Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Mark Ames, he's a journalist who's written for the New York Press, The Nation, and GQ Russia.
He's the founding editor of the Moscow-based The Exile, and author of the books Going Postal and The Exile, Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, I really enjoy this article that you wrote for The Nation, the Cold War that wasn't, let's hope that's the case, that this thing's dead in the water, and the article is about obviously the conflict between Russia and Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains last August, but primarily it's about media coverage of that battle and particularly the New York Times, and the narrative that they spun about that war in defiance of all facts.
Why don't you kind of give us the overview here.
Well, basically the New York Times, and I should add, I mean, the New York Times is just one of, you know, many, pretty much every mainstream American media outlet which is guilty of this, they sort of bought hook, line, and sinker into the Georgian slash neocon argument that poor, small, democratic little Georgia was invaded by big, evil, 19th century Russia for no reason whatsoever, except that Georgia is free, and Putin hates freedom.
And then they went, then basically they spent the next, you know, month or two trying to find evidence that supported this, even when no evidence existed, I mean, for example, they tried pushing, like a lot of people have on Russia and the Kremlin, they tried pushing this idea that Russia launched the first ever cyber war that coincided with a shooting war.
And even the article admits there's no evidence of it, but nevertheless, if it is the first instance of cyber warfare, you know, it marks a new phase in, you know, human evil.
And basically, you know, Russia has a lot of problems, and Putin has a lot of problems, I mean, he's certainly not somebody who, you know, if you believe in decent things in this world, you want to, like, spend your life defending, but, you know, he's not Hitler, and he's not Stalin, and, you know, there's this lobby out there, and it's a very powerful and very loud shrieking lobby, which for some reason wants to drag us into another kind of Cold War with Russia.
I suppose they see Russia as some kind of perfectly convenient enemy, perhaps maybe because we supposedly won the Cold War, I'm not sure, but, you know, there are a lot of people whose jobs are sort of predicated on this, and whose entire, I don't know, image is based on this.
I'm thinking of Fred Hyatt, the opinion page editor of the Washington Post, I mean, this guy is one of the most insanely obsessed Russophobes, you know, imaginable.
And with the New York Times, I mean, they try to maintain a slightly more, I don't know, quote-unquote, objective veneer, but their choice of stories, and the way that they present these stories, you know, has pretty much the same effect, which is to make readers think that Russia is this insanely aggressive, Hitlerian state bent on subjugating its neighbors, and we need to go to war with them.
I mean, I don't know what else, any of this talk about Munich, you know, Munich in the 30s, or, you know, selling out Czechoslovakia in 1938, and all of this talk among the neocons leads to, except that we should go to war with Russia.
Right, I mean, that is supposedly the lesson of Munich, is the war should have started then, instead of in September.
Exactly.
And, you know, what I also notice is a lot of this is pundit-driven, and foreign editor desk-driven.
I'll just give you an example, I mean, when I was down in South Asia, I got there just as the war was ending, and the ceasefire was just taking hold.
I was in North Asia, so I was on the Russian border side, with a small crew of foreign journalists there, Western journalists.
Most of the Western journalists were in Tbilisi, or in Georgia, where the Georgians ran a very clever, skillful PR campaign to win over the journalists.
But in any event, so what the stringers I was hanging out with, stringers for Time magazine, stringers for the New York Times, writers for all the big papers, where they were being instructed to find, by their editors back in Washington or New York, were evidence of Russian atrocities against Georgians, ethnic cleansing of Georgians from South East Asian villages, possible ethnic cleansing of ethnic Georgians from North East Asia, inside of Russia.
So, you know, these guys, even the stringers, or the reporters who were there, were pretty much given instructions from the home office to find examples, you know, of evil, and particularly for a stringer, if you're trying to, you know, get a job with the New York Times, or build up your resume, you're not going to go against what the foreign desk editor's telling you, you're going to find what he asks to find.
Well, that's a great anecdote.
Is that how it usually happens?
That's always how I imagine it.
Here's what I want you to write, and then that's what they do.
Yeah, well, you know, they'll be slightly, slightly more sophisticated than that, but they'll say that's what they want to find.
You know, they really weren't interested in upsetting the story, I mean, the truth, which was that the Georgians invaded first, that the Georgians have, you know, the Georgians don't even recognize, not all Georgians, but certainly the Saakashvili government, didn't even recognize that the Essetians have a genuine grievance, and that there's, you know, a centuries-old feud between the Georgians and the Essetians.
From the Georgians' point of view, the Georgians are very chauvinistic, you know, but they're also very, very charming, particularly Saakashvili.
I mean, personally, I have a very deep fondness for Georgians from the time I've spent there.
But you know, you have to see through the BS, and the reality is, they invaded the Essetians, they invaded South Essetia, Saakashvili had, you know, he had his reasons, and I'm not sure exactly what they were, I have a feeling that part of it was his megalomania, part of it was, you know, that he might have thought he was getting positive signals from Cheney and that wing of the White House.
But I think also, you know, we forget about how domestic politics really drives people, and we always kind of think that we're pushing agendas everywhere, but in fact, you know, Saakashvili is dealing with very serious domestic problems.
He's increasingly unpopular, he's increasingly authoritarian, he's alienated pretty much the entire spectrum of the political class by this point.
And you know, how do you stay in power when everybody is turning against you, and people want to overthrow you, and you're increasingly authoritarian?
Well, you start a war with a big enemy who, you know, supposedly was going to invade and occupy and subjugate Georgia, and, you know, the result was, sure, he lost the war, but the result is that now, to criticize Saakashvili in Georgia is akin to being a Russian stooge and helping bring in, you know, the Russian subjugation of Georgia.
That's funny, that is exactly like it happens in America.
You're objectively pro-Saddam Hussein, if you're opposed to this invasion.
Exactly, exactly.
And, you know, and the same thing happened with Ukraine.
I mean, Yushchenko, you know, the president whose face is all pockmarked and messed up from the dioxin poisoning, he's very unpopular at home.
I mean, he's got ratings of under 10% as far as I know, certainly no more than 10%.
