So, the kerfuffle of the moment is the claim that Russia paid a bounty to the Taliban for each killed American GI.
The sources are unnamed intelligence community members. No proof is provided beyond their anonymous word.
Intelligence communities never lie and certainly never anonymously and with no proof.
Sigh.
Meanwhile, the US and Russia had just begun talks to extend the New Start nuclear treaty. That treaty was to reduce the number of active nuclear launchers by half. Presumably, an extended treaty would reduce nuclear launchers or weapons further.
This is a good thing.
But it is not what a lot of people in the US military industrial complex want. Nor do they want Trump to leave Afghanistan, which he keeps talking about doing (though I doubt he will, even the possibility is anathema to the permanent state).
I think it is unlikely that Russia offered a bounty for US soldiers, but I don’t much care. US soldiers shouldn’t still be in Afghanistan, and if you want to talk hard realpolitik, Russia has interests in Afghanistan which far exceed those of the US. The US, which funded the Mujahideen to kill Russian soldiers (whether there was a bounty or not), is in no position to get all high and mighty about their occupying troops coming under attack by insurgents supported by another Great Power.
Whatever happened, further decreases in nuclear weapons, which are capable of wiping out all life on Earth, matter more.
Russia is a state which has done many evil things and is doing evil things today. Likewise, the US is a state which has done many evil things and is doing evil things today. Putin is a bad man (though, a competent one). Trump is a bad man (though largely incompetent–except not at campaigning).
Irrespective of the fact that both states have done bad things, including to each other, it is paramount that they reduce nuclear weapons, and that we avoid a nuclear war between these two states. We are not substantially safer than we were in the Cold War; they still have enough nukes to kill us all.
But also, don’t believe US intelligence agencies without hard proof, and certainly don’t believe anonymous sources.
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KT Chong
Russia — and China — would be morons if they agreed to any arm or nuclear control treaty with America. America breaks any treaty it wants and, if the other country or countries in the treaty pull out of the treaty AFTER America has broken it, America will turn around and then accuse and point finger at that country/those countries.
KT Chong
Just look at the Iran nuclear deal. AFTER Iran had fulfilled it part of the bargain, and then America refused to honor its part and came up some accusations and excuses with no proofs, (and there were plenty of proofs that showed America was lying.)
America also broke the INF nuclear treaty with Russia, FIRST. And then, when Russia pulled out AFTER America had broken the treaty first, the lying asshole Pompeo turned around and accused Russia of breaking the treaty.
It’s the same thing with the Open Sky treaty. The US used some excuses to break the treaty. Expect Russia to pull out of the treaty as well, and then America turn around to accuse Russia of breaking the treaty and completely ignore the fact that the US broke the treaty first.
The US wants Russia to convince China to join a new nuclear treaty. HELL NO. China should absolutely NOT enter into any nuclear treaty with the US, not until China has caught up with the numbers of nuclear weapons.
KT Chong
Why is Russia even wasting its time to negotiate any new nuclear treaty with the US??!?
Zot23
You can’t be serious Ian. Our negotiator in chief right now is Donald Trump. He could take a treaty over buying wood from Canada and turn it into a pile of toxic waste because they either wouldn’t grant him a series of under the table bribes, or just plain old stupidity. Is there one treaty he has negotiated with another country in the past 3 years that hasn’t blown up in our faces? A new start treaty with Russia? Might as well ask the guy to cure cancer. He couldn’t convince people to wear masks during a pandemic, that’s ground floor, small potatoes politics.
We would come out of these start meetings with the USA depleting its nuclear stock by 90% via handing it over to Russia and China for “proper disposal”. He is a moron of Olympian proportions.
Ché Pasa
Trump rejects intelligence community information because he doesn’t know how to evaluate it and make considered judgments. The intelligence community knows this and torments him with reams of information he doesn’t read because he can’t fathom it. Yes, the intelligence community lies, and yes, they tell the truth. A half competent regime would be able to sort through it, make sense of it, and make reasonably correct calls. This one can’t.
