08/17/15 – Patrick Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Patrick L. Smith, the most worthwhile part of salon.com, by a long shot.
The U.S.-Russia phony war.
How Washington warmongers could bring us from stalemate to catastrophe.
Whenever somebody says catastrophe, and they're talking about the United States and Russia, my ears perk up, or my eyes.
Oh, no.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm well, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Pleasure to talk again.
Yeah, yeah.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, let's talk about the stalemate.
There is a peace agreement called Minsk II.
To what degree is it actually still in effect?
Are you worried that its days are numbered?
Can you describe what conditions it's supposed to set and the difference between that and what we've got right now?
Sure, sure.
Large question.
Give me a little time with it.
Minsk II was signed in February.
It was the second ceasefire agreement.
The first one fell apart, also signed in Minsk.
Both of these are in part sponsored by the Belarus president.
They involve the Europeans, the Russians, and the Ukrainians.
The Americans, your listeners ought to note, were not invited.
The Minsk II agreement is very fragile, but it's what we have.
It is what stands between a negotiated solution and open warfare.
So it is fragile.
There are some number of transgressions on a daily or weekly basis.
We know this, but it's what we have.
Importantly, it remains the basis for a negotiated settlement.
What we're looking at now is a situation where the Kiev government is some combination of unwilling or unable to carry out the terms of the Minsk agreement.
They call for a ceasefire, a sort of LOC, line of control, I guess, designated on maps, withdrawal of heavy artillery, et cetera, et cetera.
And Kiev is supposed to begin conducting negotiations with the eastern provinces, including in the agreement the leaders of the rebel organizations, concerning the devolution of power, a redone constitution, more or less, you're not supposed to use the word over there, but more or less the federalization of Ukraine, a very high degree of autonomy.
Anyone looking at this situation with any detachment must recognize that this is a deeply bifurcated country, culturally, historically, politically, ideologically, what have you.
And the best way to keep it together is to federalize it.
And we Americans, living as we do in a federation of states, ought to be right on board.
Now, Kiev, one, they are to some ever more apparent extent unable to execute the terms of Minsk because they are too dependent on far-right groups who are quite prepared, have said so, to topple them, to topple this government, to take it right down if they negotiate with the east.
That's one.
That's the unable part.
The unwilling part is that the US, with the single exception of Kerry, and maybe we want to return to this topic later on, is not for a negotiated settlement.
They want a military settlement for the simple reason that they do not want a federated Ukraine.
That wouldn't be a really very much fun client state, would it?
So, to engage the Kiev government is to engage the Americans in our wishes, our leadership's wishes.
And that's a yet larger problem.
That's how I see it laying out now.
And that is why, as I said in the column that brings us together today, I really don't trust this sort of lull or doldrum or whatever you wish to call it in events on the ground over there.
Yeah, I've seen other people actually also noticing, and I noticed the first time, but the summer of the shark, 2001, oh, Gary Condit's intern is missing, or whatever, and all this.
And it was like, oh, man, there's another shoe fixing to drop on all of our heads right now.
It kind of feels that way to me, too.
So, Merkel came to the U.S. and, I'm paraphrasing, told Obama, sit down, shut up, and get the hell out of our way, because me and the French, we're going to go over there and make a deal with Putin, and we're going to have a peace agreement here.
And Obama said, OK, go ahead, right?
And they did.
Yes, I think Merkel is a very complicated character, OK?
This is the first time in my life I've had any time whatsoever for a Christian Democrat.
She is, as I said, quite a complex figure.
On the one hand, she is, in a certain way, running the front-line Western European state, excluding the former Soviet satellites.
She is right there.
German business, everybody knows these facts.
German business is very, very deeply involved in Russia, OK?
Capital investment, banking matters, fixed investment, construction, infrastructure, all this sort of thing.
People come back from Russia and say every other crane is German, right?
So, she's got that.
She doesn't want a war on our border, of course.
