01/06/15 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show.
Oh, man, I need to hit the button here.
I'm doing too many things at once, trying to do a live radio show and typing an email and making a Skype call and babbling into a microphone and watching Fox News.
Oh, God.
All right.
Well, I'm all right, though.
I'm going to put the email aside for a minute, and I'm going to turn away from Fox News for sanity's sake.
And I'm going to introduce our friend Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst for 27 years.
He's now the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
What they do is they write letters, open letters to public officials saying, no, no, you're wrong.
And the horrible thing that you're doing is horrible and will cause terrible consequences.
And then it's all signed by a bunch of former CIA officers and former military intelligence officers and former FBI agents and that kind of thing.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Also, he has his own website, which is RayMcGovern.com.
And he writes for Robert Perry over there at ConsortiumNews.com, where they win the Scott Horton Award at Consortium News, certainly for their coverage of the Ukraine crisis and America's relationship with Russia over the last year, better than anything at The Nation or anywhere else, and especially on a consistency basis there.
The great, I got to admit it, the great Bob Perry, no matter what he says about us libertarians, the great Bob Perry and our friend Ray McGovern and their great coverage of Ukraine over there.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ray?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Happy New Year to you.
Happy New Year to you too.
Very happy to have you back on the show again.
And so your most recent piece here is called Rebuilding the Obama-Putin Trust and goes along with, like I just mentioned, many other articles along these same lines, especially over the past year here.
But I guess to get right to the point, we're going to have to get to the history first.
Can you tell us as briefly as you can, can you state the case for what it is that you believe transpired last February 21st, 22nd in the regime change or the change of government?
However, I don't want to prejudice it.
The end of the presidency of the last guy there in Ukraine, leading up to the current controversy.
Yeah, Yanukovych was deposed by a coup led by neo-fascist groups on the 22nd of February.
A day after an international agreement had been worked out with the Ukrainian authorities, whereby Yanukovych, the president, would leave early, there would be early elections and everything seemed to be in track, on track.
Now, all of a sudden there were snipers shooting at both sides of the people on Maidan Square.
And we had the invasion of the federal offices in the President's building and the Congress there.
And the Western legend eaten up by the New York Times, Washington Post, everybody else, is that Yanukovych fled.
He left.
He disappeared.
This was a classic coup d'etat.
As a matter of fact, the president of Stratfor, you know, no left-wing organization that, has said that this is the most blatant coup in the history of mankind.
It had been advertised on YouTube three weeks before.
So most people know that story.
In any case, that was the proximate cause of why the people out in the eastern and southeastern part of Ukraine didn't want any part of this coup government, which, as I say, was pushed into power largely by pro-Nazi forces who are fighting the, what are called, this is important, what are called pro-Russian separatists out there.
Well, they're not pro-Russian separatists.
They're anti-coup federalists.
Big difference.
They don't like the fact that their duly constituted elected president was removed in a coup arranged by the United States and the EC, and they're not about to submit to them.
Now, has Russia encouraged them in this?
They needed no encouragement.
What they did need is some political and some military support, let's face it.
But, you know, what the western version starts out with, and I encounter this all the time as I do interviews with places like the BBC, they're all right, Mr. McGovern.
Now, how do you feel about Russian aggression and Putin seizing Crimea?
And I say, well, you know, why do you start at the seventh inning here?
And what do you mean?
I said, well, you know, this all started, approximately at least, with the coup, the coup d'etat, the coup d'etat in Kiev orchestrated openly by our State Department and Putin.
Putin had no idea.
There's not one scintilla of evidence that Putin and his friends there had any idea of reincorporating the Crimea into Russia proper until the coup, and that forced their hand.
So people can't start with the, quote, seizing, end quote, of Crimea.
They need to start with the background.
And there's even more background, as you know, we've talked about it before, the whole business about the US and NATO violating their pledge, their promise to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze way back in 1990, that NATO would not move, quote, one inch eastward, end quote, toward the Soviet Union at the time and toward Russia.
And as we know, by now, there have been 23, well, actually, 12, 14 new states joining NATO, all of them to the east of East Germany.
So that's the earlier cause.
After 25 years, that's still great.
So the question arises in Putin and other people's minds, why do they need to do this?
What are they really after?
And that's the question that needs to be resolved this year.
Right.
Well, and I hate to divert off onto this, but it is important, and it can't always go without saying, but it usually does when we talk about this stuff.
