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‘The Daily Beast has learned., U.S. officials and members of Congress briefed on the crisis in Ukraine tell The Daily Beast, Congressional staffers briefed on the matter say U.S. intelligence agencies have, A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed to The Daily Beast that, This official said,’ : with this collection of anonymous sources Mr. Lake confirms his status as the J.J. Hunsecker of ‘foreign policy reporters’. Add to this mix of quotations, the speculations of friendly sources, Michael Turner, Stephen Blank, Olexander Motsyk,Vice Admiral Frank Pandolfe, and even Secretary of State John Kerry, and we have the Lake Method. Call it the shopworn chatter of a Neo-Conservative ideologue. And note the provocative, even inflammatory title: Exclusive: U.S. Won’t Share Invasion Intel With Ukraine.

Political Observer

Mr. Gelb, in his essay titled Obama Must Show He’ll use Military Means to Deter Russia in Ukraine,proves without doubt that he is a Neo-Liberal jingo, although this side of his foreign policy thought is usually muted. It also demonstrates that the difference between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives is completely imaginary, and that Wilsonian Idealism is the continuing malady of American Policy Thinkers, even in their dotage!

Mr. Gelb all but calls President Obama a coward, and then offers the president strategic advice on deployment of F-22’s, as if he were clueless as to the escalation that represents.We should give this advice the scorn it deserves! Mr. Gelb has no military experience, whatever.

The Daily Beast has become a nest of War Mongers, featuring the work of Eli Lake, a notorious manufacturer of propaganda, added to this is the voice of Mr. Gelb, beating the war drum.

Political Cynic

P.S. Please read Mr. Dettmer’s essay and look at the ‘incriminating picture gallery’ that is utterly pathetic, in terms of effective propaganda. For the full effect read Mr.D’s melodramatic hysteria mongering, or should it be dubbed a excerpt from his forthcoming non-fiction novel The Battle for Hearts and Minds:The Revolution in Ukraine co-authored by Victoria Nuland with advice from Robert Kagan?

Mr. Kagan is here Calabazas the Court Jester of Phillip the IV, made eternal by Velazquez. Mr. Kagan/Calabazas is the dissatisfied, the disgruntled , aspiring to be, longing to be Count Olivares. Not exactly a man of action, but a man who made policy and was the king’s favorite, whose passion for war was long lived, accompanied by disasters abroad and rebellion at home. But then there is Victoria Nuland, and the elaborate story I have built falls apart!
Mr. Kagan’s essay is replete with self-serving statistical data, in fact it’s main body is made up of this statistical garnish, and also  a somewhat muted call for a return to the notion and practice of American Greatness, American Exceptionalism. Wilsonian Idealism is a long lived American delusion, not to speak of an utter misnomer.

Political Cynic

The New Cold War and the New Containment were trumpeted by Mr. Ross Douthat in the New York Times of last weekend, Russia Without Illusions, but only as minor players in his weekly column, and then only as a declaration of their potential political unreality, Douthat irony? Little did he realize that The Economist would prove him right/wrong with it’s Russian revanchism cartoon and it’s undisguised hysteria mongering narration:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/03/russian-revanchism
Putin’s Arrow takes the hysteria mongering to a new level as the IMF is poised to ‘lend’ how many billions to Ukraine, as prelude to looting that country, posing as a necessary ‘Austerity Program’. And please don’t forget that that mortgage includes the basing of NATO missiles at Russia’s back door. How can one expect Putin to countenance that. The Russian Bear is back, indeed. In response to the active subversion of Neo-Con Victoria Nuland and her R2P Neo-Liberal allies: Samantha Power and her sidekick Michael Ignatieff. What 5 billion dollars can buy these days is a warmed over Cold War, although it’s decaying corpse reeks of Neo-Con bellicose nostalgia.
Even readers like Courtjester is his biting polemic makes clear that the propaganda just won’t wash. The new American Party Line is the same shopworn exceptionalism, aided and abetted in this instance by The Economist.

