What would Dick Cheney (or President Obama for that matter) have done if Russian NGOs sponsored separatist movements in Texas, California or New England? How would US police have reacted against armed revolutionaries seizing the armory and throwing Molotov cocktails and bombs at public buildings, killing police, painting swastikas on Jewish houses and claiming vigilante justice? While this does not characterize all of the Ukrainian protesters, it does reflect a fair number of them. If this is Obama's "reset" with Russia, he is resetting the Cold War by setting the neocons loose in the former Soviet republics. If there is one thing that the CIA has shown its competence in, it is in setting one ethnic group against the others – Sunni vs Shiite, Kurd against Arab, Persian against them all. When other countries seek to defend a multi-ethnic secular state, the US foreign office has backed the fundamentalists for nearly the past half-century in all cases. This should be the sub-text for reporting on the Ukrainian uprising that seems to have been carefully timed to coincide with Sochi.
Events in Ukraine are provided enough heat to overshadow the conclusion of the Sochi Olympics. Since the USSR's collapse, the "reset" has been changed many times during our long-running Ukrainian "play," but the underlying theme remains the same as it has been in the Near East: Play the ethnic card to break the country into pieces if you want to disable government regulatory power and investment. Co-opt a client oligarchy whose opportunities for the West lie in privatizing public resources and selling shares in the rent-extracting companies on Western stock exchanges. Keep your proceeds in the West and fritter it away on trophy real estate, ownership of sports clubs and London or Swiss bank accounts.
The alternative would be for a strong government to tax away their natural resource rents and use it to subsidize industrial revival. So the path to "peace" is to promote civil warfare, break up countries and concentrate wealth in as few hands as possible so as to channel it to London, New York and other financial centers rather than leaving it to be invested at home. This is how Russia is being turned into a "hewer of wood and drawer of oil and gas for the house of my bond," to paraphrase the Bible (Joshua: 9:23). "None of you will be freed from being bondservants."
This is how American protectionists in the mid-19th century described British strategy for industrial and financial supremacy. And now the tables have been turned – not only against Britain (buckling under its own real estate bubble) but against the post-Communist economies that were utterly free of debt and privatized rent-yielding resources 20 years ago.
How many times are we going to go down this road?
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