So the responsibility of the American people for listening, not that they've really supported the policy or whatever, but they tend to buy these stories hook, line and sinker, no matter how many times we get hit with this.
It's not like the last time this happened, it was Lyndon Johnson lied to us about the Gulf of Tonkin, right?
We've had this over and over and over again, where whatever it is that they say about what's going on is never true.
The North Korea Sony hack is the one from, you know, the most recent one where there's really no reason to believe North Korea has anything to do with it whatsoever, at least that we've heard so far.
But don't they won't let that stop them on TV.
And and according to the polls, or at least according to what the TV claims, the polls say, Ray, 75 percent of the American people are willing to snap to and say, yeah, let's get North Korea.
They're the enemy.
They're out to get us.
Oh, yeah.
No, the the evil Vladimir Putin is on the march.
He wants to recreate the Russian empire.
He's an aggressor.
And what's America going to do to contain his aggression?
TV said so even after Iraq, even after Libya, even after all these things.
So it seems like there's a responsibility at some point on the adults of this society to really put their foot down and say no more to this and to say, no, we just don't believe you.
Whatever it is that you're claiming is just a claim to us.
And whoever it is that you're accusing is presumed innocent by us because you guys are liars and killers.
And what are we talking about?
Well, Scott, you put your finger on it.
And since this is a new year, I'll say what I've said every year for the last 12 that I've seen a lot of change in Washington in 50 years.
But by far, the most significant change by far is the fact that we no longer have in any real sense a free media that is big.
So the fourth estate is dead.
Now, the good news is there's a fifth estate.
We're speaking on it now.
Young people are much more attuned to the fifth estate.
And so we have to find ways to get grown up people old as I am or almost as old as I am to turn in to where they can get real news.
That is a formidable challenge.
And I think we're making progress, but it's slow.
You know, you can't hold the American people innocent for being for avoiding these kinds of things.
But you can say, well, given the economics of the situation here among most Americans, you know, they have one or two jobs.
They come home, they feed the kids, they put their feet up and they don't want to they don't want to go into Consortium News dot com.
They want Fox News.
And they think they're getting news from that.
That doesn't excuse them.
But it explains that.
All right.
Yeah, I think so, too.
Yeah.
James Fallows has this thing in the Atlantic mostly blaming the American people and letting the government off the hook.
And they're the ones who are, you know, the actual politicians in charge are the ones.
But anyway, I'm sorry.
We got to take this break.
We'll be right back with the great Ray McGovern in just one second.
Hey, you own a business.
Maybe you should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern here.
Veteran intelligence professional for sanity and writer at Consortium News dot com.
Check out his Web site, Ray McGovern dot com as well.
And we're talking about America's relationship with Russia.
And I'm sorry I got us all off diverted on the media and the American people and this and that and whatever.
And I would get straight back to what you were saying about the relationship of eastern Ukraine and the West and the American role, except that I think right when we were going out to break, you were trying to say one more thing there and were interrupted.
So if you wanted to wrap up one more point about the American people and the foreign policy here.
Well, I think pretty much I said it.
It's a terribly unfortunate situation when the American people can't learn the truth.
I guess I was going to adduce the worst example ever.
John Mearsheimer, preeminent political professor, political science professor at University of Chicago, widely respected.
He writes this article in Foreign Affairs and they print it and it says the U.S. is responsible for the troubles in Ukraine.
And it lays out all the evidence.
Now, Foreign Affairs being the Journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the most prestigious think tank for 100 years running now in New York.
You're provoking me.
OK, well, anyhow, they did print it.
And I asked John, I said, John, did he get any reaction to that?
He said, oh, well, yeah, I wrote phone right off the hook.
But, you know, Ray, it was it was French TV.
It was Italian.
It was another.
I didn't really know.
I didn't get any reaction from any of the outlets here in the States.
I emailed him.
I said, John, is that unusual when you're speaking out on a very current sort of very topical issue?
He said, you know, Ray, come think of it.
Yeah, I never had something like this before.
So there you go.
I mean, here he succeeds in writing this thing.
The editor of Foreign Affairs, to his credit, puts it in their magazine.
It is the preeminent whatever it is.
And nobody comments on it.
Nobody mentions it, not even on MSNBC.
And so it sort of dies a natural death.
