“GOP Hypocrisy”: Outraged Over Benghazi, Silent On Iraq
When I heard that the House of Representatives has established a select committee to investigate the attack on Benghazi that left several Americans dead in 2012, I couldn’t help but wonder what these same legislators might have done had Barack Obama been president in 2003, and had the audacity of George W. Bush to attack a sovereign country that had no relevant connection to the 9/11 attacks with the result that nearly 5,000 Americans and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians (many of them women and children) perished. Had Obama’s war in Iraq also cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion, with another $490 in veteran expenses (thus far)—with a total cost of $6 trillion projected—I have no doubt that a select committee would long ago have sent him to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.
It’s sad to think how in our fury over Benghazi we’ve almost forgotten a recent war that destroyed so many families, nearly bankrupted this country (and may yet), and led to a hugely destabilized Iraq that no longer serves as a buffer to Iran. Needless to say, this terrible war was pursued under false pretenses, with huge amounts of government corruption—Houston-based company KBR alone (a spinoff from Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO before becoming vice president) racked up charges of nearly $40 billion during the war, making it (by far) the winner in the Iraq sweepstakes. In most banana republics, this would be cause for serious investigation; but not so much here, where our politicians (or their friends) are allowed to profit from armed invasions. Can it possibly be so that the U.S. Congress has ignored such obvious corruption while investigating over and over whether Susan Rice was given some edited “talking points” on Benghazi? Really?
I’ve spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco. Soon after the invasion of Iraq, I was staying at a hotel in Amman, when into the hot tub by the pool stepped a tall American with a closely shaved head. He seemed about my age, and we struck up a cheerful conversation. I explained I was in the country at the behest of the Department of State, as a kind of cultural ambassador. He liked this, and told me he was en route to Baghdad. He was a general in the army, a career officer with a specialty in intelligence. I asked him what he thought would come of the Iraq war.
He said, without pausing, that in ten years the U.S. would be out of Iraq, as the American people would never support an expensive war in an obscure country longer than a decade. He was right about that. He guessed that thousands would die. And he was more or less right about that, though his figures were a bit low. He predicted the region would be dangerously destabilized, and that sooner or later Iran would assert control over the Shia majority who would almost certainly take control, repressing the Sunni minority, which Saddam Hussein had led to power. Let’s say he was absolutely on the mark here, as Nouri al-Malaki was hiding from Hussein in Iran before assuming high office in Iraq, where he now has become a kind of dictator, supported strongly by Grand Ayatolla Kazim al Haeri, one of the most influential Shia voices in Iran.
I remember this general shaking his head bitterly, noting that we had turned Iraq into a magnet for all sorts of dangerous elements, drawing al Qaeda into a region where they had only a minimal presence before the war. He also pointed out that large numbers of Iraqi citizens had been displaced, and that the number would increase. Indeed, some four million Iraqis have been run out of their homes, and these wandering families–he said with a wry smirk–would never become our allies in the region (to put it mildly).
A few days after this conversation in Amman, I was giving a lecture on American poetry at a university on the Iraqi-Jordan border, talking to perhaps 800 students about Robert Frost. Afterwards, a young man came up to me with Frost’s poems in hand. He could recite reams of Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, and Lowell, and he did so while I stood there, amazed. He had just completed a degree, he explained, in American poetry, and I asked him if he were going to become a teacher one day. He said, indeed, it was his fondest hope. “But first,” he said, “I am crossing the border into Iraq, to fight against the American invader.” My jaw dropped. “And why is this?” I wondered. He said, “You must understand that, for my generation, this is like the Spanish Civil War. I must join in the fight for freedom. I must join the equivalent of our Lincoln Brigade.”
These encounters in Jordan stick with me, a decade later. Now Iraq lies in ruins, and the U.S. has tens of thousands of enemies with a right to their anger. Meanwhile, Americans mourn the loss of so many brothers, fathers, uncles, sisters, mothers. Many veterans lie in hospitals across the nation, dazed and confused. This war that somehow never found its way onto the books continues to drag on our economy. So why haven’t we brought Bush and Cheney to Washington to answer some very hard questions under oath? Well, I suppose we’ve got Benghazi to worry about.
