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Contents:
Vladimir Putin’s Plan: He Took Crimea. He’s Taunting NATO. What Will Russia’s President do Next?: Joseph Brean, National Post, Nov. 16, 2014 — Menace clouded the arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Brisbane Australia on Friday, as he was the only world leader to bring along a naval fleet, including his Pacific flagship, forcing Australian vessels to intercept as it neared territorial waters.
Testing the Limits: Andrew Stuttaford, Weekly Standard, Oct. 20, 2014 — "I don’t think it’s 1940,” the woman in Riga told me in June, referring to the year the Soviets brought their own variety of hell to Latvia.
Contest of the Liars — Bill Clinton vs. Barack Obama: Rex Murphy, National Post, Nov. 15, 2014— We all know, or I should say, we all used to know that Satan, the Adversary, was the father of lies.
A Murderer’s Warped Idealism: George F. Will, Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2014— Western reflection about human nature and the politics of the human condition began with the sunburst of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but it lurched into a new phase 70 years ago with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps.
FIDF Protective Edge (Video): Youtube, Nov. 9, 2014
The Loneliest President Since Nixon: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2014
Victory was Easy, Now the Hard Part: Linda Chavez, New York Post, Nov. 8, 2014
Obama Survival Manual, Intl. Edition: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 14, 2014
Angela Merkel's Putin Problem: Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 2, 2014
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S PLAN: HE TOOK CRIMEA. HE’S TAUNTING NATO.
WHAT WILL RUSSIA’S PRESIDENT DO NEXT?
Joseph Brean
National Post, Nov. 16, 2014
Menace clouded the arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Brisbane Australia on Friday, as he was the only world leader to bring along a naval fleet, including his Pacific flagship, forcing Australian vessels to intercept as it neared territorial waters. Russian officials claimed the boats are testing their range in anticipation of climate research in Antarctica, but in light of Mr. Putin’s escalating provocations of the West, the symbolism was impossible to ignore.
It was a reminder that, even at this meeting from which Mr. Putin was nearly uninvited amid outrage over the downing of a passenger jet by Russian enabled separatists in Ukraine, he is the one who makes the threats. Other recent gestures have likewise revealed a belligerent vanity, with an undertone of nuclear danger, which raises worrying questions about Mr. Putin’s true goals, broader strategy and appetite for risk. These include the frequent sorties of Russian military planes into or near the airspace of other countries, often NATO members, including one over the Labrador Sea during a NATO summit. In September a Russian plane buzzed a Canadian warship in the Black Sea during Russian combat training near the Crimean port of Sevastopol, coming within 300 metres and causing the HMCS Toronto to lock its radar on the plane in anticipation of firing in self defence. Russia has denied the flight was provocative, and said it was routine.
Other airspace incursions have been noted over the Arctic, where Russia and Canada have disputed claims to energy resources. These are not merely exercises in international airspace or waters, but rather they are provocations, “almost an invitation to an accident,” said Aurel Braun, a professor of international relations at the University of Toronto, now a visiting professor at Harvard. They are increasing in frequency, intensity, and recklessness, he said. As winter approaches, there are fears Mr. Putin’s next move could be to cut off gas to Ukraine — or to Europe — despite the economic harm it would cause Russia. Mr. Putin has used this lever before, and Russian companies have reportedly purchased much of Germany’s gas storage capacity in recent months, as a way to prevent stockpiling there.
While the fear of gas disruption seems to have been largely averted by a deal last month to secure $4.6-billion in guaranteed funds for Russian gas that transits Ukraine into Europe, Mr. Putin’s recent behaviour suggests playing by the rules is not a top priority. The self-sabotage of a gas shut-off could cause great harm to Russia’s economy, not least via the sanctions it could trigger, but such a tactic is no more risky than invading a neighbouring state or providing arms to separatist militias. As such, Mr. Putin still wields the threat of real hardship in countries, like Germany or the Netherlands, that are traditionally unwilling to push back too hard. This willingness to threaten neighbouring countries, even at its own likely expense, has led some European leaders to allude to dark memories of the 20th century, such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, who came close to comparing Mr. Putin to the expansionist dictators of modern European history.