Now, if that were highlighted, if the American people knew the facts in that article, they would know that the Ukrainian situation is not a matter of Putin trying to get back the Soviet Union or, you know, invading the Ukraine and threatening NATO, that it's a much more complicated affair and that it's really a function of the neocons who are in charge of our foreign policy.
And I include John Kerry, the Secretary of State, in that really smarting from their failed attempt to get a war started between the U.S. and Syria back in September of, I was going to say, last year, 2013.
OK, they were right on the verge.
The Israeli air defenses were up.
The French fighter bombers were on the tarmac warming up.
And Obama changed his mind.
Now, he changed his mind because he found out that those so-called chemical attacks by the government of Syria were not that at all, that the sarin used was not from Syrian government stocks.
It was homemade.
Almost certainly, it came from the rebels who were trying to mousetrap Obama with full cooperation from the neocons into starting this war on the pretext that the Syrian government had violated the red line that they had persuaded Obama to set.
So they were really angry about that.
I was up on the top of CNN headquarters there doing an interview with BBC International the night after.
And Wolfowitz and what's his name?
The senator from Lieberman and all those guys.
I never saw them so down in the mouth.
They didn't get their war.
Now, how could they retaliate, move up their preparations for the coup in Ukraine?
And that's exactly what happened.
Putin's involved in the Olympics down there in Sochi.
When he gets back from the Olympics, all of a sudden the Maidan is in flames and the coup happens.
And that's what forced him to act.
Of course, you know, the main naval base, their only warm water naval base since Catherine the Great at the time of our revolution, is in Crimea.
And Putin is not about, or no Russian leader, is about to even risk the remote chance that Ukraine would join NATO.
And as he said in a sort of jocular way, he said, you know, I'd hate to see a situation where our armed forces would have to be visiting the NATO naval base in Sevastopol, in Crimea.
I'd much rather have it the way it is now, where we're happy to have them visit our naval base in Sevastopol.
Isn't he such a raving fanatic lunatic, that Putin, with his deadpan humor, you know, we considered it and we thought, actually, we would rather invite you guys to be our guests instead.
Well, you know, he's kept his cool to all this.
And, you know, right after, right after he, well, how do I say, pulled Obama's chestnuts out of the fire, you know, he was going to do this war on Syria.
It would be bedlam, even worse bedlam there than it is now.
And Putin said, hey, Barack, remember we talked about this at the summit in Northern Ireland?
We've brought the Syrians around.
I think they're willing to destroy all their chemical weapons.
Obama says, really?
He says, yeah.
Now Kerry, he's cut out of all this.
He says that same day, they will never give up their weapons.
That's never going to happen.
Never give up their chemical weapons.
Okay.
What happens?
Within four days, the chemical treaty was signed.
And now all those Syrian chemical weapons were destroyed.
Now that should make the neocons happy because that was Syria's major deterrent to an attack from Israel.
But no, it enraged them because it removed the pretext for war.
And so what I'm saying here is that they were going to get even.
And this is not, this is not the only motivation, but you can see Victoria Nuland handing out chocolate chip cookies to get the sugar level up on the Maidan and openly talking, or not openly, but the intercepted conversation with the ambassador in Kyiv, where she says, yeah, Yatsis is our guy.
The others can wait in the wings.
Yatsis knows about the economics here.
He knows what the IMF will require.
He's our guy.
And sure enough, I was really shocked at this.
Three weeks later, I wake up in the morning, 23rd of February, and guess what?
There's been a coup in Ukraine.
And who's the new prime minister?
Yats!
Yats Inyuk, okay?
So I wrote a little article saying, yikes!
Right, and it's not even like the leak came out later.
The leak came out before the regime change, and then they still did it exactly like in the script.
Yeah, so the revolution may not be televised, Scott, but this coup was YouTubized.
My God, you know.
And then the leaders of the NSA said, how dare the Russians spy on our diplomatic phone calls?
It was an open line, for God's sake.
All right, well, the good news is I don't have a third guest today, so I'm going to ask you politely, and you're going to graciously offer to stay one more segment with us to talk more about this subject, because we're not done yet, are we?
Okay, good.
It's Ray McGovern, everybody.
He's at ConsortiumNews.com, and him and Bob Perry, they're the dynamic duo over there on, first of all, the matter of the Syrian chemical weapons incident of 2013, and then most especially their coverage of the coup in Ukraine, the use of the Nazis by the American side there, the Russian reaction, the aftermath, and setting the record straight for the last year and change there.