There's an election coming up, and he is going to battle with his former ally in the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, as well as with the so-called pro-Russian candidate Yanukovych.
And so what did he do?
He did, you know, he pulled the same move.
He, when the war started, he exploited it.
He said that Russia was planning to invade the Ukraine next, invade Ukraine next, and then he accused Tymoshenko, when she tried to sort of calm things down a bit, he accused her of being a traitor, of bringing the Russians in to invade, you know, Ukraine, accused Yanukovych of the same thing.
So these guys are using these wars to shore up their unpopularity at home, and they have, you know, a common agenda with the neocons.
I mean, the neocons, the war in Georgia and the supposed threat against Ukraine, these did more to kind of revive their standing.
I don't even know why they have any standing, but in any event, it sort of brought them back to the forefront, a lot of these neocons.
Well, let me stop you right there.
So there's so many things I want to follow up on here.
Well, really, a ton of things.
First of all, just now you mentioned Yushchenko and his face messed up from the dioxin poisoning.
Was that just shorthand for, so you know what I'm talking about?
Or is that what you really think happened there, that he was poisoned with dioxin?
No, I do believe it.
You know, Russia and that part of the world is very conspiracy theory, is very, I don't know, it's drowning in conspiracy theories out there.
And because people believe so deeply in conspiracy theories, I think probably there are more conspiracies that actually are hatched there.
Clever, you know, triple Mobius, double flip conspiracies that are hatched there compared to, let's say, here.
But nevertheless, what I've kind of learned over time and what I've learned from Russians and Russians were pretty high up and so on, is I think generally you kind of try to go, I think you kind of try to take things at face value and what's most obvious.
Face value is a bad pun in this situation, but I think you kind of try to go with what's most obvious and what's kind of clearest rather than sort of thinking it through too deep.
I don't know.
I understand what you're saying, that you can go down a rabbit hole and never find your way out of it.
It hasn't yielded too much truth for me, kind of trying to think it through too cleverly.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, that you kind of get stuck going down the rabbit hole and kind of never get out.
Although that particular one, to me, always seemed so half-baked that the Russians would poison him with a poison that wouldn't kill him.
Even his own campaign manager now is saying that he just has an illness and he decided to make up this story about how the Russian guys did him in.
And then Yushchenko turned around and accused his campaign manager of being the one who did the poisoning.
And it's pretty obvious this guy's full of it, isn't it?
Well, but that's Ukrainian politics.
I mean, they're constantly switching sides, as what happened with Timoshenko and Yushchenko.
You know, in a way that's so savage and wild that it makes even Russian politics look pretty tame by comparison.
But getting back to the poisoning, I don't think it was the Russians who did it.
I have no evidence of that.
I just look at it like this.
There was an enormous amount at stake in that election in 2004.
Basically, whether certain oligarchical clans would be able to keep and expand on all of what they owned or face possibly losing everything.
Right.
And, you know, these oligarchical clans then have people within the security services.
I don't think the Russians did it.
I guess that's possible, just as it's possible that, you know, Yushchenko was poisoning himself or something.
But personally, I think the most obvious and reasonable explanation is just, you know, everything was up for grabs.
People's billions of dollars in property and political power over the country was up for grabs.
And they tried to kill him and it didn't work.
Or maybe they tried to disfigure him.
I'm not sure.
But, you know, not everything goes right in these things.
The same thing with the Litvinenko poisoning.
I don't buy into most of the conspiracy theories against Putin, but I'm pretty sure that this was the Russian security services that killed him.
And they almost got away with it.
I mean, there was the half-life of that poison.
There was only a day or two left before it would have completely disappeared.
They, you know, almost got away with it.
But people make mistakes all the time, you know.
All right.
Now, well, and see, I don't want to get too much into that one, too, because, you know, well, Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com has written quite a lot about that and has quite a bit different take.
I don't really know what to make of it, but so we can let that go.
I do appreciate what you're saying about politics in Eastern Europe and Russia.
And these places are so Byzantine that there's really no point in trying to delve all the way down to every little detail, sort of like the JFK assassination.
You're never going to figure it out anyway.
There's 100 different stories, so forget it kind of thing, right?
No, I don't think forget it.
I've taken a position.
I know a lot of people that I admire and work with don't agree with me on this.
It's just from my experience being out there.
But, you know, I agree.
Look, taking that position, then the problem with taking the position that it was pissed off FSB people who poisoned Litvinenko for reasons that I think are pretty obvious when you, I mean, had a similar situation.
Had you had a guy like that from Assad, for example, and he was out in Iran calling, you know, the Israeli leader a pedophile and writing constantly against him, you know, he'd have been whacked also.
And I just look at it.
That's how I look at it.
But in any event, the problem with taking that position is you wind up eventually maybe supporting the position of new Cold Warriors and people who want to get this new Cold War on.
Those ought to be completely separate issues as far as that goes.
I want to bring this back to the narrative as compared to what really happened.
As you said, for whatever, maybe various reasons, Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, which they say in the narrative was a breakaway province or whatever, but it's never really been part of Georgia.
It was Stalin who made it that way.
They've been basically autonomous since the end of the Cold War.
Isn't that right?
Well, again, you know, these maps, when we talk about history, you know, everybody and who owns what territory, it's people kind of, people who aren't directly involved, sort of use whatever historical precedent is convenient for them.
So, you know, the West sees Kosovo as a completely exceptional, you know, situation, even though it's not.
There are, you know, enormous amounts of analogous situations around the world, including in the former Soviet Union, where you do have ethnic, you know, regions or provinces of countries that have, you know, terrible relations with the center or have, you know, real serious historical grievances.
I mean, I think if you ask an Ossetian whether South Ossetia should have been part of Georgia, obviously, they'll say no.
You know, I have a lot of Ossetian friends, and they've been telling me for years about the problems that they've had with the Georgians.
They go back at least a century, actually a couple of centuries.
They'll cite for you, you know, genocides committed by the Georgians on the Ossetians, even though they're very small, their numbers are very small.
They'll cite old genocides from 100 years ago as if they happened yesterday.