“We have to be clear what we are dealing with here is a large state bullying a smaller state. We have seen the consequences of that in the past and we should learn the lessons of history and make sure we do not let it happen again,” Mr. Cameron said, adding he did not think there was a purely military solution.
A think-tank, the European Leadership Network, this week released a report called Dangerous Brinkmanship, which identified nearly 40 recent close military encounters including three high-risk encounters and 11 “serious incidents of a more aggressive or unusually provocative nature, bringing a higher risk of escalation.” It called on Russian leadership to “urgently re-evaluate the costs and risks of continuing its more assertive military posture.” “To perpetuate a volatile stand-off between a nuclear armed state and a nuclear armed alliance and its partners in the circumstances described in this paper is risky at best. It could prove catastrophic at worst.” While it is possible Russia is testing NATO defences in anticipation of outright conflict, there are indications the provocation is the main point, serving as it does Mr. Putin’s domestic goal of projecting his image as a Russian nationalist defender against a looming foreign threat.
It is one of the few poses available to Mr. Putin, who leads a country with a GDP the size of Italy’s and an economy one-eighth of the size of the U.S., and smaller than China, Japan and Germany. His stage is global, but his audience is largely domestic, and it is this duality that gives rise to the strange image of “a tiny man in elevator shoes,” as Prof. Braun put it, who still manages to stand astride the world like a colossus, exerting power through empty gestures, like riding bareback on a Siberian horse, flying with rare cranes in a glider, or diving into the Black Sea and coming up with ceramic antiquities. Dictators are famous for their bluster, but this is a man with nuclear bombs, whose aggression has already split a country. And there are signs that Mr. Putin is prepared to push his nuclear advantage, for example the news this week that Russia intends to reduce its participation in a joint effort with the U.S. to secure nuclear materials.
Even the unveiling this week of the memorial statue in Sofia of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident who was assassinated on a bridge over the Thames in London by a man with a poison dart umbrella, was a reminder of how far Mr. Putin is willing to go: The killing of Alexander Litvinenko, similarly poisoned in 2006 by radioactive polonium in a cup of tea at a hotel on Piccadilly, with Russian agents the main suspects, occurred during his presidency. If provocation ever does tip over into open conflict with the West, Ukraine is the obvious flashpoint, even more so now that there are reports of Russian troops and materiel crossing the border into Crimea, including ballistic missiles with nuclear capabilities.
To Mr. Putin, as Prof. Braun describes it, the danger of Ukraine has never been about outright conflict with NATO, for which Russia is no match. Rather, the fear is that Ukraine could become a successful democracy integrated with Europe, a large Slavic state transcending the fortunes of modern Russia. “It would undermine his legitimacy,” Prof. Braun said, and so if Mr. Putin cannot control Ukraine, he would rather destroy it. “Ominously, evidence is growing that this buildup [of Russian military in the Donbas region of Ukraine] is preparing a new offensive by [Mr. Putin] in his war against Ukraine — a campaign of attrition against Ukraine’s economically fragile state,” according to a report for the Atlantic Council by Adrian Karatnycky. In all this, Mr. Putin has been lucky in having a “feckless” American president, Prof. Braun said, who makes him look good by being so desperate not to intervene in the Syria and Iran, and seeking Russian help, which comes at a diplomatic price. “We should not confuse political luck with political acuity,” said Prof. Braun. “This is where the comical blends with the dangerous.”
Prof. Aurel Braun is a CIJR Academic Fellow
Andrew Stuttaford
Weekly Standard, Oct. 20, 2014
"I don’t think it’s 1940,” the woman in Riga told me in June, referring to the year the Soviets brought their own variety of hell to Latvia. “But then, I wouldn’t have expected 1940 in 1940 either.” And then she laughed, nervously. With Russia’s ambitions spilling across the borders that the breakup of the Soviet Union left behind, and talk from Vladimir Putin of a broader Russian World (Russkiy Mir), in which the Kremlin has the right to intervene to “protect” ethnic Russian “compatriots” in former Soviet republics, the once bright line that had cut the Baltic states off from the horrors of their past now seems fuzzy.