ConsortiumNews.com.
It's the great Ray McGovern, and we'll be right back with more right after this.
Thanks for staying on, Ray.
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Okay, me again.
Scott Horton here.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org for the archives.
Talking with the great Ray McGovern from ConsortiumNews.com and RayMcGovern.com, former CIA analyst, specialist on the Soviet Union back in the day, correct?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And we're talking about the aftermath of the American-backed coup d'etat of February last year, and using real, no-fooling, Hitler-loving Nazis to seize the buildings, drive the president out of the Capitol.
And some of the leaders of those Nazi groups have actually made it into the parliament now.
So it's not like they were just sort of the lowest brown shirt auxiliaries.
They are part of the leaders of the new government there, these Nazis.
And then, as Ray put it before, the people in the East who had supported and won the election and had supported the previous president, they decided they weren't going to put up with that any more than Texans would support it if a bunch of communists seized power in Washington, D.C., or something like that.
They would probably go for the fascists, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, the point being that, so here we are in this mess.
And as you were, before the break, and we were interrupted there, Ray, you were at the part where the neocons were really mad at Russia for saving the American people from getting into another war, this time with Syria, in August of 2013 over the sarin hoax there, which it turned out was really Jabhat al-Nusra that did it with help from the Turks.
But so then they decided, well, we're going to get back at Putin.
Maybe more to the point, we're going to get back at Obama for working with Putin.
We're going to make sure that that kind of catastrophe doesn't happen again by finding a way to drive a further wedge between the United States and Russia.
And they picked Ukraine as their lowest hanging fruit to be their target to hit next.
Is that your conviction of the real motivation for the coup in the first place?
Yeah, that's not the exclusive motivation, but it's the lion's share of it, Scott.
There are also, you know, the megacorporations, the international ones that covet Ukraine for its very real natural resources, the black earth and other resources, and would love to have a cheap supply of cheap labor coming on into the EC to help them, you know, develop their own economies.
So make a Greece out of Ukraine, which is where it seems to be headed.
If something doesn't intervene.
But, you know, what I'd like to do is just kind of speak a little bit out of my experience.
I was the chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch in CIA way back when, and I followed Russia and the Soviet Union ever since my degrees in academe.
You were the chief of it, huh?
I guess I never realized that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'll tell you a secret.
Now, this is not to go outside this room, right, Scott?
All right.
Bobby Gates worked for me.
Oh, I already knew that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He worked for me for two years, 70 to 72.
And when I read his wrote his fitness report, I mentioned that he was reasonably bright, but his ill-concealed ambition was a disruptive influence in the branch.
And that unless he sort of cut it back, he was going to be trouble for everybody.
Little did I know.
And I wrote that, you know, and so people said to me later, 10 years later, when Bobby Gates became head of all analysis, Ray, I'll bet you I bet you regret being so frank in a business report.
I said, I don't regret a word of it.
Look what happened.
We're all working for that scoundrel.
And we were.
Anyhow, that's a diversion.
But I do know something about Russia and the Soviet Union, and it was almost kind of well, it was fun is the wrong word, but it was kind of good for me to get back in the game when I saw what's happening with Ukraine.
Now, we get all these reports by so-called journalists which talk to the State Department people and others and think they'd get these scoops about what the Russians are really after.
But in those days, we had to rely about 90 percent for our source information on open media.
And there was a discipline, subdiscipline of political science called media analysis.
It was a no brainer.
You read really carefully what the Russians or in those days the Soviets were saying.
And you look for changes in what they were saying or you just look to see, well, could they really believe what they're saying?
I remember going to my boss, you know, as a really young analyst, I said, you know, I think I think the Russians are really afraid of the Germans.
I don't think it's just propaganda.
He put his feet up on a desk, looked up at the fluorescent lights and said, Ray, you're telling me the lights are on.
OK, so you learn a lot.
Now, if you just look at Russian media and you just read, you know, nobody reads anymore.
You read Putin's speeches.
Here's what he said, for example, right after the right after the coup in Ukraine.
He said, you know, our Western partners, you know, they continue to interfere in the Ukraine.
I sometimes get the feeling that somewhere across that huge puddle in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments as if with rats without actually understanding the consequences of what they're doing.
Why do they need to do this?
