Posted on 12/09/2014 8:25:01 AM PST by Kaslin
Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government.
Last week, the House passed such a resolution 411-10.
As ex-Rep. Ron Paul writes, House Resolution 758 is so "full of war propaganda that it rivals the rhetoric from the chilliest era of the Cold War."
H. R. 758 is a Russophobic rant full of falsehoods and steeped in superpower hypocrisy.
Among the 43 particulars in the House indictment is this gem:
"The Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Georgia in August 2008."
Bullhockey. On Aug. 7-8, 2008, Georgia invaded South Ossetia, a tiny province that had won its independence in the 1990s. Georgian artillery killed Russian peacekeepers, and the Georgian army poured in.
Only then did the Russian army enter South Ossetia and chase the Georgians back into their own country.
The aggressor of the Russo-Georgia war was not Vladimir Putin but President Mikheil Saakashvili, brought to power in 2004 in one of those color-coded revolutions we engineered in the Bush II decade.
H.R. 758 condemns the presence of Russian troops in Abkhazia, which also broke from Georgia in the early 1990s, and in Transnistria, which broke from Moldova. But where is the evidence that the peoples of Transnistria, Abkhazia or South Ossetia want to return to Moldova or Georgia?
We seem to support every ethnic group that secedes from Russia, but no ethnic group that secedes from a successor state. This is rank Russophobia masquerading as democratic principle.
What do the people of Crimea, Transnistria, Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Luhansk or Donetsk want? Do we really know? Do we care?
And what have the Russians done to support secessionist movements to compare with our 78-day bombing of Serbia to rip away her cradle province of Kosovo, which had been Serbian land before we were a nation?
H.R. 758 charges Russia with an "invasion" of Crimea.
But there was no air, land or sea invasion. The Russians were already there by treaty and the reannexation of Crimea, which had belonged to Russia since Catherine the Great, was effected with no loss of life.
Compare how Putin retrieved Crimea, with the way Lincoln retrieved the seceded states of the Confederacy -- a four-year war in which 620,000 Americans perished.
Russia is charged with using "trade barriers to apply economic and political pressure" and interfering in Ukraine's "internal affairs."
This is almost comical.
The U.S. has imposed trade barriers and sanctions on Russia, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Burma, Congo, Sudan, and a host of other nations.
Economic sanctions are the first recourse of the American Empire.
And agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and its subsidiaries, our NGOs and Cold War radios, RFE and Radio Liberty, exist to interfere in the internal affairs of countries whose regimes we dislike, with the end goal of "regime change."
Was that not the State Department's Victoria Nuland, along with John McCain, prancing around Kiev, urging insurgents to overthrow the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych?
Was Nuland not caught boasting about how the U.S. had invested $5 billion in the political reorientation of Ukraine, and identifying whom we wanted as prime minister when Yanukovych was overthrown?
H.R. 578 charges Russia with backing Syria's Assad regime and providing it with weapons to use against "the Syrian people."
But Assad's principal enemies are the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaida affiliate, and ISIS. They are not only his enemies, and Russia's enemies, but our enemies. And we ourselves have become de facto allies of Assad with our air strikes against ISIS in Syria.
And what is Russia doing for its ally in Damascus, by arming it to resist ISIS secessionists, that we are not doing for our ally in Baghdad, also under attack by the Islamic State?
Have we not supported Kurdistan in its drive for autonomy? Have U.S. leaders not talked of a Kurdistan independent of Iraq?
H.R. 758 calls the President of Russia an "authoritarian" ruler of a corrupt regime that came to power through election fraud and rules by way of repression.
Is this fair, just or wise? After all, Putin has twice the approval rating in Russia as President Obama does here, not to mention the approval rating our Congress.
Damning Russian "aggression," the House demands that Russia get out of Crimea, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria, calls on Obama to end all military cooperation with Russia, impose "visa bans, targeted asset freezes, sectoral sanctions," and send "lethal ... defense articles" to Ukraine.
This is the sort of ultimatum that led to Pearl Harbor.
Why would a moral nation arm Ukraine to fight a longer and larger war with Russia that Kiev could not win, but that could end up costing the lives of ten of thousands more Ukrainians?