By: Jay Parini, Professor at Middlebury College; The Daily Beast, May 11, 2914
“Speaking Volumes About The GOP”: Does John McCain Care More About Deaths in Syria Than Gun Violence in America?
Please read these two statistics and notice your emotional reaction to them. Do they make you angry? Do they make you eager for government action? When you digest these roughly equivalent numbers, do they stir you equally?
- A Human Rights groups says more than 150,000 civilians, rebels, and members of the Syrian military have been killed in the nation’s three-year conflict.
- A U.S. gun-control group says more than 100,000 Americans are shot every year in murders, assaults, suicides, and suicide attempts and accidents.
For Sen. John McCain, the hawkish Republican senator from Arizona, the first number makes him spitting mad, literally—as judged Wednesday from my front-row seat at the Harvard Institute of Politics forum, where he answered questions from a moderator and students.
“The Syrian decision has reverberated around the globe,” McCain said, linking President Obama’s blurred red line over Syria to aggressiveness from Russia, China, and Iran. He dismissed suggestions that Americans are war-weary—noting that Ronald Reagan grew the U.S. military in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War—and harshly criticized Obama for dithering on calls to arm Syrian rebels.
Visions of the dead and dying, women and children, lined in the streets after chemical attacks, keep him awake at night, McCain said.
“I am emotional,” declared the infamously temperamental senator, his face reddening with anger. “I’m guilty. I’m emotional.”
Contrast that reaction to the one a few minutes later when a Harvard student pressed McCain on gun control. With a shrug of his shoulders, the two-time presidential candidate noted that he had supported a bill that would have required background checks on all commercial sales of guns. It failed in the Senate.
His tone, passionate and aggressive on Syria, turned professorial and passive-aggressive on guns, as McCain explained that while the U.S. Constitution protects the right to bear arms, gun violence is “an emotional issue.” Congress needs to grapple with the issue somehow, he said, noticeably uncomfortable with his wishy-washiness.
“I know that’s not a good answer,” McCain said, “I wrestle with it all the time.”
So this is how McCain reacts to those two sets of numbers: Go to war for Syrians. Wrestle for America.
Disclosure: I briefly considered working for McCain in 2007, and respect his service to the nation as well as his willingness to compromise with Democrats. On the other hand, I opposed intervention in Syria, support gun regulations, and object to the policies and tactics of the NRA.
And so as McCain hemmed and hawed on gun violence, I turned to the person sitting next to me, Rep. Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., and whispered, “Where’s the emotion he showed on Syria?” Kennedy nodded.
The contrast of emotion may speak as much about the Republican Party as it does about McCain. The GOP is lurching so far to the right that this Arizona conservative is considered a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only, and there is no room for commonsense policies that uphold the Second Amendment while curbing gun violence.
After supporting one war fought on false pretenses in Iraq, McCain is still rattling U.S. sabers over the deaths of 150,000 Syrians in three years. Normally, that would hardly be notable: McCain, after all, is a consistent interventionist. But laid against the shootings of 100,000 Americans annually, McCain’s peculiar lack of emotion about gun violence seemed to speak to the sorry state of U.S. politics. And made me sad.
By: Ron Fournier, The National Journal, April 28, 2014
“Enough With Puff Pieces About Painting”: Bush Crew’s Deplorable Return, How Their Reemergence Sends A Deadly Message
It’s been more than five years since Dick Cheney left the White House and nearly eight years since Donald Rumsfeld was booted from the Pentagon. With the obvious exception of George W. Bush himself, no two men were more responsible for the United States’ disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq, as well as its embrace of a counter-terrorism model built on the twin barbarities of indefinite detention and systematic torture. In the years that have passed since their departure from public office, both men have released best-selling memoirs, made countless media appearances and no doubt added substantially to their already considerable wealth.
In fact, to get a real sense of just how little these men have had to pay for their sins, consider three recent examples.
One is a recent comment from Dick Cheney, delivered in public — not in private, not on background, not via unknown insiders with intimate knowledge of the former vice president’s thinking, but in public — about whether he still supports waterboarding (or torture, as most people besides Cheney tend to call it): “If I had to do it all over again,” Cheney said, “I would.”
