05/21/15 – Patrick Smith – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I sure like this headline, anyway.
John Kerry admits defeat, and it's not about the Iran nuclear thing.
I'd be bothered if it was about that, but about anything else, I'm happy with it.
He's already defeated on the Palestinian state thing, so everything else that he's up to is horrible, so I'm glad that he's been defeated.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Patrick L. Smith from Salon.com.
How are you doing?
I'm well, Scott.
Good to be back with you.
Very good to talk to you again.
It says here, the U.S. seems to admit it overplayed its hand in Ukraine.
You're talking here about John Kerry's trip to Russia.
He went over there, met with Lavrov and Putin all day long.
Is that it?
Three hours with Lavrov, who is a very confident foreign minister.
Kerry has a somewhat personal friendship with him, developed over a lot of months.
And then four with Beelzebub, Putin.
I don't know what that makes Kerry.
Does that make him the Neville Chamberlain of our time, or what?
I say no.
He's tied to the lessons now.
I say no, and he's not.
Right?
I want to take you back a little ways, Scott.
Yes, I have been cheering on an American defeat in Ukraine since the coup of February 2014.
I want to tell your listeners, if I may, this is a very honorable position, okay?
In the late 60s, we had quite eminent historians, I'll name one, Henry Steele Commager, one of the great American historians of the 20th century, saying, we need to be defeated in Vietnam.
It's the same sentiment.
We're wrong, and we will not take no for an answer, so we're going to have to have a bloody nose.
And Kerry going to Sochi precluded a bloody nose.
For now, we don't know what's next from the State Department, and I think it's altogether a good thing that we appear to be capitulating in the Ukraine matter.
So you're saying that, to sum it up then, when Kerry goes to Russia and meets with Lavrov and Putin like this, that's sort of de facto signing on to Minsk, too, and saying, okay, we'll stop screwing around for our side.
That's right.
I mean, the infamous Victoria Nuland was so, if I may use the word, really very slimy on this matter.
Nuland, indeed Kerry, when Minsk, too, was signed, they did everything within their power to sink it.
They did not want a negotiated settlement.
That involves compromise.
American leaders don't like compromise.
But they were beaten.
The Europeans trumped us.
Again, I couldn't be more pleased.
And so now they're kind of playing catch-up, and they've finally come to their senses and said, the Minsk, too, framework, very imperfect, kind of Swiss cheesy for all its empty spaces, but it is the framework of a negotiated settlement.
It's the best we've got.
And that is the avenue the Europeans and Moscow are going to travel.
It depends on two things now.
Well, until this moment, it depended on two things.
It depended on how the Americans behaved, whether they would succeed in sabotaging the agreement, and how the Ukrainians behaved, how the Kiev government behaved.
The Americans appear to have settled now and said, okay, we'll do it your way.
The people in Kiev, you know, the Europeans have been complaining, I hear from sources, what you get from the German foreign ministry is, these people in Kiev are impossible.
They never tell you what they're going to do next, and when they do tell you what they're going to do next, they do something else.
They're just, they're wild cards.
They're loose cannons.
All right, so now, but this doesn't really mean, or does it mean that they're canceling the training exercises, or they're just...
No, the cancel, the training, the troop trainers were kind of a secondary, I mean, the primary preference the Americans had until quite recently, until Minsk, too, was arms, okay?
We proposed, by way of the New York Times, sending arms to Ukraine on February 1st.
Chancellor Merkel and her colleague, Francois Hollande, went into apoplectic over that, so far as I can make out, and got straight into gear and said, okay, this is it with the Americans, we're going to go our own way.
Do the math.
Minsk, too, was signed ten days after that New York Times story.
This was a race to the finish line, and the Europeans beat us.
The troops followed that.
They arrived April 16th.
Okay, they're there, they're kind of a placeholder.
I am very disturbed by their presence, of course.
I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War.
Maybe a number of your listeners are not.
They should read up.
This is how it always starts.
But that's kind of a placeholding thing.
I think your listeners, and certainly I, take it as, at this point, a dangerous reminder, but a reminder only, that we don't know what's next for the Americans.
For now, they are acquiescing in the pursuit of a negotiated settlement.
For now, in italics, who knows?
Right.
Now, as far as the wild card, coup d'etat, junta, there in Kiev, who's behind all these assassinations?
Does anybody know?
There's been more than a dozen assassinations of, I think they're virtually, to a man, all of them associated with the last president's government, isn't that right?
Yes.
A few things mark them out.
First of all, Scott, you and I are having this conversation.
We're talking into a very extensive news blackout, okay?
I don't expect many of your readers to be aware of this wave of assassinations.
As I wrote in a column, it sort of reminds me of Argentina in the late 70s.
And the corruptions that are now emerging, involving the new government, perhaps we'll get to those.