He's talking, of course, about the coup.
Then he says, look, it's bad enough what they're doing, but the deployment of a missile defense system is the worst.
Now, you may recall that Obama in an overheard, unintentionally overheard conversation with Medvedev, who was president of Russia at the time, right before Obama was reelected.
I mean, Medvedev is saying, look, you don't need you don't need an anti-ballistic missile system in Europe.
Why?
There's not a threat from us, much less from Iran.
Why do you do that?
North Korea, give me a break.
And Obama says, and it's, you know, it's overheard.
He says, well, give me some space.
So let me get reelected first and then we deal with this.
Well, he's unable to deal with this.
And the important thing is that the Russians believe that he is a captive of the military industrial complex and security state.
He doesn't have the freedom to do the kinds of things, even that he did with respect to Syria, in bowing to the pressure to stop the war and being given an out by Putin.
So that's big.
If the Russians really think that Obama, who I believe they think is the most sensible person around, although extremely malleable and and, you know, susceptible of all kinds of crazy ideas, if he at least senses that, for example, a missile defense system is not what's what's needed to to cause even more tensions in Europe, and he's unable to deliver on that, which, you know, that was 2012.
Right.
So it's over two years now.
What are they going to do?
Are they going to sit around and let US newly fitted out naval ships with anti-ballistic missile systems crowded to the Black Sea and the Baltic and in Central Europe and endanger what has always been the Russians strategic weapons deterrent?
Are they going to do that?
Well, no, they're going to do everything they can to prevent that.
But failing preventing that, what does that leave?
That leaves launch on warning.
That's kind of a trade phrase to say, as soon as the Russians suspect that the Americans are up to something really, really strategically important, they are going to be tempted to launch their deterrent on warning.
And we're being the situation that we were before 1972.
When those start those strategic arms limitations treaties were signed.
I was in Moscow at 72 at the time Nixon came.
It was a big deal and it kept this balance of terror until the end of the Cold War.
Who wants to reintroduce this balance of terror?
So you're saying make money out of it.
You're saying that this when Kissinger says this would be a tragedy if we get back into full scale Cold War.
This is what he's talking about is a situation that he helped undo with the detente of the 1970s.
But you're saying it's been since then.
Reagan didn't even undo that during his brinksmanship in the 80s and abandoning of detente.
They still didn't.
He didn't ratchet up the situation so that they were back to launch on warning again.
That's it's been since.
Since when?
The early 70s, you say?
Oh, yeah.
Stay another segment with me, would you?
Sure.
As long as we're going right.
The rest of this news, we'll have to wait till tomorrow.
Boy, do I have Israel news for you guys, too.
But I'll see if I can get a good guest to help cover it.
Did you see the one about Naftali Bennett in the Jerusalem Post today, Ray?
Check that out during the break.
We'll be right back.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back.
I got the great Ray McGovern online talking about Russia.
So I'm sorry.
I'm terrible watching this clock, Ray.
Did I understand you right there about the launch on warning thing that you were saying it's been since the early 70s, since the Russians had such a itchy trigger finger on their H-bombs?
Yeah, well, Scott, it's really pretty simple.
And of course, when you're as old as I am, you remember these things, especially since I was deeply involved in them.
The strategic equation was really, really very labile, as the Germans say, very itsy kitsy.
And it was decided that we, the CIA, could monitor the deployment of Soviet missiles and Soviet air defense, well, missile defense systems.
OK, so when we proved to Reagan that, you know, when he said, trust, but also verify, we said, OK, Mr. President, we can verify.
And so he he took that aboard, went to went to talk to Gorbachev, who the honest ones of us Russian analysts at the time told everyone who would listen was the real deal, despite what Bobby Gates and Casey were saying about the Communist Party, the Soviet Union never disappearing, never giving up power.
OK.
And they negotiated with Gorbachev.
And that's, of course, how right after the Berlin Wall fell, George H.W. Bush was able to say, look, the dream that I portrayed in my speech in Mainz earlier this spring can be true.
We can have a Europe whole and free from Portugal to the Urals.
Let's invite Russia in.
Let's get this thing set up so that there's a security system to to cover all of Europe.
Now, as we know, Clinton and others went back on that.
But the thing is that the strategic thing had always been pretty solid until, of course, George Bush revoked the key agreement.
And that was a treaty signed in May of 1972.
I say I was there.