So, you know, the reality is that if we're going to go in and bomb Serbia and carve out an ethnically pure Kosovo, and then, you know, allow it to become independent and free, then we have no more argument anymore against, for example, the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians, who are in an absolutely similar situation.
In fact, I think even with the Abkhaz, which is another breakaway region in the west of Georgia, you know, they probably have even a much better case to make.
They go back centuries in that region.
They have a real functioning, you know, functioning government.
They're even fairly autonomous from Moscow, the Abkhaz region that the Kremlin has sort of had a hard time controlling Abkhazia.
I mean, there's this fiction out here that Abkhazia is just some kind of puppet state, but it's really not the case.
So in any event, to answer your question, you know, is South Ossetia historically part of Georgia, you know, based on the Kosovo precedent?
No.
I mean, you could even argue, you take the Kosovo precedent, you might even, never mind former Soviet Georgia.
What about former Confederate Georgia?
I mean, don't they have the right to secede on a Kosovo model?
Yeah, exactly.
But, you know, but no, not if you ask all the people who invested themselves, you know, morally, legally and everything else in this war, which is that this is a special case for whatever reason.
I mean, it's one of the most idiotic circular reasoning I've ever come across.
And, you know, I think for years after the Cold War, as the Cold War wound down, and then the years afterwards, America and the Europeans behind it have got used to the idea that they can do whatever they want in the world, and there won't be any consequences, because nobody would mess with us.
Nobody would think of messing with us.
They need our billions in IMF loans.
They need our goods, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I think, you know, the chickens are coming home to roost on that.
And, you know, in some ways, the war in Georgia, if cooler heads prevail at all, that's hoping for a lot, but if cooler heads prevail at all, it might be a wake up call to the West and to America that when you bomb a country and, you know, change a map, that it's going to have consequences.
It's going to blow back.
And hopefully that kind of stuff is going to end now.
Well, you know, Greg Pallas talked about how Henry Kissinger was part of the team that came up with the plan to siphon all the oil out from under the Caspian Sea and all that back in the 1990s.
And yet I kind of like to cite him as a cooler head, at least relatively speaking.
I've seen Kissinger on TV.
And by the way, I hate saying this, so feel free to smack me down with whatever evidence you might want to summon.
But I've heard him say on TV, for example, look, people want to talk about Vladimir Putin as some kind of new Stalin.
Well, he could have just had the Constitution amended to run for a third term in power.
And yet instead, he stepped down to become prime minister.
That sure is a strange path to dictatorship, if that's really what he's after here.
And maybe it would be better to leave the rhetoric for the rooves out there watching TV.
And for those of us wise men, when we talk about these things, maybe we ought to ground our discussion in reality.
Instead of the talking points we use to BS everybody else, you know?
Yeah, well, again, this talk of the new Stalins, I mean, these historical exaggerations and exaggerated analogies, they're really dangerous and they're idiotic and they're dangerous.
Because if he is a Stalin or a Hitler, then we need to go to war.
If he is Stalin or Hitler, I thought that was the whole lesson.
So launch all your nukes right now, buddy, you know, show me how tough you are.
But they always stop at that.
They just, these idiots, the neocons, they just like jumping up and down and stomping branches on the ground, you know, in order to, I don't know, get their speaking fees up or their book sales up.
But I find it really dangerous because in Russia, for example, you know, it has a very chilling effect, this kind of exaggerated enemy talk and new Cold War talk.
It has a really negative effect in Russia on America's image there, on what America supposedly stands for.
You know, America used to stand for, and Russia used to stand for some pretty good ideals like liberty, freedom, freedom of speech, democracy, and so on.
And now it just stands, from their point of view, for exploitation and imperialism and complete hypocrisy.
Well, and you know, we go, when you talk about the view of the people of Russia there, you know, you can look back at the history of why, for example, they were, the Soviets were so intent on holding on to all of Eastern Europe, is to keep a buffer zone between them and the people who have been invading them over and over and over again for 3,000 years or whatever.
Russia is the most paranoid society because they have a real history of just power after power after power on their borders coming and invading their country.
Yeah, that's true.
And we don't, you know, we really only experienced one big bloody war, you know, the Civil War, but we weren't invaded in that one.
And there's really nothing in the American conscience that can compare with what's in the Russian conscience.
There's no sort of memory of the horrors of war and the fear of being invaded.
And yeah, actually, if you look again at the Cold War, you know, Russians, the Soviets were, I mean, they certainly weren't, you know, good, but they were not aggressive.
They weren't going around the world invading countries.
Russia historically hasn't done that on the same scale that the Brits or the Americans or, you know, other European powers have done.
They are very, they're very paranoid.
They're very, they feel very vulnerable.
And they're also extremely sensitive to what, to how the West and how America views them and how the West of America treats them and if it's fair or not and so on.
And because they feel they've been treated so unfairly and essentially been lied to first with, you know, with the so-called economic shock therapy reforms of the 90s, which bankrupted the country, then with us backing, you know, one of the most corrupt regimes that impoverished the entire country and which destroyed the democracy that they had there in the early 90s by 96, you know, Yeltsin was stealing every election.
And then in 99, by invading Serbia and ignoring the UN vote on that, Russians feel so completely betrayed that, you know, they've really kind of withdrawn into themselves and into a kind of an anti-liberal, anti-Western, you know, mood because they see, I mean, they identify the consequences of, I mean, basically they think they were suckers in the 90s and they got completely suckered.
And so, you know, the consequences, I think nobody in America, in American power was really thinking, well, geez, if we rob these people blind and steal all their assets and, you know, help them steal their elections and bomb without giving them any consideration, bomb Serbia, you know, what are they going to do?
They're so weak, they can't do anything.
Well, now we're seeing the consequences of it.
Yeah, they never considered, wow, for every action, there's equal and opposite reaction.
The Russians might actually become nationalists if we do nothing but kick them while they're down.
Exactly.
Huh.
Amazing.
And in fact, you know, when you talk about broken promises, the first broken promise was James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev, we will not expand NATO eastward.
And in fact, what we've done is exactly that.