And in a more literal sense the borders that separated the Baltics from their old oppressor have lately appeared more vulnerable than once believed. Moscow has been pressing and provoking in the Pribaltika for years—some subversion here, some denial of history there. There have been maliciously random trade bans (Lithuanian cheese, Latvian sprats, and quite a bit more besides) and carefully planned cyberattacks. But the bullying has been stepped up sharply this year. The saber-rattling has evolved from menacing “training exercises,” such as last year’s Zapad-13 (70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops war-gaming their way through a fight against “Baltic terrorists”), to include too many flights by Russian fighters near or even in Baltic airspace to be anything other than part of a significantly more aggressive strategy.
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On September 3, Barack Obama traveled to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to reaffirm NATO’s commitment to the three Baltic states, all of which have been members of the alliance since 2004. Two days later Eston Kohver, an Estonian intelligence officer investigating smuggling across Estonia’s remote and poorly defended southeastern frontier, was, claims Tallinn, grabbed by a group of gunmen and dragged across the border into Russia. His support team at the Luhamaa frontier post nearby were distracted and disoriented by flash grenades and their communications were jammed: They were in no position to help. Shortly afterwards, Kohver turned up in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison. According to Russia’s rather different version of events, the Estonian was captured while on a mission on the Russian side of the border. Kohver faces espionage charges that could mean decades behind bars. He has “decided” to drop the lawyer that the Estonian government had arranged for him. Court-appointed lawyers will fill the gap. The stage is being set for a show trial, complete, I would imagine, with confession.
After a year of Russian lies over Ukraine, I’m inclined to believe democratic Estonia over Putin’s Russia. The timing was just too good. Barack Obama descends on Tallinn with fine words and a welcome promise of increased support, and Russia promptly trumps that with a move clearly designed to demonstrate who really rules the Baltic roost. In the immediate aftermath of Kohver’s kidnapping the Estonians signaled that they were prepared to treat the whole incident as an unfortunate misunderstanding. No deal. The power play stands, made all the more pointed by the way that it breaks the conventions of Spy vs. Spy, a breach that comes with the implication that Estonia is not enough of a country to merit such courtesies. If anything could make this outrage worse, it is the historical resonances that come with it. There are the obvious ones, the memories of half a century of brutal Soviet occupation, the slaughter, the deportations, the Gulag, and all the rest. But there are also the echoes of a prelude to that: the kidnapping of a number of Estonians in the border region by the Soviets in the days of the country’s interwar independence, intelligence-gathering operations of the crudest type. These days Russia prefers more sophisticated techniques: Earlier this year, it polled people in largely Russian-speaking eastern Latvia for their views of a potential Crimean-type operation there (as it happens, they weren’t too keen).
But whatever the (pretended) ambiguities of the Kohver case, there were none about what came next. Moscow reopened decades-old criminal cases against Lithuanians who acted on their government’s instructions and declined to serve in the Red Army after Lithuania’s unilateral declaration of independence in March 1990. That government may not have won international recognition at that time, but recognition—including from Moscow—followed within 18 months. To attempt to overturn now what it approved in the interim comes very close to questioning the legitimacy of Lithuanian independence today. This could turn out to be more than merely symbolic harassment. The Lithuanian government has advised any of its citizens theoretically at risk of Russian prosecution on these grounds not to travel beyond EU or NATO countries. That’s not as paranoid as it sounds—Russia has been known to abuse Interpol’s procedures in ways that can make for trying times at the airport for those it regards as its opponents…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CONTEST OF THE LIARS — BILL CLINTON VS. BARACK OBAMA
Rex Murphy
National Post, Nov. 15, 2014
We all know, or I should say, we all used to know that Satan, the Adversary, was the father of lies. Alas, the Grand Serpent’s claim to that dubious paternity has long since been challenged by more fertile and febrile monsters, among which louche set none can claim first rank with more authority than the tongue-torquing, lip-biting prevaricators of modern politics. As for old Nick, when he was Lie-Master-in-Chief, He at least was clear on one thing: That a lie was, indeed, a lie. Not even in the broiling stews of Hell would He have tried to imply otherwise. He treasured His lying, tied it in fact to matters of apocalyptic consequence: the loss eternal of souls and endless perdition and pain. But not even Nicky had the brass to claim a lie as truth, or a lie as a disguised virtue. That was left to the PR-bred, spin doctor-massaged politicians of our sad and weary day.