And please notice the Putin’s Arrow,  Mars and Venus mentions are the rhetorical frame that dovetail with this utterly convenient anonymous quote: ‘Europeans are not from Venus. They are from Pluto—as in plutocrats who are only interested in making money from Russia,” was the scathing comment of one hawk.’

Political Realist

Mr. Eisler’s essay wastes valuable space and time by pursuing the Mafia/Godfather/Sopranos theme, as rhetorical frame for his essay. He has some valuable observations to share with his readers, yet we must suffer through his pop culture obsession, that don’t particularly illuminate. But it rather obscures the motives of Senator Feinstein, for her attack and puzzling demand for an apology, on the National Security State operatives who have spied on her and her committee.
I live and vote in California, and I’ve watched as the Senator became a replacement for Jane Harmon’s National Security State Lap Dog. Her alliance with Sen. Saxby Chambliss, stands as proof of her collabo mentality, as they both parroted and kowtowed to agencies that Sen. Feinstein now attacks. Sen. Feinstein is a creature of the mob, to put it inelegantly, not to speak of crudely. From my perspective, Sen. Feinstein needs very badly to rescue herself from the public perception that she is a lapdog, and her way of backhandedly accomplishing that  is the aforementioned speech and demand for an apology. It isn’t quite as Mr. Eisler makes it to be, the assertion that even the Mafia has a ‘code of ethics’ reeks of vulgar Hollywood melodrama. It sells movies and in this case sells papers and or internet hits. But Sen. Feinstein’s problem is much simpler, it’s purpose is to demonstrate to her constituents that she is somehow above political reproach.

Political Observer

After the spade work done by Victoria Nuland, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy , and various NGO’s to overthrow a corrupt, but duly elected government in Urkaine: better to call it by it’s real name, a coup fostered and paid for by the EU and American money. Mr. Kirchick drops his impersonation of James O’Keefe, in his near comic turn at RT headquarters, and reverts to type: Neo-Conservative political nihilism: fomenting discord as a prelude to war.
View Mr. Kichick’s essay , ( The full title gives the game away: Europe, Stunned by Reckless Russia, Mistrusts Feckless Ukrainian Leaders,The staid European Union is finding it hard to come to grips with Russia’s rule-changing, game-changing behavior) as successor to Mr. Ross Douthat’s mildly hysterical essay in the New York Times of March 22, 1014 titled Russia without Illusions. A telling quote from the Douthat essay:

‘The key here is balance — recognizing that Russia is weak and dangerous at once, that the West has been both too naïve about Putin’s intentions and too incautious in its own commitments, and that a new containment need not require a new Cold War.’

The ‘New Containment’ and ‘New Cold War’ are simply milder forms of Neo-Conservatism i.e. as the senility of a particular branch of Cold War Liberalism. Mr. Kirchick is simply the second generation of that destructive political blight,who is more than willing to sacrifice the lives of anyone but himself to his notion of freedom

Political Cynic  

Mr. Ross Douthat plays the part of the Wilsonian Naif, in his essay of March 22,2014, to the hilt, in the rhetorical pose of cultivated ignorance in regards to the five billion dollars spent by America to subvert the government in Ukraine, with the help of another one hundred million from NGO’s, and the subversive power of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. And don’t forget Ms. Victoria Nuland’s contribution to this episode of pernicious American Meddling. Mr. Douthat is a political conformist who repeats the American Party Line. Mr. Douthat can become self-servingly incurious at propitious moments.

The quality of his analysis is demonstrated in his opening:

SINCE the end of the Cold War, America’s policy toward Russia has been shaped by two dangerous illusions.

The first was the conceit that with the right incentives, eyes-to-soul presidential connections and diplomatic reset buttons, Russia could become what we think of, in our cheerfully solipsistic way, as a “normal country” — at peace with the basic architecture of an American-led world order, invested in international norms and institutions, content with its borders and focused primarily on its G.D.P. Not the old Russian bear, and not an “Upper Volta with rockets” basket case, but a stable, solid-enough global citizen — Poland with an Asian hinterland, Italy with nukes.