And of course, Trump’s opponents are going to take advantage of this failing as they should. It’s politics.
Trump doesn’t know how to negotiate, and those around him who do are thwarted more often than not when their grand designs are blown up by yet another Trump tantrum. The notion that Trump can re-negotiate a SALT treaty is absurd. Those who might do it have little incentive to bother.
Zachary Smith
More evidence of the very high Editorial Standards of the Neocon York Times. “Unnamed Intelligence” sources – that’s the gold standard for starting – or continuing – foreign wars. Captured POWs looking at captors holding the standard array of Torture Tools discover they can avoid being ‘worked on’ by saying the right things. The same POWs might also learn that besides avoiding torture, they might even be turned loose with some pocket money if the “say the right things”. Standard jailhouse snitch stuff in the good old US of A.
Naturally every character talking with a Russian accent to the prisoners is a genuine Russian Intelligence Agent. Couldn’t possibly be somebody working for the companies who want to continue making huge profits transporting supplies into Afghanistan. (at one time the delivered cost of gasoline was said to have spiked at $400/gallon) The Apartheid State is so good and pure it wouldn’t have had people posing as Russian Intelligence. Couldn’t have been one of Lardbutt Pompeo’s hirelings either.
Personally, I’m using this latest Russiagate BS to help me sort out which sites I can trust from the ones I can’t. If So-And-So blogger buys into it and starts ranting about Trump going too easy on the Russians, he/she is either stupid, or has sold out. Yes, taking money from the Intelligence Services to say the right thing is an All-American tradition.
Don’t believe me? Then try to locate an English-translation of Udo Ulfkotte’s book Bought Journalists – Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News.
https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/08/english-translation-of-udo-ulfkottes-bought-journalists-suppressed/
S Brennan
Ian, I was agreeing with what you were saying; until the last 3 paragraphs. In those 3 paragraphs you told your readers that the two men who want this agreement, to the exclusion of all others, are irredeemable A-1 a-holes. Such diatribe hardly advances the preceding paragraphs.
In an effort to be taken “seriously”, you negate your own arguments for a treaty and…any reason for either man to move forward with the talks. When the “left” gives credence to neocolonial mantras, the conversation becomes monologue.
Olivier
Ian, how is Putin a “bad man” exactly?
Ian Welsh
Start by reading about how the Chechen war was fought.
Don’t make excuses for him, it’s you you’ll be damning.
bruce wilder
The last President who was more than “half-competent” at foreign policy was assassinated for his trouble.
This paragraph seems to me to derail your argument rather than reinforce it:
This paragraph is not usefully analytic or insightful. It seems like a ritual concession to morons you should not want to argue with.
I can recall the 1960s, when sensible proposals to reduce the probability of great power confrontations could prevail in policy-making. What changed is that global neoliberalism left the U.S. governed by an elite with no loyalty to the country, no commitment to the common enterprise. In this regard, the liberals are the worst. Trump was elected because he looked better to many people (not to me, mind) than a corrupt globalist like Clinton. Corrupt, sure, but a patriot of sorts.
Several people observed that Trump seems incapable of negotiating a big agreement on anything, and I cannot disagree, but is there an alternative? Hillary Clinton gave plenty of evidence of being both corrupt and not agreement-capable. In other words, it is systemic problem that goes beyond a narrow cast of characters.
Putin, I would submit, is a committed Russian patriot. He works for the good and/or power of his country. That contributes a lot toward making him agreement-capable.
Mark Pontin
Bruce Wilder: “The last President who was more than “half-competent” at foreign policy was assassinated for his trouble.”
Bruce, Bruce, Bruce. Forget the hagiography. You should study the actual history, and especially the documents from the EXCOMM. It’s pretty damning: through his own aggression and mismanagement, Kennedy *created* the Cuban missile crisis — a crisis that by his and his brother’s own admission had a 33 percent chance of ending in a global nuclear holocaust — entirely unnecessarily.
And the proof that it was entirely unnecessary was that a decade later the Soviet Union again based nuclear-armed subs and bombers at Cienfuegos Bay in Cuba. Why haven’t we all heard of the Cienfuegos Bay Crisis?