The second is the new documentary, “The Unknown Known,” by Errol Morris and about Donald Rumsfeld. Estimations of the film’s quality vary, but all reviewers are unanimous in at least one regard: Rumsfeld, as he comes off in the film, truly has no regrets. Asked by Morris if invading Iraq for the second time, causing hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths and turning millions more into refugees, was worth it, Rumsfeld shrugs off the question and settles for a fittingly cold and glib answer: “Time will tell.”
The third story is, to my mind, the most disturbing. It’s a piece in the New York Times, published Friday, about a third man, a man who ignored warnings of a terrorist attack, plunged his country into two disastrous wars, invaded a sovereign nation without sanction from the United Nations and on false pretexts, signed off on the implementation of a worldwide torture regime, secretly initiated domestic surveillance on an unprecedented scale, oversaw the destruction of one of the world’s greatest cities, and cut taxes for, and thwarted regulations against, the Wall Street power-players who destroyed the global economy and consigned millions of people to lives of poverty, unemployment and deferred dreams. That man is George W. Bush, and the article is a puff piece about his kitschy paintings.
Obviously, the fact that these men continue to live charmed lives offends our sense of fairness. But it has a more tangible consequence, too. Consider the state of foreign policy thinking within the Republican Party today. Granted, with the recent ascendance of the relatively isolationist Sen. Rand Paul, the GOP’s view of foreign policy is somewhat in flux. But Paul is still an outlier, and a quick glance of the Mitt Romney campaign’s foreign policy experts is enough to show that neoconservatives like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and the rest of that ghoulish clique still call the foreign policy shots for national Republicans. Despite their abject failures — both technocratically and morally — Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld remain in good standing with the people who run one of America’s only two serious political parties. If Mitt Romney were president right now, with Dan Senor by his side, the United States could be ramping up for war with Iran or Russia, preparing to once again spread freedom from the barrel of a gun as if Fallujah and Abu Ghraib never happened.
There’s next to no chance any of these men will ever be officially held accountable for their crimes. All three clearly harbor no regrets. These are the fruits of belonging to the American elite in an era of widespread inequality, when not only the economy, but many pieces of the state itself, act to reinforce and perpetuate the divide separating those who have from those who do not.
Of course, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are hardly the first American war criminals to escape justice. Richard Nixon, in whose administration the former two men served, immediately comes to mind. Henry Kissinger, too. As was the case for Nixon and Kissinger, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have benefitted from a decision of the political ruling class — and, to a lesser degree, of the general public— that it’s best not to dwell too much on the nastier bits of America’s recent history. Back when some touchingly naïve souls thought it a possibility, President Obama used to dismiss the notion of holding his predecessors accountable for torture by urging America to “look forward.” This was an order that the vast majority of Americans showed themselves willing to follow.
This same dynamic, this resistance on the part of the powerful to hold their fellow elites to account — as well as the general public’s silent acceptance of these different, looser ethical standards — was also a key driver of the government’s response to the financial meltdown of 2008. After the crisis had passed and the Obama administration had begun reconstituting the financial sector (mostly in its prior form, sadly), there were public demands that some of the Wall Streeters responsible be prosecuted for the damage they wrought. But these flashes of public discontent were mostly ignored by the White House, and here we are, five years later, with essentially no Wall Street villain having had to worry about seeing the inside of a jail cell. Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are richer and more powerful than ever.
I’m hardly the first to notice the difference between how not only society, but also the state, treats the powerful and the rest of the public. Salon alum Glenn Greenwald has made the same point, as has MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. But while it’s a point well worth repeating, I don’t bring it up in order to shed light on the past but rather to sound a warning about the future. Because as bad as accountability norms have already become in the United States, there’s ample reason to worry that they’re soon to get even worse.
For an example of how this might be, consider the recent, much-talked-about essay in the Wall Street Journal by billionaire industrialist and right-wing donor Charles G. Koch. The piece is an odd one, residing somewhere between a talking-points-filled press release and a list of conservative maxims that are too hoary for all but the dullest politicians and the most thoughtless ideologues (despite his political activities, Koch is much more the latter). It’s littered with pablum about liberty and “the principles of a free society,” and is defined by the kind of sloppy, lazy thinking that lays claim to “dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom” without acknowledging that, in the real world, disagreements over the proper application of these universally agreed upon values is the essence of democratic politics.