On the other hand, Merkel is an extremely devoted Atlanticist.
She does not want, remember, she grew up in Eastern Europe, Eastern Germany.
She does not want to precipitate a breach in the Atlantic alliance.
She's very NATO, let's say, OK?
So, that's the other side of her.
I think your listeners, when we're thinking about Merkel, you've got to think about these two dimensions of her outlook, her perspective, OK?
Now, yes, she came to Washington and seems to have put her foot down with Obama, and that was the first Merkel speaking.
Look, Mr. President, we really can't let this go a lot further.
One, two, the Kiev government is so unreliable, it is almost impossible to deal with them.
So, let us get this done.
And Obama, we can't but speculate, Scott, of course, but by appearances Obama seems to have acquiesced.
Kerry went to Sochi, the Russian resort town, your listeners may recall, and smoked the peace pipe with Putin, quite a remarkable turn, right?
However, post-Sochi, things have not improved.
And it looks to me as if the Obama administration, I've argued for some time, is fighting a war on two fronts, against the Russians, but also the Europeans, who want a negotiated settlement.
And now the administration, more particularly, has an internal struggle, it seems to me, going on between what we broadly call the warmongers and those such as Obama and Kerry, and I'm now quite convinced that those two had a camp that would like to see a negotiated settlement.
I'm sorry, hold it right there, Patrick.
And they have people like Vicky Newland, right?
Yeah, right.
We'll pick it up right there on the other side of this break with Patrick L. Smith, y'all.
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Hey, welcome back, y'all.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Patrick L. Smith, writing at Salon.com, the U.S.-Russia phony war.
How Washington warmongers could bring us from stalemate to catastrophe.
And where we left off, we were talking about the war party in the United States and just how much power and influence they still have, even on this issue.
And I wonder, what makes you think that Obama sides with Kerry rather than with Nuland on picking this fight?
Because he could have just got rid of her a long time ago, or marginalized her, assigned her to some other job, something.
Yeah, very true.
Good question.
And the proof of what a good question is is that an answer is not easy, Scott.
I don't know what these people, and Nuland is not to be singled out.
She's just the most visible.
I don't know what these people are doing there.
I don't know what Samantha Power is doing at the U.N., etc.
I think there's an argument either way.
Obama is responsible for these appointments, notably Samantha Power.
It may be that he is as complex a man as Merkel is in a European context, and a person of many minds.
I can't answer it, Scott.
I wish I could.
I can't answer it with certainty.
But it has occurred to me, and this I suppose is what I was getting at before our break, it has occurred to me that Obama has a kind of attenuated latitude, attenuated alternatives within the power structure of Washington as he inherited it.
Okay, this is not a new theme.
To what extent does the tail wag the dog?
To what extent have defense and intelligence agencies staged over who knows how many years a kind of silent coup in Washington, right?
We cannot know that.
Well, but it's impossible really to imagine that Obama didn't know that Soros and the NED and all these guys were working on another color-coded revolution in Ukraine after they did the same damn thing ten years before.
A point well made and taken, Scott.
Yes, that's true.
And this stuff has gone on.
It kind of grinds on year after year.
And by this stuff I mean these corrupted NGOs supposedly over in Russia and elsewhere doing good, well-intentioned things, and they are not good and they are not well-intentioned.
That's true.
But I don't think it necessarily contradicts my suggestion of at least complexity on the matter.
In this way.
And like we talked about before, when Merkel came to town and said, hey, come on, man, Obama seemed to say okay.
And then as we spoke about before, and as you mentioned, he sent Kerry and Kerry went and met for four hours with Putin and Lavrov, and they seem to be getting along.
They are obviously working together on the nuclear deal.
There are new reports that maybe they're going to work together on some Syrian peace talks.
Right.
But then again, in your article, you point out that they're still rigging this MH17 investigation against the Russians.
And in fact, you talk about how the Treasury announced new sanctions just as a matter of course here.
Right.