Those who produced this provocative resolution do not belong in charge of U.S. foreign policy, nor of America's nuclear arsenal.
The other key differences are that we have not annexed any part of Serbia, and the Serbs did in fact massacre 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica. I don't think Clinton should have jumped in, but we were an honest broker, and we had no intention of annexing either a slice or all of Serbia. Given Putin's repeated encomiums to the Soviet Union, it's evident that he would have annexed Georgia if Bush hadn't sent Air Force resupply missions to Georgia as a tripwire force.
Oh, right, honest brokers: we cancelled military operations in favor of Muslim holidays, but bombed Serbia on Orthodox Pentecost, including bombing a bridge full of civilians on their way to Liturgy, then rebombing it when the village’s inhabitants came to help casualties from the first attack, killing among others the village priest. We spread breathless false stories about Pristina stadium being turned into a concentration camp and Ibrahim Rugova having been killed — stories debunked by AFP visting the empty stadium and calling on Rugova at his home.
But no, you’re right. There was a difference: Russia acted in its own national interests, Clinton acted on behalf of the Muslim terrorist KLA and European Union ambitions in the Balkans.
You have that backwards.
Pat has implied it was Poland’s fault that WWII happened due to its intransigence.
All countries act in their national interests. Russia has gone on the path of military conquest. The EU is a free association of nations. I'm not enamored of it, but countries are free to exit without having EU troops occupy their capitals. Note that Serbia is attempting to join the EU, and may successfully do so by 2020. How bad can the EU be?
Just like a NATO (American) commitment with the Ukraine and other Russian border states is also ill conceived.
Pat would also say that the partitioning of E. Europe between the Nazis and Soviets was “none of our business.” Leading to the question, when does the gobbling-up of small countries become our business?
And his point was that Poland should have been tractable instead of intractable and principled. His point too was that Churchill was part of the problem. If Pat were a Liberal instead of a pseudo conservative, you’d probably see through him, I’d say.
Pat’s against empire building, except when the empires being built are those of US enemies, like Putin’s Russia. When it’s an empire of US allies or not really empires but places where US influence and mutual cooperation is dominant, he’s quite hostile. He’s not really consistent on this.
You are as pathetic an apologist for Putin as Dems are in claiming opposition to Obama is racist.
Today the empire builders are the Islamists and NATO. Not Russia. They have so much resources of their own to exploit, they don't need more. Putin is protecting what they have.
I guess that depends on whether you want to be free to live as a Christian, or prefer to have aggressive secularism in its multiculturalist incarnation rammed down your throat, and whether you want your country to have its own economic policy or to have its economic decisions dictated from Brussels (and indirectly Berlin).
Full disclosure: my tag-line is a quote from remarks Slobodan Milosevic made when the kangaroo court in the Hague refused to allow him to show photographs of Bosniak jihadis exulting over piles heads from decapitated Serb prisoners. If FR gave us more room it would read
"And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was about." -- Slobodan Milosevic
What, that concerns us, does Putin have to apologize for?
As compared to Putin who annexes neighboring countries, demolishes Catholic and Protestant churches and allows Chechnya to impose elements sharia law, including banning gambling and alcohol and requiring women to wear headscarfs? Serbia has the option of not joining the EU.
The apologist is you. Trying to deflect legitimate criticism of Putin’s actions with the same nonsense the Dems use for such with Obama.
Let’s see: the main parties in Serbia that would oppose joining the EU have had their leaders kidnapped and brought up on war-crimes charges against which they have been prevented from offering an effective defense; the remaining members of the parties subjected to incessant vilification by the spokesmen of NATO, the EU and the Western media; Serbia’s spiritual heartland has been forcibly detached and is still occupied by NATO to enforce rule by a government composed of criminal gangs that financed themselves by drug-dealing and trade in human organs harvested from murdered Serbs; and the pro-EU parties have received massive aid from Western governments and Soros-backed NGOs, and Serbia “has the option of not joining the EU”. Okay, sure, and Germany had the option of not signing the Treaty of Versailles.
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