By Cliff Kincaid
February 25, 2022
The “experts” say Russia is a gas station with an army. Who made this army possible? The answer: politicians and corporate interests in Washington, D.C., and other Western capitals.
In our 2014 book, Back from the Dead: The Return of the Evil Empire, we quoted Michael Birnbaum, the Washington Post’s Moscow bureau chief, as noting that “after Russia’s brief war with neighboring Georgia in 2008, top leaders rethought their old habits. Although Russia ultimately prevailed in that conflict, its soldiers proved ill-equipped and disorganized, struggling with Soviet-era equipment that failed them on numerous occasions. So leaders turned to the West to boost their capabilities.”
In other words, the West decided to make future Russian conquests more easily accomplished by the Kremlin. The French, the Germans, and Italians began providing sophisticated military equipment to Moscow.
These deals with Moscow make the activities of Armand Hammer seem mild by comparison.
Hammer was the chairman of Occidental Petroleum and a champion of East-West trade whose father Julius laundered money to establish the first Soviet espionage networks in the United States. Armand Hammer was himself exposed as a Soviet agent who helped former Vice President Al Gore and his family become rich.
Trade with the USSR served Soviet interests then, and it serves Russian interests today.
President Obama and his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engineered a “reset” with Russia, supposedly to improve relations. It only served to bolster the regime of Vladimir Putin.
It was in 2012, after the Russian “reset,” that President Obama pushed Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) for Russia through the Congress, with the support of the Big Business-dominated Coalition for U.S.-Russia Trade, passing the Senate by 92-4, and the House by 365-43.
Conservative or libertarian groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute supported trade benefits for Moscow.
Two years later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Going back in time, once again to the Obama/Biden Administration, remember that Barack Hussein Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s statement during the 2012 campaign that Russia was our geopolitical adversary. Obama refused to supply Ukraine, after the invasion of 2014, with heavy weapons to defend themselves and then praised the Russians for their role in the Iran nuclear deal.
Clearly, Russia was exercising some sort of control over the Obama administration.
As a young man in Hawaii, Obama was mentored by a pro-Russian communist, Frank Marshall Davis, who taught him that “Red Russia” was a savior of the world’s oppressed peoples.
We had warned the world abut Obama’s communist sympathies.
The one-time chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), preferred to explain U.S. policy by claiming there had been another “intelligence failure.”
He admitted to CNN’s Jake Tapper on April 12, 2016, that the U.S. government has badly “misjudged” the intentions of Putin “for many, many years.” He declared, “The biggest intelligence failure that we have had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.”
After the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, Rep. Nunes noted, the U.S. continued to engage diplomatically with the Russians, and “we continued to talk to the Russians, and then they invaded Eastern Ukraine.” “We missed that,” he said. “And then we completely missed entirely when they put a new base, a new base with aircraft into the Mediterranean, into Syria. We just missed it. We were blind.”
This series of “misses” is just an excuse. Our policy makers and intelligence “experts” were blind to the reality of communism in Russia and China.
Putin, a former KGB spy, never repudiated the Soviet state and, in fact, called the death of Soviet communism a “geopolitical disaster.” His invasion in 2008 of Georgia, the former Soviet Republic, was evidence of his true intentions. He then invaded Ukraine, to put down an anti-communist uprising there. He invades again, as if to clear up any confusion on the subject.
There are many of us who believe this is much worse than blindness. It is treason that has put an ant-communist revolution in Ukraine, one of the great developments of modern times, in jeopardy.
A reckoning should begin with naming the names of those who backed the Obama/Biden Administration into granting trade benefits to Russia.
One Senator, who now postures as tough on Russia, is Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), who voted to “normalize” trade relations with Russia, saying it would “help create jobs in Delaware by allowing U.S. businesses to take better advantage of the emerging Russian market.” He explained, “With this vote, the Senate agreed that we cannot allow outdated, Soviet-era policies to prevent healthy, robust trade with the fast-growing Russian market.”
I suggest Americans review the Senate and House votes that helped Russia develop its economic power to such an extent that it could help create a modern Army to go along with the use of energy resources to use as blackmail material against Europe and the West.
Putin’s war has literally been made in Washington, D.C.
In effect, Putin’s Russia has been created by the same forces that explained the phenomenon of Armand Hammer and the betrayal of the West. The sad truth is that the Russians used the same trick twice. As a result, the Free World is now at the mercy of a resurgent Russia and a Red China with superpower status.
The future is easy to predict. Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel are all in jeopardy of extinction. Then comes the main enemy.
© 2022 Cliff Kincaid – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Cliff Kincaid: kincaid@comcast.net
*Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org