Is it, how many countries in Eastern Europe aren't in NATO now?
It's Georgia, Ukraine and what?
Ukraine and what?
Hungary?
You know, Belarus.
No, Hungary's in it.
Oh, Belarus.
That really is the first betrayal was the Russians don't buy it.
We actually believe ourselves, which I find so odd.
We believe ourselves when we say that NATO expansion is not a threat to Russia and it has nothing to do with Russia.
It's odd.
And they know it's complete BS.
Well, wait a minute.
Now, who's we believe in ourselves here?
I'm confused.
When I say we, definitely I'm not talking about you and me talking about the, you know, the establishment in the West, the establishment media, the establishment political class.
So you don't even think it's really an ulterior motive that they, oh, it's a peace guarantee, not a war guarantee.
Exactly.
And these people believe their own BS.
And, and, and they also genuinely seem to believe their own BS about the ABM system.
And I can tell you, I was in Russia in, I think it was very late 2001 or very early 2002 when Bush announced that he was withdrawing.
I think it was very end of 2001.
He announced he was withdrawing from the ABM treaty and Putin, it's the one time I've actually seen him publicly, you know, get on TV, make a speech and look like he had just been brutally humiliated because when he agreed to allow American forces to use the bases in Central Asia in order to go after the Taliban, he took a lot of heat from generals and the security services people and so on.
I think he kind of thought, you know, again, this happens to every Russian leader.
He thought, I'll do this, I'll do this big favor, I'll make a great gesture to help America in its time of need, and they'll pay it back.
And so, you know, he acquiesced to having the Central Asian countries open up their bases to American forces against all of his, as they call the security services, advice and the generals and so on.
And as soon as Kabul fell and Kandahar fell, the first thing we did is say, OK, we don't need the ABM treaty anymore and ripped it up.
And, you know, Putin was actually pretty seriously weakened by that.
I mean, I think there was a lot of grumbling among his generals and FSB people.
And so he went on TV to announce that, you know, America was withdrawing from the ABM treaty and we shouldn't worry about it.
And he kind of tried to calm everyone down, but he looked very, very humiliated.
And I remember I asked somebody who worked in the Pentagon at the time, who I've known for a while, did we do that intentionally?
Did we announce it at that time, just as we got what we needed from Russia, that Afghanistan fell?
Immediately we announced this.
Did we do that intentionally to humiliate him?
Was there some, you know, was there some reason for it?
And he said Putin wasn't even a consideration and his reaction wasn't even a consideration.
We just figured this is a good time for our interests to abandon the ABM treaty.
So now we have, just as the Russians feared, you know, when we abandoned it, we said this is all about, you know, protecting the free world from terrorists and we'll all be in this together.
Well, of course, they're building the ABM systems on Russia's borders in the former East European bloc countries.
And now what we're saying is, yeah, but this has nothing to do with Russia.
But this is all aimed at Iran and North Korea, which makes no logical sense.
And, you know, I don't know if you've read this, but in Foreign Policy magazine a couple of years ago, a couple of American professors explained in detail why, in fact, the ABM system and placing them there is aimed at Russia.
And the point of it is to allow America to be able to successfully launch a first nuclear strike against Russia, a completely devastating first strike, which would result in a total American victory.
Now, wait a minute.
This is in Foreign Policy magazine and who wrote it?
Yeah, I've written about this actually a couple of times.
I can send you the link.
I don't have that right in front of me right now.
Yeah, that'd be great.
I mean, and this is something that we've talked about on this show.
I guess I never knew where was the journal article that started the whole discussion, but this is not a defensive mechanism.
This is like wearing armor to a fistfight.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, this is aimed at Russia.
I mean, and I called one of the professors and asked him about it, and he explained, look, if we were, for example, if this is aimed at North Korea and we want an ABM system to shoot down North Korean missiles, we wouldn't put them in Europe, you know, 5,000 miles away.
We'd put Aegis destroyers all around the peninsula in North Korea and try to shoot the things, try to shoot the missiles down just as they're launching or shortly after they launch.
That's basic sort of military doctrine.
And then he went on to explain why and, you know, the odds.
It's all laid out in a Foreign Policy article.
And it's funny, we've got very little play over here, but when that article was published in America, it was top news, all the radio stations, all the TV stations in Russia.
And, you know, people were hysterical and they actually thought that the reason why this article was published in Foreign Policy, which they thought, you know, thinking in analogous terms, they thought that this was published actually by the government as a signal to Russia that, look, we're already at this point now and we already can launch a successful first nuclear strike against you anytime we want to and you're through.
I mean, they took it as an act of war, pretty much.
And the population and the public was pretty hysterical for, you know, a couple of weeks.
Let me ask you about the government of Russia's reaction to that.
This is something I know I really need to learn a lot more about.
But there's a couple of guys who always post the same comment over and over again on the anti-war radio blog entry archive entries, and which is that when America takes this first strike posture, that means that Russia has to take a launch on warning posture, which means that if Norway launches a satellite into space and their computer reads it wrong, goodbye, Austin, Texas.
Yeah, in theory, it should be that way.
You know, the only thing that I would say that gives me a bit of comfort is that, you know, ideologically, you know, our two systems, our two governments are not so, you know, diametrically opposed as they were before.
I mean, Russia is still essentially a capitalist, a variation on kind of capitalist dictatorship.
Well, we're becoming a lot more like Russia here, too.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, to be honest, there are a lot more similarities than we should make any of us comfortable.
And in fact, you know, the horrible reality is we were part of what Putin put, we helped put Putin into power.
I think a lot of our own oligarchical interest and sort of thought he would be our Pinochet.
And there was a lot of talk about how we needed a Pinochet because Yeltsin was faltering so badly.
We just, we turned against him because he turned out to be not our Pinochet, but Russia's Pinochet.
You know, he wasn't our bastard.
He was their own bastard.
And that's why we really turned against them.
So, but to get back to your point, you know, that is certainly a danger.
I just think, I don't think fingers are on the trigger quite as, you know, ready, ready to strike as they used to be.