But here is the actual New Cold War vision of Mr. Douthat,in the guise of speculation on illusions :

The second illusion was the idea that with the Cold War over, we could treat Russia’s near abroad as a Western sphere of influence in the making — with NATO expanding ever eastward, traditional Russian satellites swinging into our orbit, and Moscow isolated or acquiescent. As went the Baltic States, in this theory, so eventually would go Ukraine and Georgia, until everything west and south of Russia was one military alliance, and its western neighbors were all folded into the European Union as well.

Here we have the ‘New Containment’ without a ‘New Cold War’:

The key here is balance — recognizing that Russia is weak and dangerous at once, that the West has been both too naïve about Putin’s intentions and too incautious in its own commitments, and that a new containment need not require a new Cold War.

When illusions are shattered, it’s easy to become reckless, easy to hand-wring and retrench. What we need instead is realism: to use the powers we have, without pretending to powers that we lack.

What is inconvenient to Mr. Douthat’s argument, in regards to the Russia’s claims and exercise of it’s claims,  is that it ignores America’s hegemonic claims in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and it’s dismal history of the exercise of those claims. The lynchpin of Mr. Douthat’s essay is a self-serving American myopia.

Political Observer

Here is Mr. Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books slated for publication in the March 20th 2014 titled Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine:

‘Later that year Motherland was banned from taking part in further elections after complaints that its advertisements incited racial hatred. The most notorious showed dark-skinned people eating watermelon and throwing the rinds to the ground, then called for Russians to clean up their cities. Glazyev’s
book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order claims that the sinister forces of the “new world order” conspired against Russia in the 1990s to bring about economic policies that amounted to “genocide.” This book was published in English by Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine Executive Intelligence Review with a
preface by LaRouche. Today Executive Intelligence Review echoes Kremlin propaganda, spreading the word in English that Ukrainian protesters have carried out a Nazi coup and started a civil war.’

Here is Mr. Snyder in a blog post at the NYRB dated March 1, 2014 titled Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda:

‘Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right.
From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s newsletter through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist, or even Nazi coup d’état.’

Dissent, on this issue is not a captive of the crackpot ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ as Mr. Snyder self-servingly argues it:
See these telling argued essays by Paul Craig Roberts:

http://www.paulcraigroberts.or…

http://www.paulcraigroberts.or…

http://www.paulcraigroberts.or…

This essay by Mr. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya at MintPress News and Global Research titled The Road To Moscow Goes Through Kiev: A Coup d’Etat That Threatens Russia:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/r…
Here a revelatory quote from Mr. Nazemroaya’s evisceration of American Imperial Hypocrisy:

‘Instead the agreement has been used as
a disguise for the opposition’s takeover of the state. In truth,
the European Union helped broker the agreement as a means of
empowering the Ukrainian opposition. The
leaked phone conversation about the protests in Ukraine between
the US Department of State’s Victoria
Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador in Kiev,
even indicated that the US and EU were planning
on creating a new government in Ukraine. The Nuland tape reveals
that Washington was working to inaugurate a new opposition-led
government in Ukraine with Ukrainian figures that would readily
submit and acquiesce to US and EU demands.

What Nuland and Pyatt discussed is regime change in Ukraine, which
has nothing to do with what the Ukrainian people want and everything
to do with what the US government and its allies need from Ukraine.
If the US government really believed that the Ukrainian people have
the right to determine their future, it would not be busy working to
appoint political figures in the Ukrainian government or trying to
configure how the Ukrainian government would be constructed. Instead
Washington would leave the creation of government in Kiev to the
Ukrainian people.’