The Pentagon, last time we spoke, Scott, some weeks ago, the Pentagon had begun training the Ukrainian National Guard, which consists of reconstituted far-right militias.
That's what we mean by the National Guard.
Don't expect our newspapers to explain that to you, but that's what we mean.
The Right Sector and the Azov Battalion.
Yeah.
Now we have a very recent announcement, part of what prompted me to write this column.
We are now training the regular Ukrainian army.
Wait, you have to step back and say, what is it we're not training at this point?
That is why I said, and I stand by the assertion, de facto, we are running the Ukrainian defense.
That's a very aggressive thing to do.
It means that we're in the middle of a kind of pseudo ceasefire where there's still fighting going on, if not official war, there's still skirmishes all the time.
You have at least accusations, never mind the thousands of mythical infantrymen, but at least there are plausible accusations of Russian Special Forces helping coordinate the resistance fighters on their side.
You have Americans on the ground training with these guys.
You could really have Americans and Russians trading fire in no time here.
That's right.
This will surely get me in trouble with still more readers and listeners than I am already, but let me make this point.
I will stand by it.
I am rather pleased that the Russians are doing whatever they're doing, and I don't claim to know precisely what it is, but generally we get the idea.
If they weren't there, there would be no balance whatsoever, and these people in Kiev would absolutely overrun the East.
We have an official figure of 6,400 deaths.
Throw it away.
The German intelligence agencies put it at 50,000.
The 6,400 is what they count in the morgues.
That's all.
We're looking at a situation where there are, again, by German intel reports.
These are published in Europe.
They're not unknown.
They're just not published here.
About 50,000.
That's pretty serious, and it's all occurring in the East, of course.
Once again, at the risk of promoting the ire of your listeners, I think it's probably net a good thing that the Russians are there.
Well, I mean, the argument's been made.
It was on balance a good thing that American traders gave Russians plans for nukes too because America would have nuked Russia in a preemptive war.
We would have started a war against them if we had maintained the monopolies.
You mean back in the late 40s?
Yeah, yeah, back then.
Yes, yes, right, right.
So, yeah, no, that makes sense.
It doesn't mean that, oh, you love a foreign power or whatever.
You're just making a kind of cynical observation about the position our government has put us in.
That's all we understand what you mean.
Here's the underlying principle.
Think of it this way.
Deterrence was sort of a chiseled-in-granite principle back during the Cold War, justifying these immense, ridiculously overbuilt nuclear arsenals, right?
But it all had to do with deterrence.
Well, this is another variation of deterrence, is it not?
I would like to think so, but apparently no.
I mean, that's the crisis that we're talking about here, is that we seem to be, well, I don't know who's we.
Our leaders seem to be kind of, I don't want to say sleepwalking, but in a way they're kind of half-assing us into war with Russia, it looks like to me.
This isn't the focus of all their attention, sort of like on this show.
All my attention is on the Middle East, where the big game is going on over there on Poland's eastern border, in the Baltic states and stuff, where they had American soldiers parading around just a couple of hundred yards from the Russian border.
And the Russians are aggressing.
The Russians are aggressing because they're carrying out training and military exercises on the Russian side of the border.
That's aggression.
They're a couple of hundred miles or less from Russia's western border.
As I said last time we spoke, Scott, I think the mess Obama will leave behind in Russia, and whatever complexities we want to read into the Obama White House, his name is on it.
The mess he will leave behind on Russia's western border is his worst foreign policy legacy by a long way.
That assumes we make it to inauguration day for Jeb or whoever's next.
You're an optimist, I take it.
Well, you know, I'm trying to be.
I've learned that alarmism usually doesn't pay off, but sometimes it does.
And this is the kind of thing where even if President Trump and President Putin are the best of friends getting along, disarming the H-bombs of both sides still should be the highest priority of every human on this planet, assuming we want our species to survive.
So there's nothing more important than America and Russia's relationship, period.
I don't even think that's an opinion.