And I'm, maybe I'm just in a false sense of security, but it's, that danger is there, but it's just not the same as in the Soviet time, I think.
Plus, I'm not really sure how much the Russians even trust their own equipment, you know, to allow something like that to happen.
Yeah.
Well, I hope that's right.
And believe me, I would much rather have that same false sense of security.
That's why I don't watch documentaries about meatpacking facilities.
You know what I mean?
I just rather pretend.
On the other hand, you know, it's got me thinking about, I forgot what it was called, the Schiefen Plan or whatever, before World War I in Germany, where if Russia attacks us, we invade France.
And it was just, you know, in the form of the bureaucracy.
If this happens, that's the reaction kind of thing.
And that's what really scares me, is that, you know, there's some signature on a clipboard that says, launch on warning, and that's going to be what counts at the end, you know?
I think there's definitely that danger.
And, you know, people think that Putin has this incredible hold, like nothing happens, nothing moves in the country without him lifting a finger or signing an order, which is just not true.
The bureaucracy does operate pretty autonomously from Putin.
And once in a while, he sort of, you know, stomps in the room and shakes things up.
So actually, yeah, and that's a really good point.
And on top of that, I think, you know, his generals, as was evidenced with the move he made to allow us into the Central Asian bases, his generals and the people in the military and in the security services are far more anti-American and aggrieved and bellicose than Putin is.
There's no doubt about that.
And even Khodorkovsky, you know, the Yukos oligarch, who's in Siberia in jail, he wrote from jail that Putin is more liberal than 70% of the country.
And some people took that to mean that, you know, Khodorkovsky had been broken or was trying to suck up to Putin.
But I don't think so.
I think he was I think it's true.
I think Putin is he's probably a bit less liberal now than he was a couple of years ago, especially after we were we were backing this, you know, Garry Kasparov's opposition to him.
I think that that radicalized him to a new level.
Well, and Garry Kasparov was allies with these guys who I swear, they're straight out of the Simpsons, the commie Nazis, right?
The National Bolsheviks.
Yeah, but, you know, I should add to Edward Lomonov, the head of the National Bolsheviks.
He's he's one of my favorite writers.
And I was reading his book, you know, before I even moved to Russia years ago.
And he's and he's he also wrote for the exile before we were before our newspaper was closed down.
He used to write for us.
Really?
Yeah, he wrote regular columns.
And in fact, I think I think his the fact that he wrote for us was one of the reasons why I think my newspaper got in trouble for got cited with potential extremism.
And, you know, he is very radical and very extreme.
And it is very odd that, you know, the neocons and the NED would be backing the National Bolsheviks in Russia.
It's very odd.
But, you know, it's Russia is not what we want it to be.
We want Russia.
We kind of have this script where there are good, decent, you know, middle class pro-American people just waiting, ready to lay down their lives to have a lot in order to bring about this glorious Walmart cubicle future.
And we've seen that to some degree in Eastern European countries.
And we think it just we think that basically we think sort of like in the movie Full Metal Jacket, we think inside of every name of nationality here, there's an American trying to get out.
And the reality is, in Russia, there isn't an American trying to get out.
Russia is such a completely different culture with a different history.
And, you know, it's if there's going to be a revolution there, it's not going to be some kind of pro-American neocon, pro-Clinton, Tony Blair type of leadership.
It could be a national Bolshevik regime much, much more.
I can imagine that much more easily than I can imagine a liberal democratic regime there.
Well, please forgive me for getting all scorpions and winds of change and things on you here.
But what if let's do like the counterfactual history?
Let's say that after the fall of the Soviet Union, rather than pretending to give them a hand to help them up, but in fact, just holding them there so we can kick them while they're down.
What if we had actually tried to say, now, listen, here's here's the best way.
You know, what you ought to do is sell shares of stocks to everybody and all these companies and really create a market economy there.
And we had tried to really be friends with them.
How different could it have been?
You know, that's that's a great question.
I mean, obviously, we'll never know, but it could not have been worse.
What we did was the absolute worst thing to ensure that the Russians are going to distrust us, distrust liberal democracy and market capitalism for at least a generation.
We did we we were with the absolute bad guys and we pushed it down the narrowest, worst path possible for Russians.
I even remember at the time, short term needs, you know, very, very short term political and, you know, greed needs.
But it was it we led them down the absolute worst path.
And we were very instrumental in it.
I mean, you know, in Gorbachev's later last year or two, we pretty much shifted policy and stopped helping him, stopped supporting him, threw our weight behind this group of radical young reformers who were big fans of Pinochet and shock therapy.
And we funded them through USAID and other vehicles.
We funded these guys.
And, you know, at a time when 50 million dollars went a long way and we made their careers and that group, it was called the St. Petersburg Klan, that group of radical reformers who were all enthralled by Pinochet and shock therapy and who all even traveled to Chile at that time.
That's the group that Putin eventually came out of.
Yeah, you know, I remember I believe maybe I read this later, but the way I remember it, I think it was even when I was a kid, actually, during the fall of the Soviet Union, watching it on TV with my dad and not long after that, hearing a reference to one of the former Soviet leaders saying, well, you know, we want to look at your constitution and try to copy the American constitution that the Americans said, oh, no, you don't.
That's the worst thing you want to do.
Oh, it's a terrible, ineffective thing.
You don't want that.
Yeah, because we wanted to control the place.
That's why I mean, that's it.
And I think we thought if they had a constitution like ours, they might have a tough time controlling it.
I mean, we made we made so many blunders first by pushing the most radical privatization program.
I mean, this goes back to Larry Summers and that whole, you know, insane and ran neoliberal ideology that you kind of create that you don't you don't spread the wealth and opportunity in that situation.
Instead, you create a tiny class of Uber mentioned of oligarchs, you know, who then will make it in their interest, who then will have an interest in maintaining the status quo, which we which at the time we thought was the status quo was pro-American government, which will be good for business.
And so we were we were very instrumental in, you know, in steering Russia towards this kind of extreme shock therapy, oligarchical economy.
And that's what that's what the battle between the White House.