Because Nixon and Kissinger simply *ignored* the Soviet buildup and suppressed the intelligence, figuring that there’d be Soviet subs ready to launch missiles in the waters immediately offshore of the U.S. anyway — which was true and had been just as true in 1962 — and a crisis would just get in the way of the push for detente with the U.S.S.R. they were then trying to push through.
‘Handling the Cienfuegos Crisis’ (1983)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538485?seq=1
It’s almost impossible to find information on it now in the U.S. and Kissinger doesn’t talk or boast about it in his books, for obvious reasons. But everybody in Cuba and the former U.S.S.R. remembers that the Soviets based nuclear forces there from the start of the 1970s through to the Soviet collapse in 1989-90. That’s *why* the Soviets maintained the Cuban economy and why it was so ruinous for Cuba when the U.S.S.R. went away.
The takeaway: John F. Kennedy was not only *not* more than “half-competent” at foreign policy, but was in fact in many ways as poor and fake a “great leader” as Obama, only far more dangerous. Nixon and Kissinger — those war criminals, yes — were better at foreign policy, for God’s sake.
Mark Pontin
Bruce W. wrote: “What changed is that global neoliberalism left the U.S. governed by an elite with no loyalty to the country, no commitment to the common enterprise … Hillary Clinton gave plenty of evidence of being both corrupt and not agreement-capable. In other words, it is systemic problem that goes beyond a narrow cast of characters.”
Now this is absolutely true, on the other hand.
Although the ‘no loyalty to the country’ part, Clinton would doubtless see differently. In her mind, I’m pretty sure it’s a matter of “l’état, c’est moi.”
rkka
“Putin, I would submit, is a committed Russian patriot. He works for the good and/or power of his country. That contributes a lot toward making him agreement-capable.”
Ian probably shouldn’t look too closely at the process by which Grozny went from having a large Russian majority to having almost none.
Nor should Ian look too closely at the hostage-taking raids mounted from Chechnya, nor the open-air markets where the fruits of those raids were bought & sold.
Nor should he look too closely at how Russian envoys returning to Russia from negotiations with the Chechen president could get kidnapped and “disappeared” from Grozny’s airport.
Ian Welsh
That the other side committed horrible atrocities does not excuse your horrible atrocities.
Then there are the more recent attacks on hospitals, which, yes, the US does too.
I find the human need to idolize their leaders and their side tiresome. Putin’s a war criminal. That other people are also war criminals does not excuse him.
That he has also done good things and that he is competent also does not excuse him. If, independent of country, I had to choose to be ruled by Putin or Trump, I’d choose Putin, but I’d rather get the flu than Covid.
Stirling S Newberry
Good work.
bruce wilder
@ Mark Pontin
i don’t think there’s any question that there was a lot of blundering about in the Kennedy Administration, but 1.) the standard Ché Pasa set was “half-competent” and 2.) “competent” to my mind at least is not synonymous with either skilled or “does not make mistakes”. I conceive of “competent” as being realistic enough to recognize and acknowledge mistakes as mistakes.
there are many flavors of “incompetent” I suppose. elites that adopt a parasitic stance with regard to the institutions they lead are one of them, with negligence, actual malfeasance or simple malignancy featured. there’s also just being clueless — the Dunning-Krueger type if you will, which may be much more common than seems to be generally appreciated. in military and foreign policy, some of the incompetents advertise their incompetence with an obsession with “sending messages” and “signalling”. Military incompetence seems to be associated with being a martinet or becoming hopelessly lost in narrative fantasies of glory or ignominy while remaining ignorant of the practical implications of strategy, tactics or logistics.
I don’t think conservatives are necessarily incompetent as political leaders or advocates, though they do seem in a party context to make common cause too often with predators and parasites. the left can be incompetently naïve, though maybe that’s a stereotype; leftish hostility to authority has a tendency to overdo, pitting them against practical effectiveness and efficiency. Leftists in power have been known to do really stupid things. The naïve left struggles a lot with the difference between “great” and “good” — the lessons of Machiavelli never sitting right, though maybe they should not sit right, but also reluctant to accept the messy reality of waste, and, well, the cruelties of even negotiated coercion.
