Ira Straus: Re: 2016-#123-Johnson’s Russia List. (re: Breedlove)

Philip Breedlove file photo

Subject: Re: 2016-#123-Johnson’s Russia List. (re Breedlove)
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2016 15:00:17 -0400
From: IRASTRAUS@aol.com

Re: 2016-#123-Johnson’s Russia List, 4. The Intercept: Hacked Emails Reveal NATO General Plotting Against Obama on Russia Policy. (Breedlove) 5. www.rt.com: Breedlove’s war: Emails show ex-NATO general plotting US conflict with Russia.

Here we go again, into the fantasyland of anti-Russian conspiracies. No “plotting” against Russia is shown in these articles, nothing to justify their breathless headlines and tone. Just a perfectly normal practice of General Breedlove asking people – the people he could be expected to ask in DC – how in the world he could get his relatively hardline view on Ukraine through to the Obama Administration.

Breedlove’s sincere despair about the Administration’s views and attitudes shines through plainly, even in these conspiracy-style accounts. The people he is shown consulting with, written up in a manner that is supposed to strike fear in us readers, are mainstream, and, last I knew of most of them, rather moderate.

There’s Harlan Ullman, who is with the old antiwar and pro-disarmament business group BENS as well as being with the Atlantic Council and an adviser to the SACEUR. Are we supposed to believe there is something wrong about the SACEUR consulting one of his advisers on how better to get his views through the White House’s viewpoint barriers? (and he didn’t get much help or encouragement, from what the article says).

Then there’s the Potomac Foundation, which will come as a mystery to most people. I knew it in the 1990-93 period as a small non-profit drawing on defense and defense industry people. Back then, its most active person on Russian affairs seemed to be Phil Petersen. Phil was in DOD for some time and took a warmly welcoming line to Gorbachev, and subsequently Yeltsin. He had been critical of his superiors at the Pentagon, and more broadly of the Bush Administration and of figures in it such as Gates, for thinking solely about playing out the cold war endgame against the Soviet Union and not thinking enough about building a new security order that would include Russia. When he and a colleague went public with their views about how the Pentagon ought to be planning and preparing for budget cuts, he lost his job, was understandably considered a loose cannon. He joined Potomac and went to the Soviet area to conduct fantastic interviews among a wide range of officials and public figures about evolving Russian security perceptions at the end of Gorbachev’s time and the beginning of Yeltsin’s time. His highly informative write-ups of his interviews showed just how fundamentally Russian security anxieties had shifted from the Western threat to new threats, particularly threats from the Islamic south, in the period of the collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of new actors in the former Soviet space. And how surprisingly much other ex-Soviet Republics shared this concern, rather than overwhelmingly focusing on a threat from Russia as we might expect them quite reasonably to do today.

This reinforced Phil’s view that a more active approach should have been pursued to integrate Russia in a new security order. His superior at Potomac was also reasonably pro-Russia though not as much as Phil; and in turn viewed the Atlantic Council at the time as even more pro-Russia.

That was the reality of these people and institutions that are named in with that kind of tone that suggests we should all become suspicious about eternal hardline plotters against Russia. Nothing of the kind in reality. Normal good people doing their best to respond well to very real changing conditions in the world.

Looking back at that period, a period when so much was possible and so much historic opportunity was lost, it seems to me that it was in no small part thanks to Phil’s encouragement (and separately, that of an official in the Russian Embassy) that I and a few colleagues in the Atlanticist NGO sphere felt ourselves justified in setting up a committee to promote planning and discussion for getting Russia into NATO alongside its neighbors.

Today, a quarter century later, that seems like another world. The West did not make anywhere near sufficient effort to think through how Russia could be included in NATO or foster such an integration. Russia on its side made plenty of mistakes and left plenty of gaps in its radical but spasmodic reforms, something for which the West was unreasonably blamed as the supposed cause of it (the honest criticism of the West in the Bush years was that it did far too little and didn’t put nearly enough skin in the game; skin meaning obvious money but also, maybe more importantly, initiative and change from the international structures it controlled, first NATO, then EU and OECD; then G7, which did go halfway but used itself mainly for status for Russia, not as a venue for serious diplomatic engagement with Russia). Divisions between Russia and the West reemerged on foreign policy; given the vast legacy of opposing positions and military structures from the Cold War era, and the new opportunities for competing for influence in the “near abroad”, this was all too natural, probably inevitable — inevitable in the absence, that is, of a much more serious effort at working out joint policies and integrating the security and foreign policy efforts of the two sides. That absence was inevitably the fault of both sides, but in that period the Western side seemed especially inadequate in vision and effort. A decisive historical conjuncture was lost.

The consequence was a re-alienation between Russia and the West. Which in turn sent the Western proponents of Russian integration with the West — including the cautious ones at the Atlantic Council as well as the more enthusiastic ones in the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO — in all directions as to the question of how hard or soft a policy to apply to the evolving Russia, in the course of this detour from the hoped-for integration goal. As the prospect of returning from the detour became more distant, views diverged further. However, few gave up the goal altogether, and here I think I should specify the Atlantic Council as an important institution that has tried hard to keep the goal and vision alive even while dealing with current situations.

There is no conspiracy of eternal hardliners in the circles Breedlove consulted with. Only people of various views, people whom it made sense for him to consult, and many of whom had been viewed as softliners for being Russia-integrators in the early ’90s, when it was urgently right to be Russia-integrators. And who now are trying in their various ways to figure out how best to cope with a situation that has flowed in no small part out of the failure to pursue that approach very far.

