Dirty Hand Whitewashes Black Coups

Somebody needs to put hats — white for good guys, black for bad guys — on all those demonstrators in foreign countries.  

It would help the United States foreign policy makers.  Right now our unclean hands are leaving fingerprints all over the protests, and things are getting sticky. With diplomats who get caught saying things like “Fuck the EU,” it’s no wonder things are getting sticky. We don’t choose sides very well.

The diplomat who dropped the F-bomb — Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland — and  the person on the other end of the line —U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt — are up to their ears in fomenting the coup that drove a democratically-elected president out of office in the Ukraine.   Now they are openly cheerleading for the interim opposition government, and boasting of this country’s $5 billlion “investment” in the regime change.

But the side we chose to back in this smelly affair turns out to be run largely by neo-Nazis.  The side we drove out, it’s true, is pro-Russian.  But President Viktor Yanukovych had agreed with the opposition on an orderly transition toward early elections. Then right-wing armed patrols shattered the agreement and took strategic positions around Kiev, forcing Yanukovych to flee. 

Yanukovych left unguarded the plush digs that were the fruits of the graft and corruption in his government, but in our haste to blacken Vladimir Putin’s Russian eye during his showcase Winter Olympics, we didn’t bother to inquire deeply enough into what now looks like a from-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire strategy. What’s worse? A corrupt democrat or a Nazi regime on the very borders of the EU?

Putin, who bailed President Barack Obama out of a leaky boat on Syria, doesn’t suffer black eyes kindly.  A two-state Ukraine, ostensibly a “compromise,” would leave Russia with the prosperous half of the country, and the U.S. and its E.U. puppets with the economically troubled half, but even that wouldn’t pacify Putin.  So what we’ve created by meddling into a regional problem is to make it a bigger, global one.  Do we really want another Cold War, simmering with the threat of becoming a hot one?

The same policy makers who conned Obama into his Ukraine quagmire were bullying him toward military intervention in the civil war in Syria, on the side of the opposition, because of specious allegations that the Syrian government poison-gassed civilians.  You can’t have enough wars for these guys, who were infuriated when Putin brokered a deal that would remove Syria’s illegal chemical weapons under international supervision. This rendered moot, for a moment,  the question of U.S.military involvement in Syria.

The neocon warhawks who want to at least bomb, if not invade Syria have really mucked up the situation regarding Iran. Just when a new and more moderate head of state took office there, and made overtures to the west, and Obama agreed to a new round negotiations toward a peaceful resolution of what U. S. media satraps termed the Iran nuclear “threat,” the neocons began to rattle their swords for tougher economic sanctions against Iran. Awash in bribes from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), congressional whores of both parties seized upon an Israeli agenda item demanding that the Iran talks be broadened to include curbs on Iranian military missile capability.  It’s all a not-very-veiled attempt to sabotage the talks and force Obama to agree to the Israeli government’s insistence upon bombing Iran into subservience.

Our foreign policy fruitcakes are messing around all over the globe, from shadow wars and drone attacks not only on foreign governments we don’t like and U.S.citizens who support them, to the fomenting of “popular uprisings” against disfavored foreign leaders as stage-setters for possible CIA assassination attempts.

American neocons’ open contempt for Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution in Venezuela knew no bounds.  Chavez was elected and re-elected in large part thanks to support from the country's poor, who were downtrodden by previous governments.  He addressed  their needs and frustrations, by establishing “social missions” across the country, aimed at eradicating illiteracy, distributing staple foods and providing health care. Chavez’s hand-picked successor, President Nicolas Maduro, has pursued the same policies, but lacks Chavez’s political skills in dealing with the nation’s irate elite, who, like their U.S. counterparts in the GOP, oppose aid to the impoverished with a hateful determination.

America’s Black Ops army sensed Maduro’s vulnerability and stirred up the student protests that launched the current wave of violence. 

The dirty fingerprints are everywhere. As Casey Stengel might have put it, “Don’t nobody here know how to play the game right?”