If you remember, you know, when Yeltsin bombed the parliament in 1993, that's what that battle was all about.
It was all about how property was going to be divided up as an extremely wealthy country.
And the question was, was it was this going to be the program promoted by Chubais and young reformers backed by USA, backed by us, which was going to create a small oligarchy class?
Or is it going to be something that was going to put shares in the hands of the workers and sort of the masses and create a much more equitable system that's been used in some other countries?
And Russia just, you know, Russia took the extreme neoliberal path and it eventually came to a head because the parliament resisted it.
And so Yeltsin bombed the parliament and we backed it.
You know, we actually extended him billions of dollars of aid right after he bombed the White House.
I'm sorry, because we're up past our time here.
But can I keep you on?
Because I still have more questions.
I don't want to, you know, if you have to go, I understand.
Well, tell me about those other countries, because unfortunately I have my anecdotes of all falling apart because I can't remember what country I'm talking about anymore.
But I had a next door neighbor who was in the Peace Corps who went over to Eastern Europe right after the fall of Soviet Union.
And it was Latvia or Estonia or one of those countries, I think, where what they did basically was they took, you know, everything had been communist state owned property.
But what they did was they sold shares to everyone and they put a limit on how many could be bought.
They fixed the price real low so that, you know, pretty much everyone could afford to buy at least some shares in all the formerly state owned property.
And somehow they had a regime that actually enforced those contracts and enforced those certificates.
And you had the local townspeople ended up owning the school district, owning the factory that they all worked at, et cetera, et cetera.
It would be like if you ask Ludwig von Mises, how do you go from a communist society to a libertarian one?
Not Ayn Rand, but ask Mises.
This is probably, you know, what he would recommend, something like this.
And according to my neighbor, the former Peace Corps guy, it worked.
Can you tell me, is that what you're talking about?
It worked because to apply a model that might work in the Baltics, where the countries, they're tiny countries of one or two million people with an historical consciousness where the people place themselves, you know, in the Western European tradition.
So what might work there with that kind of culture and history and mindset is not at all going to work in a place like Russia, which spans 11 time zones, has enormous amounts of, you know, assets.
I mean, incredibly wealthy, you know, just Norilsk Nickel, for example, just one company controls one third of the world's nickel and 70% of the world's palladium.
That's in Russia.
You know, Latvia, Estonia, none of these countries have anything like that.
Gazprom has a third of the world's natural gas reserve.
So, you know, there was a lot less at stake with a different culture and a different history.
You know, but I think we did try to push on Russia a policy that we had, that the government and the IMF sort of thought was working OK in Poland, which is, you know, mass privatization, firing, downsizing, opening up markets, et cetera.
But the polls, the polls, as far as I know, they, you know, after a couple of years, it was so incredibly unpopular and it was impoverishing so many people that they turned around and, you know, really softened the economic changes and the shock therapy and voted in different people.
But they, again, because culturally and historically, I mean, they it's not as violent and brutal of a country as Russia.
They had a functioning, somewhat functioning democracy with different political parties that genuinely had a chance.
You know, Yeltsin ruled as a dictator.
A lot of the decrees that Yeltsin signed in the 1990s, you know, he didn't even, some of them were written by his American advisers, some of these economic decrees.
The parliament was completely ineffectual.
So I guess what I'm saying is that the situations were just so different.
There was so much more at stake in Russia.
There's such a completely different history and culture and consciousness that, you know, you couldn't you couldn't apply what worked in little, in a little Baltic country to Russia.
Although, you know, like you said, what the way that they did do it couldn't have been worse.
I mean, they really did.
You know, we look at, you know, the Pinochet model.
That guy was a fascist.
That's not libertarianism to have a decree that all of this formerly state-owned property now belongs to these 10 oligarchs.
Yeah, no, it's fascism, exactly.
And these guys, you know, who ran things, they believed, as do, you know, a lot of neocons and neoliberals, they believe that democracy should only be about the symbols of democracy and the trappings of democracy.
If you hold elections, even if they're rigged and if you have, you know, a variety of opinions, supposedly, or a variety of newspapers or owners of newspapers, you know, even if everything is bought off, then you can call it democracy and free press.
But really what they think is there are only a few supermen who really know what the people need, who really know how the economy should be run.
And kind of ideologically, these people, you know, ran Russia into the ground.
But these people, they had actually a very kind of similar, I don't know, ideology or outlook on life.
People like Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs and that ilk on the Western American side.
And then people like Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, all of the so-called young reformers and shock therapists on the Russian side, they all sort of thought, yeah, you need democracy, you need the trappings of democracy, a vote every four years, but rig it.
But in reality, we know what's needed, we know what's best.
I mean, a lot of Russians called these market reformers, young reformers, they just called them Bolsheviks.
From their eyes, these are the same, it was the same thing as the Bolsheviks, a small elite controlling everything and holding phony elections.
You know, what changed, really, again, what changed was Putin eventually turned against the West.
And now we demonize the hell out of him and make him out to be Hitler and Stalin and every other bogeyman.
And we want to get a Cold War going.
But, you know, we created this guy, we put him there.
And the reality is, if he was acquiescent to what we were doing around the world, if he let Chevron buy out, you know, his oil companies, we'd be touting him as this great, you know, Peter the Great of Russia, with a few flaws.
Right, yeah, no doubt about that.
And, you know, this gets back to what we were talking about, about the missile defense and reason for hope is, you know, what you described there sounds a lot like America, more and more as we become like Russia.
And I know that sounds kind of hyperbole in a sense, but we do have a Military Commissions Act.
And, you know, we do have a theory of plenary powers in our presidency and all these kinds of things.
You know, seems like we ought to be best buddies with them.
And my favorite example, of course, is the American media, which I guess is more sophisticated than the Soviet media, if only because they have the feedback mechanism of pricing and all that.
And probably more criticism from the outside.
But I just wanted to share with you from Glenn Greenwald's blog here.
He's a blog quoting the Washington Post.
I forget if it's Dana Priest or Dana Priest.
There's two different.
There's a Dana and a Dana over at the Post.