I think that's just a scientific observation or something.
We've got to get this right.
Stephen Cohen, the historian, made this point some while ago.
Every national security question facing the United States from nuclear arms to climate control runs right through Moscow.
There is no denying that.
It's as vital as we used to say the relationship across the Pacific was with Japan.
Famously the most important bilateral relationship, bar none, said Mike Mansfield, right?
Well, Washington-Moscow is the key to more or less everything wanting resolution right now, and sleepwalking is just the term.
We're just not addressing this.
I make this point as often as I can.
We Americans have no idea how scarred we are by Cold War ideology, Cold War thinking, propaganda, and all the rest of it.
I don't know how old you are, Scott, but maybe I have a few years on you.
Believe me, it runs very deep, and it limits our capacity to renovate our thinking.
It limits our capacity to reimagine relationships, and it's going to sink our ship if we don't come to terms with this.
Regrettably, there's no sign of it.
The source of my optimism is very simple.
We can do it if we decide to.
I hold to that.
Well, and of course what's working against us the most, other than just the behavior of our government in the first place, is, as you often point out in your column here, the media, and the way you just will never tell the truth.
I was reading an article about Ukraine last night that, of course, says that the crisis all started when Russia invaded Crimea.
Never mind the coup or any of that.
Just pretend that never existed.
And never mind the fact that they didn't invade Crimea from Russia.
They invaded Crimea from bases they had at Crimea, and that not a single person was killed.
They just kind of walked outside and said, this is Russia again now.
Let me share this with your readers.
A couple of months ago, RT ran a very lengthy Q&A session with Putin, live.
He recounted this whole matter and how the Crimean annexation came about.
The evening of February 22nd, when the Ukrainian coup was an established fact, he gathered his closest aides and said, ladies and gentlemen, we need to begin right now thinking about what we're going to do about Crimea.
The moment has arrived.
And by 7 the next morning, they had a plan, and we watched the consequences of that plan.
And he explained it perfectly in a speech, too.
Yeah, he explained it in a speech, too, joking and saying, you know, I thought about how nice it might be to go down to Sevastopol to visit our NATO friends and say hi, guys.
But then I decided that, no, we would rather just keep the base ourselves.
Did he say that?
Yeah.
You know, it would be great.
We love visiting our NATO friends.
You know, that would be a great place to visit them.
But instead, no, I think we're just going to go ahead and hold on to it.
Right.
It seems like Americans could understand.
I brought that up to Eric Margulies, and he said, you know, this is like if we were talking about Houston, Texas.
OK, never even mind like one of our outposts in the Pacific or something like that.
This is like, you know, and he talked about, you know, remember the Alamo?
Well, the Russians lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of soldiers over Crimea fighting the Germans.
I think they're just going to give that up to NATO.
Never.
Give me a break.
But we don't see that in that context.
You have to be Eric Margulies and have that wide kind of understanding of the world to be able to see it that way.
Or you've got to hear Eric on this show.
Otherwise, people just never get it explained to them from the Russian point of view, you know.
I agree.
And I urge your listeners to go back.
Historically, Crimea is very, very interesting.
In effect, it's been part of the so-called great game competition between the Brits and now the Americans and the Russians for control over the Khyber Pass and that whole area of the world.
Crimea has been a locus of contention for well back into the 19th century.
Well, it was officially annexed by Russia the first time in the 1780s when we were still under the Articles of Confederation here.
Right, right, right, right.
Thanks for coming back on the show, Patrick.
We're way over time and I've got to let you go.
But I sure appreciate you coming back on.
You're very welcome, Scott.
We'll do it again.
Yes, I hope so.
That is Patrick L. Smith.
He's at Salon.com.
The U.S.-Russia phony war.
How Washington warmongers could bring us from stalemate to catastrophe.
It's a really good one.
It's in the viewpoint section today at Antiwar.com.
And we'll be right back with Yosef Butt in just a second.
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