But, sigh. I get an impression that this utterly insignificant “revelation” from hackers will get churned into another of those widely believed conspiracy theories that we have become accustomed to.

Readers may recall the leaked Paet and Nuland phone calls, and the conspiracy theories spun around them by the means of simple miscategorization of what was said and what was going on. Nuland discusses who should be the new PM under Yanukovich, under the agreement with him; it gets turned by miscategorization into an American plot to throw out the agreement and carry out a coup against Yanukovich. By dint of angry repetition, this obvious falsehood becomes an important part of the fixed structure of reality in the minds of large numbers of people, not just in Russia. Similarly with the Paet call, although not worth reviewing here; it would take too long, the conspiracy theory is more of a play on multiple ambiguities in the taped conversation, playing to the many circles that like to believe in anti-Russian malfeasance, and the will to believe that a conspiratorial interpretation of the meaning of what Paet and Ashton were saying, no matter how implausible as an interpretation of the tape, is the real meaning.

These myths can all count on being propagated massively by RT on its side — run partly by Westerners resentful of the West, who love to feel like they are courageous dissidents from the Western power structure and media structure — and picked up on uncritically by many Western journalists who carry the same basket of sentiments in their heads.

There is a paradox in the criticisms from these circles of the Western media for not paying even more attention to their views and conspiracy theories. A more accurate criticism would be of the number of Western journalists who give an uncritical pass to these conspiracy theories.

There is some overlap here with the mentality shown in today’s more frequent brand of “media criticism”; the one in which the Western media are constantly accused — and accusing themselves — of propagating a narrative that demonizes Islam and blames Islam for terrorism. Meanwhile the ordinary Western public sees its main journalists and public figures in fact doing the opposite: denying that there is any connection between Islam and terrorism, denouncing the society at large as Islamophobic and as declaring war on all Muslims — and falsely accusing themselves too of propounding an Islamophobic narrative, even when it’s plainly the opposite of what they are in fact doing. It seems they have to make this false accusation against themselves, and so does the government, in order to make their accusation against society seem plausible: How could American society be Islamophobic and unfairly hard on Muslims, when the most powerful structures in it, the government and media, are almost nonstop arguing against any criticisms of Islam and any normally discriminatory and profiling policing practices, reasonable or unreasonable, and branding them Islamophobic, hate, etc.? The only way out is by the paradox of falsely accusing themselves of the same.

I say the overlap is only partial, however, because there is a very big difference: an overall anti-anti-Russia line is very much in a minority in the Western media, while an anti-anti-Islam line is overwhelmingly predominant there. This creates another paradox: in the case of Islam, the routinization of the “Islamophobia” accusation has become a matter of plain denial and obfuscation of facts and logic on urgent security matters; in the case of Russia there would be better reasons for differences in view. How to explain this paradox? Maybe it’s that the focus of feeling dissident and antiwar has shifted, from running interference for (Soviet) Russia to running interference for Islam. Or maybe not.

What is widespread in both cases, irrespective of whether dealing with Russia or with Islam, is the attitude of seeking blame to put on Western society and governments, and to attribute extreme hardline attitudes and conspiracy-type behaviors to the security sectors of Western governments. When it comes to discussing policy on Russia, this attitude is usually outweighed by other concerns; when it comes to uncritical propagation of anti-Western conspiracy theories, it often prevails.

Will the Breedlove hackings be another case in point? It seems obvious that RT and related outlets do their best to make it one. Less obvious is how many others in the West will follow, out of the quite separate motivations of liking to feel dissident and present a balance between two sides.

One of the foundations of international diplomatic society is the basing of conversations on fact and honesty, within bounds of not spilling state secrets; coupled with recognizing legitimate differences of interest and of consequent power perspectives that have to be negotiated between. This recognition of legitimacy of different interests is fundamentally different from the relativism and nihilism that were spread by the Nazis and Communists, destroying many people’s capacity for perceiving fact and truth, and that have been revived, sadly, by Russia in recent years, most famously by RT but also throughout a much wider space than RT. Since 1991, both sides of the equation for international diplomatic society has been violated: the West, by too frequently failing to recognizing the legitimacy of divergent interests and bargain with them fairly, as one of very foundations for hopefully reconciling interests a commonality of interest down the road; Russia, by reverting to nihilistic falsification of fact and undermining of all common foundations in truth.

The seeing of two legitimate sides in most matters of interest and perspective is often confused with a legitimacy of unreasonable contestation of every fact, or a readiness to attribute two equally valid sides to every matter of fact. They are in fact opposites, not the same thing. Successful diplomacy depends — as the great theorist of international society, Hedley Bull, explained — on both sides accepting this distinction and basing mutual dialogue on a fundament of truthfulness. Otherwise there is no real dialogue, just a jousting dance with words.

It is something that it seems to me Gorbachev understood; he retired most of the old jousting dance and the old demand that peace be made on its basis, which apparently would have meant by everyone agreeing to split the difference between truth and falsehood and tell half-truths in unison; he opted to address real problems and have real dialogues, and he achieved a real end to the Cold War. It is a norm that I have long wished the peace movement would understand, since without it, it cannot in reality work for peace.

Ira Straus
U.S. Coordinator
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO

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