Let us take the case of the great duplicitist himself, the Master, William Jefferson Clinton, a man who looked warily upon truth as the grease on the pole of his ambition. He knew it was an easier mast to climb when it had been studded with something more abrasive, when it had been gritted and rutted with evasions, equivocations, infinite parsing and jesuitical conjugations of the obvious. He splintered the pole with each evasion, scarred it with chop logic, and carved whole footholds with artful deceit. And subtle, too, he could be. “That depends on what the meaning of is is” is his most famous slip-slide into swampy semantics. Not many politicians can claim to have taken the wind of out the most fundamental verb in human history. Mr. Clinton’s most brass-faced lie, his Thermopylae stand against the truth and all its attendant soldiery, is now famous. People who cannot house a line of Lincoln in their iPhone brains store Clinton’s famed animadversion and denial, the immortal: “I did not have sex with that woman … er … Ms. Lewinsky. “ He spoke this locus classicus of determined deceit, which at the time was hysterical in its rebuttal of reality. For at the moment the words were uttered he was living a White House sex fantasy in real time, featuring under-the-desk carnal ministrations from his intern-houri while he whispered diplomatic sweet-nothings to some foreign ambassador. History’s first tête-à-tête-à-tête. Clinton’s nose-telescoping gobsmacker was spoken with gritted teeth, live, into the eyes of a camera and watched by every American citizen. Rarely has a lie, a straightforward brass-faced lie, been launched with such fulsome bravado, unshaven of all qualifications whatsoever.
Skip now to the current incumbent, the supercool master of the outright, non-subtle, brazen, full-on, deliberate lie. He sold the transformation of 20% of the American economy, the upheaval of its health-care system, and the launch of the error-riddled and Byzantine (the law is more than 20,000 pages long, with more to come) Obamacare. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health-care plan you can keep your health-care plan. Period.” Those are Obama’s straightforward, urgently stated declarations — repeated on tape to audiences of thousands and on television to audiences of millions. The “period” was his anchor of assurance. No way you couldn’t keep your plan or your doctor. Period. As millions of Americans now know, of course, those were lies. And they were lies when they were made. The most central persuasion to have Americans vote or buy into Obamacare was a declaration from the herald of a new politics, of truth and transparency such as America had never seen, from the mouth of the angel of Hope and Change … all of it a damn lie. It was not a Clinton sex lie, a lie to excuse hormonal recreation, or fraternizing sexually with the White House help. This was a policy lie, from a man who came into the White House as a symbol of a new day in politics, a turning away from the mud and madness of Washington. But “you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan” was a deceit that would have shamed Nixon. Obama, the winged messenger of a new day, turns out to be as loose with the truth, and as comfortable with casting it aside, as the most pot-bellied, cigar-chomping ward-healer of old.
Of these two, who lied least? I give Clinton a slight moral edge. He can plead his overactive sex drive, and he confined his lies to matters that (mainly) concerned him and Hillary and Monica. Obama’s, however, is far more serious. He was a president speaking as a president. He was changing the law. He was giving eye-to-camera assurances to Mr. and Mrs. America, and knew those assurances were false. Obama wins the lie tournament with the Clinton. But he was aided by a mindset. Obama is a progressive politician. He went to Harvard. He knows more than anybody else — and especially all those millions less intelligent than he — what is good for them. So with the smug, righteous and callous authority of the progressive, he was more than prepared to deceive those who elected him … and place his head on a soft pillow each night with the soothing thought, that — after all — he was lying to them for their own good. And who could know better than them what they really wanted but he himself?
George F. Will
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2014
Western reflection about human nature and the politics of the human condition began with the sunburst of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but it lurched into a new phase 70 years ago with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps. The Holocaust is the dark sun into which humanity should stare, lest troubling lessons be lost through an intellectual shrug about “the unfathomable.” Now comes an English translation of a 2011 German book that refutes a 1963 book and rebukes those who refuse to see the Holocaust as proof of the power of the most dangerous things — ideas that denigrate reason. The German philosopher Bettina Stangneth’s “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer” responds to Hannah Arendt’s extraordinarily and perversely influential “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Although, or perhaps because, Arendt was a philosopher, in her report on Israel’s trial of Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of industrialized murder, she accepted the facade Eichmann presented to those who could, and in 1962 would, hang him: He was a little “cog” in a bureaucratic machine. He said he merely “passed on” orders and “oversaw” compliance. Arendt agreed. She called Eichmann “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” lacking “criminal motives,” “a buffoon,” “a typical functionary” who was “banal” rather than “demonic” because he was not “deep,” being essentially without “ideology.” Arendt considered Eichmann “thoughtless,” partly because, with a parochialism to which some intellectuals are prone, she could not accept the existence of a coherent and motivating ideological framework that rejected, root and branch, the universality of reason, and hence of human dignity.