As Koch goes on, however, it begins to make quite a bit of sense, his inability to recognize the basic mechanics of American democracy. It’s not merely that he’s an unsophisticated and unoriginal thinker (though he certainly is), it’s that he truly doesn’t understand what democracy even is. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the brief, passive-aggressive section of the essay in which Koch defends himself against unnamed “collectivist” bullies. Responding to a fusillade of criticism sent his way by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Koch complains that “collectivists” reject “a free and open debate” and “strive to discredit and intimidate opponents” like himself with “character assassination,” just as “so many despots” and Saul Alinsky did before. (Small consolation, I suppose, that Koch is self-aware enough not to actually call his opponents Hitler, choosing instead to merely make the implication.)
Beyond his comically exaggerated sensitivity, what Koch’s mini jeremiad shows is that the man can’t quite fathom the idea that free speech is not the same thing as freedom from critical speech. At no point in his many attacks has Harry Reid — or any other Democrat of significance, for that matter — said anything about Koch’s private life or soul. Throughout, the criticism has been directed toward his politics and the groups he pays to promote them. Reid has said that Koch wishes to establish a political status quo that shields his power and wealthy from scrutiny or competition. Reid cannot authoritatively speak to what goes on inside Koch’s brain, but his interpretation of Koch’s motives is hardly outside the realm of acceptable discourse in American politics. Keep in mind that ours is an era in which politicians malign the the poor as having bad values, bad habits, bad families and bad minds. People infinitely less influential than Charles Koch, in other words, routinely suffer much worse.
Then again, Koch, in so many ways, isn’t like most people. Unlike most people, he can directly reach any Republican politician in the country by simply picking up the phone. Unlike most people, he can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on misleading attack ads and cynical, quixotic campaigns to persuade young people to forego health insurance. Unlike most people, he can take advantage of Citizens United in order to funnel countless millions through shadowy outside groups, largely obscuring his political activities and denying Americans the right to know whose interests are being represented when a politician swears to fight higher taxes on the wealthy and roll back regulations on industrial pollution. Unlike most Americans, Koch can now take advantage of McCutcheon, the Supreme Court’s sequel to Citizens United, which lifted aggregate caps on political donations and took us one more step closer to having no limits whatsoever on how America’s wealthiest citizens can use their largesse to influence the political process.
And that, from all appearances, is how Koch and his ilk like it. With Republicans in Congress stymying any attempt to make political donations transparent, so people at least can follow the money, and with the conservative Supreme Court widely considered to be far from finished destroying campaign finance law from within, Koch can rest easy knowing that his power will remain not only overwhelming but also little understood. He can go on supporting politicians who thwart Medicaid expansions one minute and funding outside groups who castigate Obamacare for not covering more people the next. He can keep bankrolling anti-Obamacare ads that stretch the truth so thin as to render it translucent. He can keep polluting our air, contaminating our water and destroying our environment without having to even pay for the privilege.
He can keep being unaccountable.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, April 5, 2014
“This From A Trained, Known Failure”: Rumsfeld Thinks “A Trained Ape” Could Do What Obama Can’t
Donald Rumsfeld, whose mastery of foreign policy was amply displayed in Iraq, thinks that “a trained ape” could have done a better job handling Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, than President Obama and his team have. The problem, Rumsfeld told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox, on Monday night, is that Obama has not been deferential enough to Karzai: “The President has been unpleasant to him.” His entire Administration has dealt with Karzai “repeatedly and publicly in an abusive, unpleasant manner.” Is that perhaps what Rumsfeld considers untrained?