Anyway, so it's an exchange with the live chat, with the Washington Post audience.
And a question from Evanston, Illinois asks, Hey, Dana, why does McCain keep saying that Russia committed unprovoked aggression against Georgia?
Nobody outside of America believes that.
Why won't anyone call him out on that?
And Dana Priest answers.
The person who would need to do that is Obama.
And he doesn't do that or a lesser version of that because I suspect he does not want to look weak vis-a-vis a resurgent Russia.
OK, so never mind that point.
We she's absolutely right about why he doesn't want to give McCain a talking point.
That's obvious.
But what I want to focus on is the it's Obama's job to tell McCain that he's wrong about something.
It's not the job of a reporter listening to this to follow up and say, well, wait a minute, are you saying that there was not an attack against Osetia or what?
Yeah, I think his point is well taken, but he also he leaves out a lot of his papers.
The Washington Post really, along with the Times, but even more so, the Post took the lead in creating this false narrative that Russia invaded unprovoked because Russia is evil.
I mean, just a couple of days ago, I forget her name now, Molosenko, Moskalenko, that a lawyer for Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian lawyer for Anna Politkovskaya.
She was in Strasbourg for a human rights court trial.
And she's a Russian lawyer, human rights lawyer.
And she was apparently poisoned.
This was last week.
And they found a bit of mercury in her car.
So immediately, Fred Hyatt, the opinion page editor of the Washington Post, comes out with yet another in a series of insane op-eds saying that even though evidence is not in, it's pretty clear.
We can already say that Putin has poisoned yet another outspoken critic.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We need to do this.
We need to do that.
Well, it turns out a couple of days later, she just got sick.
The mercury was in the car because the previous owner had broken a thermometer.
She even admitted it.
This is all out there now.
And it's all in Le Figaro.
And it was just a mistake.
You know, in the war, I mean, I'll give you another anecdote.
Just after the shooting stopped, I went with a press pull, with the Kremlin press pull, into Gori and then into Tskhinvali, which is the capital of South Ossetia.
We saw, you know, all the incredible destruction there.
This was actually the second time for me in there.
And on our way back, there was Peter Finn from the Washington Post, who was one of the people in the buses with us.
On the way back, I got an email that I saw on my phone saying that the Washington Post, just that day, had put out an op-ed piece saying that Tskhinvali was largely intact and, you know, almost no one died.
And all of that talk about how the Georgians had leveled Tskhinvali and committed crimes were just pure Russian lies.
And I mean, I just saw that with my eyes.
All of us just saw what happened in Tskhinvali.
So I actually went over to the other bus and I showed this to Peter Finn.
And I said, you just saw what I saw with your own eyes.
And this is what was just written in your newspaper, that what we saw did not exist.
You know, what do you think?
And he was, you know, he was pretty diplomatic about it.
But basically, he said, you know, when my article comes out about, you know, the events of today and what I've seen and so on, it's going to be hard for the opinion page to be publishing crap like that.
But of course, that's not true, right?
The opinion page can go on writing whatever they want, as though the rest of the newspaper doesn't exist.
Exactly.
And the thing is, the opinion page and all these pundits and, you know, they actually drive the narrative much more than journalistic reports.
I mean, some of the journalistic reports are very slanted and complete BS as well.
But I saw what Peter Finn wrote, and it was very balanced and right.
And he talked about, you know, all the horrible destruction there.
And it was, and it's pretty clear there were war crimes committed by the Georgians.
And, you know, there were parts of the city that were completely leveled.
We didn't even see some of the villages that were leveled.
I met, you know, a lot of refugees who fled from their villages and ran, you know, through forests in the night and were attacked by planes.
Their trucks were strafed by Georgian planes.
I mean, there were a lot of horrible things committed by the Georgians, and we on the ground saw that.
But on the opinion page, the people working in the opinion page and running the opinion page, and they're very, very powerful people.
They just cherry pick.
They can choose what they want to publish and what they don't want to.
You know, actually, this line that Fred Hyatt used about Skinvali being largely intact, what he did was he quoted a Wall Street Journal article saying that Skinvali was left largely intact.
And that article was written by another guy I know who was on the same trip with us.
He, in fact, got there a day or two earlier than I did.
And I went back and read the article that the Washington Post quoted.
And what the Wall Street Journal said was, parts of the city were destroyed.
You know, the main residential area was destroyed.
The center was destroyed, et cetera.
And then there were other outlying parts of the city which were left largely intact.
And what the Post did is just said, according to the Wall Street Journal eyewitness there, the city is left largely intact.
I mean, it's that evil, you know, and that intentionally manipulative.
Well, there was one article in the Post that said it looks like Stalingrad when they finally drove the Nazis away.
Bart, I don't think there was enough time.
I mean, you know, if the war had settled in, Stalingrad, that kind of destruction, I think, takes a lot more time.
But in the main residential area, it's called Shanghai District because it's the most sort of densely populated part of Tskhinvali.
Every building was, you know, parked and had giant blackened holes in it.
And all the windows, there wasn't a window left and there were corpses in the streets and so on.
Well, what is your sense of the casualties?
Because I guess Human Rights Watch said it was just a couple of hundred.
The Russians said it was 3,000, something like that.
Yeah, that was some way, you know, it's a pretty surly business trying to get into that because when we were out there, we were all really pushing them to find out, you know, had 1,500 or 2,000 really died or not.
There was certainly enough warfare going on, enough destruction going on.
And the war was launched, the Blitzkrieg was launched in the middle of the night by the Georgians.
So, you know, it certainly could have been possible, but I just have to go with what I saw and asking people and, you know, evidence that I was given.
And it seems to me, I go with what Human Rights Watch said.
You know, this happens in warfare.
People see horrible things all around them and refugees in particular, if you look at any crisis or any war at any time, they always tend to, because of the trauma, they tend to exaggerate the numbers of dead and the numbers of dead and who's been killed and, you know, the destruction and so on.
Because they've just undergone, you know, the most traumatic thing human beings could possibly experience.
This happened in Kosovo.
If you remember in Kosovo, the Albanian refugees, they were using Albanian refugees as sources without questioning them then.
