Sunday, April 10, 2016

"Our Guys" in Kiev Come Unglued


“Yats is the guy,” crowed Victoria Nuland, the American assistant secretary of state under Hillary Clinton and architect of the U.S. coup d’etat in Kiev, in an intercepted 2014 telephone conversation with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.

Well, “Yats” was the guy.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk  was installed by the U.S. as prime minister of Ukraine after the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven into exile in Russia by a “popular uprising” engineered in Washington. Now, Yatsenyuk has said he will proffer his resignation to the parliament tomorrow.The other American puppet in the Kiev government, President Petro Poroshenko, has been named as a tax cheat in the so-called Panama Papers, and is facing calls to resign as well. In his first year as president, Poroshenko, already a billionaire in the chocolate business, increased his net worth by 20 per cent.

 “Yats” and Poroshenko were billed by their U.S. patrons  as crusaders who would clean up the corruption of the ousted Yanukovych government in Ukraine. Now, their own corruption is their undoing. So much for one of the great foreign policy achievements of Secretary Clinton and her neocon henchfolk.

The Ukraine regime change to a Yatsenyuk-Poroshenko government was part of the larger Washington ploy to bring down Vladimir Putin in Russia by ensnaring its neighbor, Ukraine, into the net of European Union and nudging NATO weaponry  to the very borders of the bear.

Last week, in an advisory election, the Netherlands voted 2-1 not to take part in the EU squeeze play on Kiev.  The Dutch government, which has already agreed to join in, doesn’t have to heed the voice of its people,  but would pay a political price for caving in to Washington now.

Meanwhile, there’s a fragile cease-fire in the civil war between the pro-Russian eastern Ukraine and the duped and discredited regime in Kiev.  The latest contretemps in the west won’t make that truce any more stable. Another spike may be coming in the human toll for Washington’s foreign policy blunders there.

This is just one of many areas of the world where ex-Secretary Clinton’s “foreign policy expertise” is a tragic fiction, a myth manufactured to enhance her campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.

Her toadying speech to AIPAC last month made it clear that Israel's warhawk prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would be an ad hoc foreign minister and policy-maker in a Clinton II administration. Her so-called East Asia “pivot,” the decision to grant NATO-equivalent “ally” status to Afghanistan, the decision to attempt to maintain an impossible status quo in Pakistan . . . each of these blunders casts doubt on her foreign policy credentials. Not Benghazi, but the decision to ignore the advice of the Pentagon and join in the military overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya created a chaos for which we and the world continue to pay a terrible price.  And when Gaddafi was sodomized by bayonet, this woman snickered and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Is this the sort of mind we want in the Oval Office?