theories, facts or information on this numerical question, anyone?

Now, as in all these other hotspots, American politicians like to get on their soapbox and berate the evil Putin for his undo influence in other countries political affairs and in the Ukraine this charge accompanies almost every report in this latest flare-up.  What you don’t hear much about is how American political groups get actively involved in actually managing campaigns (paid political consultants) in many foreign elections – from Israel to the Palestinian Authority to Iraq to Afghanistan to the Ukraine, and so it goes.  Here’s a link to which American political consultants were hired to work for the respective Ukrainian candidates in the 2010 presidential election in the Ukraine.  Now, what this means is American politicians and their cronies pick sides in many foreign elections, their consultants make big bucks organizing campaigns in foreign countries and our “American” foreign policy ends up being as divided as our internal politics due to this partisan-charged environment.  None of the folks in Washington will step back from their partisan talking points and spoon-fed politicized dogma to actually think about America, in the big picture sense – as one country, needing one voice abroad, to promote our national interests.  We can’t even agree on what our own national interests are, yet here we go again trying to jump into other countries internal affairs – half-cocked.  Naturally, John McCain is at the forefront.  Our politicians are just as much trying to influence internal affairs in the Ukraine as the Russians are – let’s at least be honest about that.

And let’s look at the Obama administration flip-flops dealing with foreign hotspots – completely incoherent.  Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Israel – totally embarrassing and colossal failures.  In Syria, Madame Secretary Clinton proclaimed Assad a “reformer”, President Obama declared red lines, and in the end John Kerry and President Obama handed over control of the situation to Putin.  CNN reported: “U.S. talks tough, but options limited in Ukraine”, indicating that even at CNN  the real world seems to be crashing through their  idolization of President Obama as more hype than actual “change you can believe in”.

Before Americans get too fired up by the likes of John McCain with his denunciations of Putin (here’s a pretty typical rant of his), be fully aware that a financial crisis precipitated this latest Ukrainian unrest, when Yanukovich went with a Russian bail-out offer rather than a lesser European offer.  Here’s a quick background on the real source of Ukraine’s continual corruption problem within it’s natural gas and energy industries: “Ukraine’s $19-billion question of debt and corruption”.  So, while McCain is bellowing about sanctions against the Yanukovich government, be aware that what’s really going to be asked of us, to secure  a European-leaning Ukraine, is a huge bail-out for the Ukraine, which is ranked 144th by Transparency International on corruption – tying with countries like the Central African Republic and Iran and scoring worse than Uganda.  The Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe.  If you still feel dismayed at Obama’s bailouts and haven’t had any satisfactory answers as to where all that money went, imagine tossing money into this Ukrainian gambit?

Finally, the Russians have a legitimate interest in the Ukraine based on centuries of ties.  The Russians have based their Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol since the time of Catherine the Great, so it’s not like they just decided to meddle in the Ukraine on a whim.  NATO has pushed toward integrating the Ukraine and Georgia into it’s sphere and there are many Ukrainians who would welcome aligning with Europe.  There are also many ethnic Russians in the Ukraine who want a closer Russian alliance.  The Russians brokered a deal with Yanukovich in 2010, extending the lease for the Black Sea Fleet for 25 years (story here), putting a kibosh on the NATO dream.  As I stated in a post the other day, in real terms, the Russian national security framework shattered with the collapse of the Soviet Union and if you’re Putin standing in Moscow today, his European adversaries are a thousand miles closer – with no natural geographic roadblocks.  Unlike President Obama, I am confident that Vladimir Putin understands military strategy, geopolitics and has a keen grasp of map-reading (remember O and  his 57 states…), so in clear strategic terms, Putin’s moves make perfect sense, while our meandering posturing creates more chaos and international instability.  I’m not for or against either side in the Ukraine.  As an outsider, I’m just trying to make sense out of the chaos and understand what the respective sides are demanding and demolishing.