They were very skeptical this time, but back then they weren't questioning the Albanian refugees during the Kosovo war.
And they came up with figures of 100,000 killed and then 500,000 killed and 1 million women raped.
Now, I'm sure that the, you know, the refugees saw horrible things.
But what we know about the reality of Kosovo is that, you know, at most, as I understand from what the UN investigators found, there were at most, there were a couple of thousand Albanians were killed, and that included KLA people and so on.
Yeah.
John Pilger reported that the FBI left after two weeks.
There were no hundreds of thousands of people in mass graves to find.
Exactly.
And, you know, and again, part of that is just cynical manipulation.
But part of it, I think, also is refugees, when they're traumatized like that, really believe, you know, they see one person killed and there's this chaos.
And the people were describing to me, these refugees were walking around in a daze.
They've, you know, they've been dealing with shootings and shellings for years now, these kind of cross-border, but they said that just the intensity and the sound, they just kept saying the sound and the feeling in your gut of these bombs and these rockets going off.
They just, they couldn't even come up with words to describe it.
They were so traumatized.
Well, I remember the estimates after September 11th were in the tens of thousands.
Exactly, exactly.
So, you know, from the destruction, it was certainly possible.
But from what I was able to see, and it was a pretty surly business, I mean, I got some generals and I was getting, I was making a lot of enemies among the Ephesians and some of the Russian army people by probing into, you know, where are the bodies and stuff.
But I don't know, you have to do that to find out.
But what I found really disgusting was that, you know, during the war and in the aftermath of the war, Western journalists were probing for holes in the Russian story, doing what they, trying hard to find holes in the stories that they could deflate the tragedy that, the tragedies that the Russians and the Ephesians said they suffered.
Whereas on the Georgian side, they bought everything hook, line and sinker.
Every time the Georgians said something or issued a new press release about, you know, how many people were killed or how the Russians were poised to invade Tbilisi and that they were going to kill Saakashvili and subjugate the country and so on.
It was reported as news.
The reporters were doing, I mean, the reality is reporters were kind of doing their jobs on the Russian side, which is being skeptical and probing.
But on the Georgian side, Western reporters were not doing their jobs.
They were doing everything to basically just pass along disinformation from the Georgians.
Because I think that's what, you know, the editors wanted to hear back in America.
And now as we go into this presidential election, just coming up this Tuesday, we have both major presidential candidates vow to give billions of flat broke Americans dollars to Georgia and to work to bring them and Ukraine both into NATO.
Yeah, it's horrible.
I mean, you know, I've spoken with human rights activists and democracy activists and political opposition people in Georgia.
This is the last thing they want.
I mean, that country, Saakashvili is basically a Putin.
He's the kind of, he's the Pinochet who's our bastard, right?
So that's why we give him a free ride on everything.
The guy has squeezed democracy, squeezed the free press, squeezed the court.
He's a disaster.
He's a mini-me Putin.
And yet, you know, here we are propping him up again.
We're the reason why he's in power and we're the reason why there's not true democracy in that country.
You know, Reporters Without Borders just issued last week, issued a report on freedom of the press rankings of different countries and their freedom index or freedom of the press index.
Georgia came out in 120th place, you know, below, I mean, below Venezuela, the big bugaboo of all the neocons, but below, you know, all kinds of third world dictatorship and really in a clash with Russia and other authoritarian countries.
And yet we're giving billions prop to Saakashvili, propping his government up, protecting him from genuine democracy activists, basically screwing over the people in that country.
Well, I'm certain that unlike what happened in Russia in the 1990s, this time there will be no blowback or consequences from our intervention in that country.
And in fact, we won't call what's happened there already that.
You know, I have to say coming back here, I'm just, the layers of delusion among, uh, so the delusionalism in America, it's just, it's so insane.
You don't even know where to begin.
Uh, you know, the idea that every, the idea that it's now a given, uh, and conventional wisdom, it's a given that we already won Iraq.
We won the surge, the surge work, we won.
And now the question is, you know, where do we go from here?
I mean, that, that, that's so insane.
I don't even know how you argue with that.
Oh, I do.
How?
Oh, well, oh, you want to know?
First of all, uh, the Maliki government will not hire the sons of Iraq period.
Second of all, the Maliki government is now feels like they're so strong.
They only need the Iranians don't even need us anymore to back their barter core and they're kicking our asses out.
Uh, Kurdistan is always described by the experts of being particularly Kirkuk as a pile of matches waiting to burst into flames with all kinds of violence and ethnic cleansing and winner take all politics as they fight over the oil there.
The Iranian parties basically have taken over everything from Baghdad to Basra and are keeping it.
And, uh, there's only, we're only waiting for the civil war to start again.
We're just waiting for the sons of Iraq and the barter core to go back to war.
Oh, and by the way, uh, the Mahdi army can be summoned back to battle with a snap of a fingers.
Yeah, no, I, I agree with everything you're talking about reality.
People here don't talk about reality.
So when you, so I could just easily see these neocons and all these other people arguing back, you know, you're a defeatist.
I mean, what I mean is there's no actual genuine debate that's based on reality in this country.
There's these kind of meta realities, uh, that people impose.
And even though there are consequences just piling up, I mean, the American empire is collapsed.
The economy's collapsed.
We're in massive retreat.
You know, we're basically looking like the Soviet union in the 1980s.
Uh, these people live in this kind of fantasy land.
And, and so to have any kind of genuine debate or argument, it seems just impossible.
Well, I'm with you.
I guess, you know, all we can do is continue to try to write about the facts and contrast them with the narrative and see what we can do to break through.
Right.
I agree.
All right, everybody.
That's Mark Ames.
Great interview.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
Uh, Mark Ames, the article is the cold war that wasn't in the nation.
That's the nation.com.
Of course.
Uh, he's a journalist.
He's written for the New York press, the nation and GQ Russia.
That's interesting.
He's the founding editor of the Moscow base, the exile and author of the books going postal and the exile sex, drugs, and libel in the new Russia anti-war radio.
We'll be right back.