What is it about Obama that bothers people like Rumsfeld? He might ask himself, for a moment, why the idea of Obama—the President of the United States—speaking out of turn bothers him so much, and why the word “ape” sprung to mind. Rumsfeld worked for George W. Bush, who made something of a fetish out of talking like a cowboy; he spent a lot of time in office trying to out-preen Dick Cheney; and yet he just doesn’t like Obama’s tone. What’s particularly odd is that Van Susteren was asking Rumsfeld about, of all things, Karzai’s statement of support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea. (Rumsfeld called it “understandable.”) Haven’t we been hearing from Republicans that Obama is too passive when it comes to Ukraine—that he’s too pleasant with Putin, and doesn’t talk tough in the way that they imagine they would? Just a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld told Van Susteren that “it is U.S. weakness that has shaken the world.” He has also railed against the President’s supposed “apologies” for America.
Van Susteren asked Rumsfeld why it was so hard to get Karzai to sign a status-of-forces agreement—a memorandum that would clarify the legal position of American troops in Afghanistan. Karzai has withheld his agreement for months, despite warnings that it won’t be possible to keep even a residual American force in Afghanistan without one, and despite the approval of Afghanistan’s loya jirga. (He may want to insure he has a card to play after the upcoming Presidential elections.) Rumsfeld scoffed at the idea that Karzai had been difficult—this is where he talked about how “a trained ape can get a status-of-forces agreement. It does not take a genius.”
By that, perhaps, Rumsfeld meant that it does not take a genius to put American troops in another country. Indeed, it does not—Rumsfeld proved that himself, by getting our forces over to Iraq. The hard part can be getting them out.
“I realize these are tough jobs, being President or Secretary of State. But, by golly, they have trashed Karzai publicly over and over and over,” Rumsfeld said. This when Karzai had been so “friendly” during the Bush Administration; under Obama, it had all “gone downhill like a toboggan.” And so, as far as Rumsfeld is concerned, Karzai, a man whose country was invaded by the Soviet Union, was left “feeling he has to defend himself” against a United States government now in the process of withdrawing from his territory by supporting Russia’s invasion of a third country. And, Rumsfeld said, “I personally sympathize with him.” The Obama Administration has certainly made mistakes in Afghanistan, but the most questionable moves, like doubling down on troop levels early on, have tended to be hawkish—and, Rumsfeld style, they didn’t really work. A bitterness toward Obama that would be rich enough to evoke Rumsfeldian warmth toward aspiring Russian proxies is quite a thing. (It seems likely that Karzai is hoping that Putin can be a source of replacement cash, a process that has already begun.)
Rumsfeld may be right that it’s easier than it looks to make Karzai happy, as long as one doesn’t mind losing a good deal of taxpayer money to Afghan graft, and American lives in opaque standoffs in villages where we have no idea who is paying whom for a drug route or a piece of a construction project two provinces over. When Van Susteren suggested that Karzai’s support for Putin on Crimea was “a poke in the eye” to the Americans who had fought and died in Afghanistan to keep his government safe, Rumsfeld brushed her off. Karzai, he said, might have conveyed “his extreme anger” to the American government, but “he also said to the American people give them my best wishes and my gratitude.” How very pleasant of him.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, March 25, 2014
“Putin’s Aggression Is Not America’s Fault!”: Yes, Pundits Are Arguing That We’re To Blame
One of the biggest flaws with the neoconservative view of the world is the idea that the United States almost always has within its power the ability to affect change. It isn’t merely that the United States should try to promote democracy or maintain an empire; it’s the idea that doing what it pleases, ably, is within the realm of possibility.
An ostensibly converse but ironically similar view comes from many on the left. Muslim extremism? The result of American foreign policy. Warmongering world leaders? Well, they feel hemmed in by the United States. This mindset, which is echoed by a number of realist scholars, has arisen most recently because of President Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Crimea. Several realists want us to understand the actions of Putin through the prism of the United States. For these thinkers, as with their neocon opponents, everything is always, in the end, about us.
A good example is Jack F. Matlock Jr.’s piece in The Washington Post. According to Matlock, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Putin’s actions can be explained by the way a bullying United States has treated Russia. Specifically, Matlock writes, America made Russia feel like the “loser” of the Cold War after that war ended. Here is Matlock:
President Bill Clinton supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe.