At Forbes, Kenneth Rapoza’s essay titled Washington’s Man
Yatsenyuk Setting Ukraine Up For Ruin:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke…
Mr. Stephen F. Cohen on Democracy Now of January 30, 2014:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/…
I’m sorry to say that it looks as if the New York Review of Books has become the captive of the Ignatieff/Sunstein/Power coterie of
Cold War Nostalgics, known for their maladroit formulation of R2P, or without the garnish Neo-Liberalism.

StephenKMackSD

Per Mr. Eli Lake of Feb. 27,2014:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/27/u-s-spies-no-russia-isn-t-about-to-invade-ukraine.html

‘U.S. intelligence estimates conclude that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine. This, despite the launch of a massive, new Russian military exercise near Ukraine’s border and moves from armed men to seize two key airports in the country’s Crimea region.

The latest developments led Ukraine’s interior minister Arsen Avakov Friday to accuse Russia of invading the Russian majority province of Crimea after armed militias took control of the civilian airport in Simferopol, the region’s capital and the military airport in Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based. Russian authorities meanwhile have denied any responsibility for the seizure of the two airports in the region.’

Per Mr. Eli Lake and Mr. Christopher Dickey Feb. 28, 2014:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/28/u-s-spies-said-no-invasion-putin-disagreed.html

‘On Thursday night, the best assessment from the U.S. intelligence community—and for that matter most experts observing events in Ukraine—was that Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine. Less than 24 hours later, however, there are reports from the ground of Russian troops pushing into the Ukrainian province of Crimea; the newly-installed Crimean prime minister has appealed to Putin to help him secure the country; Putin, in turn, is officially asking for parliament’s permission to send Russian forces into Ukraine. It’s not a full-blown invasion—at least, not yet. But it’s not the picture U.S. analysts were painting just a day before, either.’

Eli Lake, the Neo-Conservative adept and friend of Georgia, is doing his part to inflame American Hysteria about the Monster Putin. While he remains utterly and self-servingly mum on the 5 billion dollars spent by the Nuland/Obama axis on the overthrow of a duly elected and utterly corrupt regime: the siren call of the misnomer of ‘Wilsonian Idealism’? Mr. Lake loves to quote from unnamed highly placed officials, he the Walter Winchell of ‘National Security Reporters’ or just a New York Times ‘Reporter’, you be the judge!

Imagine the naivete of President Obama, in daring to provoke Putin in his own backyard, and then having the temerity to lecture him about Russian military action. Without a trace of irony or even modestly engaging in back channel diplomatic negotiation, as the in order to of saving face for this destructive provocation, or could it be agreed that this is worse than a mere blunder?  American Foreign Policy is synonymous with the self-serving lies of the moment, abetted by Mr. Lake and his fellow travelers. A quote seems appropriate to describe the kind of reportage exemplified by Mr. Lake:

‘U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence on the fast moving situation in Ukraine tell The Daily Beast that analytic products from the intelligence community this week did not discount the prospect of Russian provocations and even light incursions in the Russian majority province of Crimea, the home of Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea.’

‘one Senate aide who works closely on the Ukraine crisis.’ ‘This source also stressed ‘ ,’One former U.S. intelligence officer told The Daily Beast’ etc. etc.

And then this hysteria mongering comment from ‘the intelligence officer’ :

‘Putin’s aim is to show that he is in the catbird seat, and there is nothing we can do about it,” this former officer said. “He’s like a kid with a can of gasoline and a book of matches, and he laughs as Obama tries to deliver lectures on how fire is dangerous. Indeed, Putin throws banana peels on the ground, and Obama manages to slip on every one of them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Already there are signs of Russian trickery. Ukrtelecom, Ukraine’s largest internet and cell phone provider, said Friday that most cell and internet service was down for the Crimea region.’

Enter stage right Mr. Jim Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former U.S. Diplomat , to rescue Mr. Lake’s nebulous reportage from the realm of purest speculation, based on unnamed government policy experts. There is more, but I will end my comment here.

Almost Marx