It was a treaty called the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
And it limited each side to two sites to have an anti-ballistic missile system.
And pretty soon that became one site.
And what did that end up doing?
That ended up saying that neither side could count on immunity were they to launch a first strike, because there would be no way to prevent a second strike because they would have no viable nationwide anti-missile system.
Now, what's happening now is as the Russians see it, and anyone in their position would see it, this is a canard that Iran is a threat to the United States and the same with North Korea.
If they're going to fire missiles at us, it's not going to be over Europe.
And so the missile system that the military and the corporations want to build is designed against Russia.
That's pure and simple.
And Obama seemed to recognize that when he told me, back in 2012, look, we'll talk about this, but first let me get reelected and give me some space until I get reelected.
Well, there's been two years plus space.
So how can they trust us?
That's the big thing.
How can Putin look at the history since the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Look at what Obama has to, in my view, has had to acquiesce in because he's got no guts and because the military and the security services are running this country.
And just ask yourself, now, if you were Putin, you know, you would keep your cool for as long as you could.
But if they keep building these systems, and if they were still start to incite a regular war in Ukraine, well, all bets are off because he has the high courts there.
He's not going to launch any ballistic missiles at us, but he is going to be very, very firm in defending what he sees and what most reasonable people would see, I would add, as Russian national security interests in that part of the world where the U.S. has very questionable national security interests.
And so now Obama and the Republicans are given hundreds of millions of dollars more in military aid to the Kiev government to help them continue waging war against the people in the east.
And they're on again, off again, ceasefires.
But I mean, is it as simple as if Kiev is ready to win outright over the Luhansk and Donetsk resistance, whatever you call them, that the Russians will absolutely be guaranteed to intervene there militarily?
That's right.
And I don't mean little green men, but I mean a real invasion.
They will prevent those parts of the Ukraine from being folded back onto a repressive regime, such as is now existing in Kiev.
You can bet your bottom dollar on that.
Now, what they've tried to do is work out arrangements where things would be short on that.
In other words, these eastern provinces could be, well, the Russians really want, they don't want to do what they did with respect to Crimea, to the eastern provinces.
They don't want them.
And the eastern provinces don't want to become part of Russia.
So there is the makings of a deal.
The problem is that egged on by Congress and the military industrial complex and the corporations to make a lot of money out of tensions in this part of Europe, that Obama is playing that kind of game.
And he's telling Yeltsin, the new prime minister, president, he's like, go ahead, give him a bloody nose.
And I don't think that Obama or anybody he has worked with from the state department or in the White House knows diddly about war is what really like, and Putin does.
And that's why I see him as being less inflammatory, less provocative, but when push comes to shove, that's his part of the world.
He's not going to let these Ukrainian folks, less still the ones headed by neo-fascists prevail in that part of the Ukraine.
All right.
Well, so.
Well, I don't know a couple of things here.
First of all, I want to give a little bit of credit to a guy named Klaus Ehrich, who has warned about the the missile defense system and the push against Russia, forcing them into the position of moving back to a launch on warning position on.
He has made that comment on virtually every interview I've ever posted on antiwar.com or on my own website for a decade now that.
And his point is this is the only thing that matters in the whole world, OK, that America and Russia don't have an H-bomb war.
It's the only thing that matters.
Nothing else matters compared to that.
And and, you know, he's right about that.
Something we should talk about.
And I'm happy to, you know, point out that he's really done a great job of beating me over the head about that.
Not so much of a good job of getting me to cover it as much as he would like.
But but he's certainly right about that.
But then.
So, I mean, what the hell is the strategy here, Ray?
Why give is I know?
Yeah, yeah.
Domestic politics and whatever.
But why are the Americans giving military aid to the Kiev government when it looks like that could help them provoke this?
I mean, we're not talking chess.
We're talking checkers here.
They push that far.
Then no King me and instead a worse war.
Come on.
Well, Congress is one of the major flies in the ointment here.
They have no idea what fire they're playing with.
They do have lots of ideas how they stay in power.
They stay in power because they appropriate money for the military industrial complex, security complex.
And that money is spent on weapons and so forth.
And a slice of that money comes back into their coffers and they get reelected.
And so they appropriate more money.
It's that simple.
There are pecuniary elements with a major role here.
The other thing is that since they don't know really what kind of fire they're playing with, it's very, very popular to blame everything on on Putin.
He's the big bad guy.