The assassinations started coincidentally with the arrival of the American troops.
No causality suggested.
Between April 15th or 16th, the first of them, and the very first few days of May, there were a dozen.
I got my count from sources I find quite reliable, 12 to 13.
Do the math, Scott.
That's not quite one a day, but it's pretty close.
Bad stuff.
One, they were political allies of the Yanukovych government, the government that was toppled.
Two, they were critics of the current government's corruptions.
Three, they advocated a less than drastic breach with Russia as it moves westward, perfectly sensible position.
Four, this is the one that really gets my goat, 27 million Russians died to defeat Nazism.
They advocated honoring them on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory.
Death.
Those are the characteristics that unite these victims of assassination.
It's crazy living in the bloodlands, you know, of course the Soviets had killed millions of Ukrainians before the Nazis ever showed up.
It's not like, oh good, our saviors are here to protect us from the other side.
And you know, in America where liberals and conservatives at least pretend to hate each other so much and call each other commie and fascist all the time, over there they really are commies and fascists.
So you imagine how much bad blood they have there.
Very complicated.
Hold it, Patrick, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back.
Patrick L. Smith from Salon.com, John Kerry, Ms. DeVete, thank goodness.
More in a minute.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Patrick L. Smith.
He writes for Salon.com and, oh, let me page down so I can tell you he's the author of the book Time No Longer, Americans After the American Century.
We're talking about the fight that the U.S. picked in Ukraine and how we're now backing off.
And at the break there, right before it, we were talking about the assassinations of people in the Kiev government or close to the Kiev government who were close to the last regime that was overthrown in the American-backed coup of February 2014, and just how dicey things are getting for people who are trying to participate in power there who fall out of line.
That kind of led me to the question I was going to ask you, Patrick, was I had read from, well, I forget the source now, but it was, I think, Andrew Peruby, the leader of, it was either the leader of Right Sector or this Fobota or something.
And they were saying, forget Minsk II, we don't respect Minsk II.
And if we can overthrow Yanukovych, we can sure as hell overthrow Poroshenko.
And he has no right to negotiate a ceasefire on our behalf.
And we're a bunch of Hitler-loving Nazis and we want to keep fighting anyway, he said.
And so I wonder if you think that there's a real danger of that, that the Nazis, that America and their sock puppets have used as their sock puppets, could come back to bite them in the ass here and end up taking power in Kiev.
Yes.
Let there be no question.
The main impediment, as I said earlier, there were two threatening impediments to Minsk II.
One was the next move by the Americans.
We were turned back, as noted.
The second was the behavior of the government in Kiev.
These people, it is quite known outside of the United States, if I have to keep saying that, but it is the way it is, that these people are the tail wagging the dog in Kiev.
The government is disturbingly beholden to these paramils and crypto-Nazis, in some cases you can drop crypto, they're right out there.
They occupy very prominent places in the government.
They had to be given those places.
They have already said, post-Minsk II, there is no way we're going to let you negotiate a settlement in the framework of that agreement.
They have begun to pass legislation counter to the provisions of Minsk II.
They are a serious danger to the European effort to negotiate this settlement in concert with Moscow.
I have it from quite reliable sources that Poroshenko, the President, and his Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, are not all that far from the threat of a coup.
These are dangerous guys.
What's the relative strength of their armed men versus the Nazis?
You mean the Ukrainian army?
Yeah, or whatever security forces they have that are loyal to them rather than to the legacy of Adolf Hitler.
Right.
The Ukrainian army was not capable of waging the civil war in the East on its own.
It could not do it.
It started that way.
The first week or ten days of the offensive eastward, we had Ukrainian uniformed troops coming into villages and throwing up their hands and saying, we can't do this.
Here, take the tank.
There was no commitment.
There was no training.
The army is well known for the depths of its corruptions at senior levels.
NATO would like to, just for example, NATO would like to provide the Ukrainian army with some funding.
It will not do it because it cannot tell where the money is going.
So the militias organized privately in these gangs of a hundred, there's an expression for them, formed and they were the advanced guard of the war in the East.
They were absolutely essential and they are apparently quite savage, bloodletting fighters.
A lot of stories of pretty awful kind of war criminal behavior going on when they took a town or a village.
Well, you know, the interceptor, you had a thing where Chechen jihadists were fighting on the side of the Nazis against the Russian backed so-called separatists there.
That's right.
Yeah.
It's a real, it's a real salad over there, I have to say.
But these paramilitaries, heavily assaulted with neo-fascists and Nazis of various sorts, are now gathered together in what is called the National Guard.
And the salient fact for your listeners is the American trainers over there are not training the regular Ukrainian army, they are training the National Guard.
Right.
So guess who they're training?
Yeah.
And starting on...
It makes the stomach turn.