Matlock appears to be arguing that Russian anger over U.S. action in Kosovo was the result of America acting in Russia’s sphere of influence. But would Russia have felt the same if we had supported Serbia, Russia’s ally? Almost certainly not; Russia was upset that we took the opposite side in that conflict. Moreover, it’s slightly bizarre to say that we should have left Kosovo to Slobodan Milosevic just to maintain our high standing in Russian public opinion polls.
Matlock mentions the United Nations in the above quote, and he brings it up again when he notes that America’s catastrophic war with Iraq did not have U.N. approval. As touching as it is to view Putin as a great proponent of internationalism who was outraged by American breaches of the law, I think it’s probably fruitful to look elsewhere for clues to his behavior. Matlock himself quickly turns to NATO expansion, which certainly does seem to have had some impact on Russian attitudes towards the United States. As Matlock writes:
When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, [Putin] was the first foreign leader to call and offer support…What did he get in return? Some meaningless praise from President George W. Bush, who then delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; invasion of Iraq without U.N. Security Council approval; overt participation in the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; and then, probing some of the firmest red lines any Russian leader would draw, talk of taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
Whatever one wants to say about the intelligence or wisdom of American foreign policy—and the policies above were probably at best a mixed bag—it is bizarre to say that Putin was so angry we might try to offer Ukraine NATO protection from Russia that he…invaded Ukraine. Isn’t there something rather ironic about Putin being so angry by our concern over something that he goes and does the thing we are concerned about? It’s all part of the same mindset that sees the behavior of other countries as literally reactionary: We act, they react. (It is also worth noting that in 2008 NATO denied Membership Action Plan (MAP) status to both Ukraine and Georgia. Somehow this didn’t mollify Putin.)
Moreover, reading Matlock’s account you would think that Russian policy at home and abroad—Putin has cracked down heavily on dissent at home—was determined entirely by the United States. It is awfully solipsistic to look at the world this way.
Matlock has more trouble with the Obama administration. He writes:
President Obama famously attempted a “reset” of relations with Russia, with some success: The New START treaty was an important achievement, and there was increased quiet cooperation on a number of regional issues. But then Congress’s penchant for minding other people’s business when it cannot cope with its own began to take its toll. The Magnitsky Act, which singled out Russia for human rights violations as if there were none of comparable gravity elsewhere, infuriated Russia’s rulers and confirmed with the broader public the image of the United States as an implacable enemy.
No doubt the Magnitsky Act did infuriate the Kremlin, but Putin’s aggressiveness abroad and undemocratic tendencies at home were visible well before it passed, which severely weakens Matlock’s argument. (Direct retaliatory steps against the United States, like banning American adoptions, were certainly connected to the Act, but that doesn’t mean Putin’s entire worldview is shaped by American actions.)
These same tendencies appear in n+1‘s editorial on the Ukraine crisis. “What role has the American intellectual community played in this saga, if any?” the editorial asks. “Certainly we failed to prevent it.” I didn’t realize that the American intellectual community had the power to stop foreign dictators from invading other countries. They continue:
We have indulged ourselves in a bacchanalia of anti-Putinism, shading over into anti-Russianism. We turned Pussy Riot into mass media stars. We wrote endless articles (and books) about how Putin was a mystery man, a terrible man, a KGB ghoul who lived under your bed….It’s hard to know how much of what gets written in various places leads to American policies in actual fact. Does it matter what’s in the Nation? What about the New York Review of Books? The New Yorker? It’s impossible to say. And the media or publishing game has its own rules, irrespective of politics. Evil Putin is just going to get more airtime than Complicated Putin or Putin Who is Running a Country in a Complex Geopolitical Situation.
Whatever one thinks of this analysis, the most striking thing about it is the power it imparts to Americans. Putin is the leader of a foreign country. The idea that what’s written in American magazines leads to American policymakers making policy that in turn enrages Putin that in turn aids and abets his thirst for aggression is, again, almost laughably solipsistic.
American policy toward Russia going all the way back to the First World War has often been shortsighted or worse. But when thinking about how to respond—or not respond—to Russia’s actions today, it’s probably best to stop viewing those actions as the direct result of American foreign policy.
By: Isaac Chotiner, The New Republic, March 17, 2014
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