It was odd for Arendt to suppose that the pride Eichmann took in his deportations — especially of the more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews when the war was already lost and even Heinrich Himmler, hoping for leniency, was urging it for the Jews — was merely pride in managerial virtuosity. Arendt, however, did not have, as Stangneth has had, access to more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s writings and taped musings among Argentina’s portion of the Nazi diaspora, before Israeli agents kidnapped him in 1960. Eichmann was proudly prominent in preparations for the “final solution” even before the Wannsee Conference (Jan. 20, 1942) formalized it. “His name,” Stangneth notes, “appeared in David Ben-Gurion’s diary only three months after the start of the war” in September 1939. On Oct. 24, 1941, a newspaper published by German exiles in London identified Eichmann as leader of a “campaign” of “mass murder.” “I was an idealist,” he told his fellow exiles, and he was. In obedience to the “morality of the Fatherland that dwells within,” a.k.a. the “voice of blood,” his anti-Semitism was radical because it was ideological. Denying that all individuals are created equal entailed affirming the irremediable incompatibility of groups, which necessitated a struggle to settle subordination and extermination. “There are,” Eichmann wrote, “a number of moralities.” But because thinking is national, no morality is universal. Only war is universal as the arbiter of survival. So, Stangneth writes, “Only thinking based on ethnicity offers a chance of final victory in the battle of all living things.”
Eichmann, a premature postmodernist, had a philosophy to end philosophizing. To him, Stangneth says, “philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories” was absurd. She says his ideology was “the fundamental authorization for his actions.” In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” argued that Germany was saturated with “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that produced much voluntary participation in genocide. This made Hitler a mere product and trigger of cultural latency. But in 1992, Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men,” a study of middle-aged German conscripts who became willing mass murderers, had noted that the murders of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge and tens of millions of Chinese by Mao’s Cultural Revolution could not be explained by centuries of conditioning by a single idea. Martin Amis’s new novel “The Zone of Interest” — set in Auschwitz, it is a study of moral vertigo — contains a lapidary afterword in which Amis abjures “epistemological rejection,” the idea that an explanation of Hitler and his enthusiasts is impossible. An explanation begins with Eichmann’s explanation of himself, rendered in Argentina. Before he donned his miniaturizing mask in Jerusalem, Eichmann proclaimed that he did what he did in the service of idealism. This supposedly “thoughtless” man’s devotion to ideas was such that, Stangneth says, he “was still composing his last lines when they came to take him to the gallows.”
FIDF Protective Edge (Video): Youtube, Nov. 9, 2014
The Loneliest President Since Nixon: Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14, 2014 —Seven years ago I was talking to a longtime Democratic operative on Capitol Hill about a politician who was in trouble.
Victory was Easy, Now the Hard Part: Linda Chavez, New York Post, Nov. 8, 2014 —The GOP victory Election Night was the easy part. Now comes the real work: forging an agenda that will solidify Republican gains over the next two years.
Obama Survival Manual, Intl. Edition: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 14, 2014—So Paul Krugman, who once called on Alan Greenspan “to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble”; who, a few months before the eurozone crisis erupted, praised Europe as “an economic success” that “shows that social democracy works”; who, as the U.S. fracking revolution was getting under way, opined that America was “just a bystander” in a global energy story defined by “peak oil”; and who, in 2012, hailed Argentina’s economy as a “remarkable success story”—this guy now tells us, in Rolling Stone magazine, that Barack Obama has been a terrific president.
Angela Merkel's Putin Problem: Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 2, 2014 —Checkpoint Charlie is an aging tourist shrine. As a symbol of a divided continent, it's part of a Berlin that was buried late in the last century.
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