Yeah.
And starting on April the 20th.
And I'm sorry, I wish I had remembered that this is where we left off two weeks ago, the point that we didn't have time to get back to.
Yeah.
And I wanted to ask you to clarify was exactly this point, that the regular Ukrainian army, as far as we know, doesn't necessarily have a bunch of Nazis in it.
But the Ukrainian National Guard is basically just the fancy pretend legitimate name for these Nazi militias.
Yes.
Poroshenko, probably, I don't think Poroshenko comes to a single solitary conclusion on his own.
But he concluded as if he has to, probably the Americans, look, you're overly dependent on these people, sweep them up.
You got to start organizing them and we'll send some trainers over.
That's my notion of the chronology of the thing.
And then once the U.S. makes better armed fighter and better trained fighters out of them, then they'll quit being Nazis because of their fancy new uniforms.
They won't have...
At least they won't have the SS lightning bolts on their shoulder anymore.
Well, we got...
Now, Scott, we got to wait and see what they do have on their epaulets.
Man, oh man.
It makes the head turn and the stomach...
It makes the head spin and the stomach turn.
That's a lot for one day, I would say.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
And you know what?
I still can't get over...
And you know what?
Maybe it's your base level kind of irony to plagiarize Bill Hicks there.
But the fact that it's the first black president who is the first time, the first leader, really, to field Nazis in battle since Hitler did in World War II in Europe is just amazing.
It's just as amazing how, you know, the way he backed the Ku Klux Klan, basically, in Libya who, you know, raged their anti-black pogroms against...
I just told you, Scott, what happens when I contemplate these things, what happens to my stomach and my head, and it happens all over again when I contemplate our president.
How treacherous has he proven, really?
Who would have guessed, you know?
I think he's...
Ha!
Just wait until Jeb comes.
Ha!
It's going to be so much worse.
Please.
Better...
Let us end on a more pleasant note.
Well, okay.
When Jeb comes, liberals will pretend to care about war again, and then so we'll have a little bit louder voice for a little while.
I love your skepticism.
I loved your permanently arched eyebrow, Scott.
Yeah, that's the fun part of being a libertarian, is I don't get to be pleased for four or eight years and then trade off like the rest of y'all, you know?
I'm always angry.
Anyway, you seem to have a pretty good grip on what's going on over there.
That's good.
Not many Americans do.
It's part of our problem.
We're flying blind.
Hey, here's something that we can talk about to wrap up, then.
So who should my audience be reading if they want to know about this stuff?
Other than you, of course.
Hmm.
Interesting, interesting.
Non-American media, all right?
You get accounts of the composition of the Ukrainian forces in, you know, Tory newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, right?
Non-American media, choose your stripe, I don't care.
Conservative, liberal, lefty, there's way more, all right?
American authors, there's a scholar at the University of Chicago, a very honorable man named John Mearsheimer, read him.
Stephen Cohen, much under siege these days.
I interviewed him for the column a few weeks ago.
Those columns traveled a mile.
They're still out there around, translated into French and Russian.
Stephen is on the nose.
He brings 40 years of scholarship to it.
He's a serious man.
He is not ideologically motivated, as he said in one interview.
My problem is I don't have an ism and I'm not an ist.
I'm not a socialist, I'm not a communist, I'm not any of that.
He's just a clean scholar.
That's his problem.
You talk, you bring a non-ideological take to these conversations.
That's bad in our American context.
Stephen Cohen, Mearsheimer, Robert Parry, P-A-R-R-Y, ConsortiumNews.com, doing a really good job.
I commentate.
Robert reports it.
He gets good facts.
I found, finally, Stephen Wiseman, W-E-I-S, maybe two S's, maybe one, Reader Supported News.
Wiseman, he seems to have dropped out of sight lately.
He's got some superb stuff about what went on under the surface in Ukraine by way of American subterfuge.
I'd add James Carden at the National Interest.
He has some good stuff, too.
Does he?
Yeah, and of course Dan McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Right.
He's got great stuff on, too.
Anyway, there are things to read, but regrettably, one must make, here in our great country, more effort than most of us assume necessary to find out what's going on.
We have this sort of cotton wool of mainstream media, and you won't know what in the world is happening over there, and not much will make sense if you just rely on them.
Good for you to put people on who can speak truth to power, as they say.
I'm trying.
I sure appreciate the job you're doing.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate your time for coming back on the show, too, Patrick.
You're very welcome.
We'll do it again.
Okay, take care.
Cheers.
All right, y'all, that's Patrick L. Smith.
He writes at Salon.com, and his book is called, again, Time No Longer, Americans After the American Century, and his latest article is John Kerry Admits Defeat, the Ukraine Story the Media Won't Tell, and it's running on Antiwar.com today as well.
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