The major media reinforced that.
And so unless unless Obama can seize the bull by the horns and we suggest or I suggest at the end of my latest piece, he needs to fire Kerry and Nolan's.
That would speak volumes to everybody in the world that realizes what's really at play here.
How can he do that?
I don't care whether he do that or not, but he should realize that Putin, the president of Russia, called Kerry a liar.
Now, he called him a liar five days before Obama arrived in St. Petersburg for a summit.
Now, why did he do that?
Because Kerry lied to the U.S. Congress two days before.
He said the moderate rebels are winning in Syria.
Nobody believed that.
And then he repeated this canard about Bashar al-Assad being respect being responsible for the chemical warfare stuff or these chemical attacks outside Damascus on August 21, 2013.
So what what Obama, what Putin said, I was really taken with this because I've never seen this happen before.
He says, he's lying.
He knows that he's lying.
This is really sad.
Now, so if Kerry is still given his head here and he gives in turn the power to Newland and others to create more mischief, there is no telling what they might be intent, what they might try to provoke.
Hopefully, saner minds will prevail.
But if I were Putin, I'd be looking around for saner minds in this country and I'd be hard pressed to find any.
So that's why I say this is going to be a crucial year for this overreaching, this transcended reality that the strategic equation is in danger of changing in a way that has not been since 1972 when we had a treaty that prevented any side thinking that they could launch a first strike.
Right.
OK, now, as long as we're over time and we are, but hell, I want to ask you this.
It's really important.
What about Belarus and what about Russia itself?
Of course, right around the time of the start of the maiden protests in the fall of 2013, you had this essay in a series of threats basically in The Washington Post by a guy named Gershman, who I think Carl Gershman, the head of USAID, which is just the CIA's outsourced soft color coded regime change operation, basically.
Right.
National Endowment for Democracy.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Thank you for the correction.
Yes, the NED.
And I'm not exactly sure what the difference is in their roles.
If you want to clarify that, I'd like to hear it.
But he was saying, yeah, and maybe you're next.
Putin is how the thing ends.
If he doesn't like it, maybe he'll find himself in the same position there in Moscow.
And I wonder whether you think that's really on the agenda for for Kerry and Nuland and then the the coming Jeb Bush administration.
Well, Nuland famously with fire there, you know, they well, they are.
And this is doubtless in the calculations of Putin.
Think about it.
Here's Nuland openly bragging that we have, as she said, devoted five billion, that's billion with a B, dollars to satisfying Ukraine's aspirations to become part of the West, end quote.
Whoa.
Five billion dollars.
You know how many you know how many fascists you can buy with five million dollars?
Yeah, quite a few.
She wasn't talking the previous year.
She's talking, you know, she worked on she worked on regime change and building democratic structures for Iraq.
Can you imagine under Dick Cheney?
So she's got a lot of experience in all this.
And when she said five billion, she knows what she was talking about.
Now, think about Putin.
And now he's hearing from one of the funnels for all this money, the National Endowment for Democracy called Gershwin is hearing that, you know, you better watch out because the next after the Maidan, then comes the Red Square.
And you want to watch out because this is going to happen to you.
Well, the big thing here, in my view, Scott, is this, that if you want to stop, if you're really authentically concerned about stopping more oppression in Russia, in Russia, putting the Russians back to the security state they used to be, the way to guarantee that is to threaten them the way we're doing right now, to stir up things in Ukraine, to make sure that the relations between Russia and America are as bad as they can be.
And that gives Putin not only the pretext, but gives him ample reason to clamp down in a way that he probably wouldn't if he hadn't felt so threatened.
So this is one of the major realities where people, oh, yeah, well, you don't say anything about Putin's repression, you know?
Well, yeah, all right.
There's only so much time.
But in a very real sense, part of this repression is directly due to the external threat, which is as real as it is imagined, given what's happened in the Ukraine.
Yep.
Where is the health of the state?
That's why his poll numbers are so high right now.
Same happens everywhere.
That's why people support the ayatollahs in Iran.
That's why Fidel Castro's remained in power for so long.
What better foil than to go up against the American empire?
Of course.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Ray.
I've already kept you way, way over today, but I sure do appreciate it.
You're most welcome, Scott.
Have a good New Year.
You too.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Ray McGovern.
He's at ConsortiumNews.com and RayMcGovern.com.
Hey, all.
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