41 Comments

Trump takes after Bush in most respects

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Sure the US tried to negotiate with the new power brokers in Ukraine, as did European powers (and the Russians), telling them that certain actions would lead to less or more support. But that was AFTER the revolution and is quite normal in any country. Even in the US political party leaderships factor in foreign acceptance when endorsing candidates for important offices.

Blaming the CIA for everything is to belittle the abilities of other countries (including Russia), the hardships of the Ukrainian people (it really is a poor and corrupt country that has not recovered from the Soviet-collapse to the degree its neighbors have, it's a miracle the whole revolt and civil war didn't happen earlier) and the role of chance/chaos in the world (that last one is a bias that has a fancy name which escapes me right now, but I'm sure you know it).

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"So let me work on Klitschko and if you can just keep... we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing."

What the transcript shows is top U.S. diplomats who think they have the connections (forgive me if I believe them) to run Ukraine politics during an international crisis.

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That's not all the comment was about. She was advising on who should assume power in the Ukraine.

[Added.] Obama's use of conservative Republicans to implement his policies rather shows the absence of a divide between the parties on war.

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The fuck the eu comment was about victoria nuland preferring the united nations as mediators instead of the eu (against the wishes of the Obama administration, she's a conservative republican). Ironically Russian media keep accusing the EU of being behind the revolt. There were definite political and economic events going in Ukraine that were certainly enough to cause mass protests, especially in a country that has a history of such protests. The protests went on for months and there were plenty of ways for Yanukovich's party to stay in power (chiefly getting rid of their corrupt leader and signing the cooperation treaty with the EU that Yanukovich had promised voters but didn't deliver on).

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"Widely acknowledged?" By whom? The extent of the "evidence" is the Victoria Nuland said she thought some person was the best choice for a particular political post. Seriously? I express opinions like that all the time. Does that mean I have the power to set off popular revolts in foreign nation?

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I largely agree with the stratfor CEO's analysis as far as it goes, but I also agree with you it isn't dispositive evidence or close to it.

But there is a smoking gun: the "Fuck the EU" discussion, which makes it clear that the U.S. participated in the coup.

Yes, the Western Ukrainians were dissatisfied with Yanukovich. That doesn't mean without covert U.S. intervention they would have chosen to overthrow an elected head of state by unconstitutional means .

[Putin's "propaganda mill" is nothing in effectiveness compared to the American counterpart.]

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There was never such a stratfor report. There was a Russian (newspaper) interview with the CEO of stratfor who talked about a geopolitical tug-og-war between the US and Russia. Besides, stratfor is a private corporation that tries to act like an intelligence agency, it does not have moles in the cia or anything like that and it has gotten a lot of things wrong in the past. Now of course since few people in the West can read Russian the state-controlled Russian media thought it was a good idea to sow confusion by claiming that the stratfor CEO had said things he had not, and then they linked to the Russian newspaper article (all the stories eventually link back to that one article). Most Westerners never tried to read the interview from the link (it's in Russian), score 1 for Putin's propaganda squad.

The simple truth is that people in the west of Ukraine hated Yanukovich. A revolt against him in Kiev was no more unlikely than a protest against George W. Bush in Portland, Oregon. The use of violence to suppress the protests only made things worse until almost the whole country and parliament turned against Yanukovich. Only in the east did he still have supporters and with the aid of a lot of Russian weapons and "volunteers" those people are now at war with Kiev. It's possible the Ukrainians will one day depose the current pro-Western leadership too, they've often swung back and forth, but Yanukovich really went too far. Still, that's a lot less likely if the east successfully seccedes.

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The heavy involvement of the CIA in the Ukraine coup is widely acknowledged. According to a Stratfor report, it was in retaliation for the Russian successes in the Mideast and their position on Syria. And there is even a phone call on record, remember, when the U.S. official says "Fuck the European Union," as they were more cautious.

Are you saying that the chaos of Libya is qualitatively better than the war in Iraq--because U.S. troops were avoided? That wasn't the attitude of most of the antiwar movement (to my best knowledge).

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Energy policy has never been a major issue in policy, but health care definitely has been. There is that the McCain plan was more similar to the ACA than to the eventual Republican proposal in 2010 which seemed to come out of left field, but I was mainly thinking of the Medicare cuts. They pushed for more Medicare cuts in 2009, 2011, and 2013, but argued the Democrats cut Medicare too much in 2010 and 2012 for the elections. It wasn't just a one time change on a minor policy; it was an annual flip-flop on the most important policy being debated at the time.

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Actually the flip-flop on carbon trading is even more extreme. For some time, the Democrats had been pushing for carbon taxes and the Republicans for cap-n-trade. When the Democrats basically put McCain's proposals FROM HIS 2008 PLATFORM into a bill in 2009, suddenly the Republicans said cap-n-trade was a horrible abomination and insisted on carbon taxes.

Yeah, the flipflop on insurance exchanges was execrable but at least it hadn't been their presidential nominee's position 6 months before.

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Are you suggesting that the leading role of the Jewish ethnicity was established in the Sixties?

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Why has Robin never used the strongest example to make his point. "Illicit motives"?

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Gadafi was pretty comparable to Hussein, but Daesh is much worse. Some of the old officer corps are supporting Daesh, but they're not running the show. They're latecomers, and Daesh doesn't trust supposedly-ex-secularists.

Yanukovych was overthrown by a popular revolt. Who came up with this idea that the populace of foreign nation follows the secret orders of the US president?

If Bush had used a strategy in Iraq similar to Obama's in Libya, there would never have been a mass resistance to the Iraq War. Americans don't care about foreign war casualties, and they don't care about foreign states failing. Maybe they should, but they don't.

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How much of Vietnam Era anti-war protests were actually part of a covert ethnic struggle for control of the Establishment? It seems like the winners of the Sixties cultural revolution have no intention of allowing the same fair play that they exploited.

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The officers corps of he Islamic State is based entirely on the old Hussein military elite. This is a continuation of the original Iraq war, not something new.

Hussein was as "reprehensible" as Gadafi.

[And the Ukrainian oligarch that Obama overthrew at the expense of international peace wasn't (relatively speaking) that reprehensible at all.]

The causes of war wax and wane, and countries learn lessons from their defeats (such as to use air power rather than than commit ground forces, so they can easily abandon the cause when the country implodes).

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