Nixon going to China was Nixon leveraging the effects of his own long-standing malignant stance. I have never seen Kissinger acknowledge his responsibility for Pinochet let alone Pol Pot. George W. Bush seems to have been a Dunning-Krueger President — in a Dunning-Krueger country where Tom Friedman of the New York Times is treated as a writer and a foreign policy expert when he is quite obviously neither. The spectacle of my country aggressively invading Iraq for a crime they didn’t commit, occupying that country in an orgy of epic corrupt incompetence and most people — never mind the progenitors and advocates of this catastrophic policy — never quite grasping that it was a bit worse than “mistakes were made” — well, I still do not know what to do with that whole episode. “Iran-Contra” involving some of the same cast of characters in the more junior roles was recognized at least after the fact as a mistake, though I remember having discussions with smart people at the time, at least half of whom apparently could not see just how insanely stupid a set-up it was, quite apart from the illegality eating away at the institutional foundation of governance.
Returning to Kennedy for a moment, the Kennedy foreign policy was a lot more than the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was Edwin O. Reischauer as Ambassador to Japan. It was the Peace Corps. Much of what went wrong involved the malignancy inherent in the CIA and related agencies of covert interventions as well as the Dunning-Krueger idealism embedded in American political culture exemplified by Graham Greene’s Quiet American. That Kennedy found himself in conflict with the CIA is a mark in his favor. That he ended up dead is, perhaps, a cautionary tale to the effect that competence is not enough.
bruce wilder
history matters.
the history of Russia in the Caucasus since Peter the Great would be astonishing to most Americans for its brutality and cruelty.
S Brennan
“That the other side committed horrible atrocities does not excuse your horrible atrocities.”
Well Ian; your standard for world leaders will never be met by a decent person…not ever, nor has it ever been. There are only world leaders who have not been faced with that choice. It’s indecent to create a standard that only a spineless quisling could meet.
When it comes to slaughtering people Putin does not even approach the top 20 alive today. Yes, I know, you don’t care what others do, only Putin is to be measured. Pourquoi? Is anyone so blind as those who seek purity in world painted in shades of grey and black?
Any person with a military background knows that the western world would have been far more cruel to the Chechen’s than Putin ever was. Ian what do you and Stirling think goes on during a civil war…supported by outside interests determined to destroy your nation? Do you guys think the US civil was any kinder, how about Rwanda, Yugoslavia? What makes Chechnya* so special to your hearts?
What Putin did do, was, bring the conflict to an end as quickly as possible and when it comes to war, that is the kindest one can offer.
And Putin did fully reintegrate those who put down their weapons, an act that is rare in the world of war…slavery, in all it’s forms, is the norm.
*Like in much of the Muslim world, Chechen men are pigs. But supporters of the Chechen side take heart, Chechen men, through their ceaseless wars have have extracted their precious freedom from Russian law. Ian, they have won the freedoms that you and Stirling are so keen for them to have, they may now beat their wives to death without fear of prosecution, plus, on rumor alone, they may kill suspected gays and trans…oh, the joy…and endless other cruelties that are so cherished in that brutal “culture” of theirs. But perhaps, I tire of hearing of Chechen men’s suffering at the hands of the Russians, when I know they suffer because they are brutal to one another, it is Chechen men who whip themselves into a feudal existence, not Moscow.
Mark Pontin
Ian Welsh wrote: “Putin’s a war criminal. That other people are also war criminals does not excuse him. That he has also done good things and that he is competent also does not excuse him.”
But that’s the gig. If one is a chief executive of a state of any size, people are going to die as the result of your decisions. If there’s an armed conflict of any kind, then one will effectively be a war criminal.
I wouldn’t invest in such a full-throttle defense of Putin as S Brennan’s above, but he’s right about one thing: when it comes to finding the leader of a state who isn’t a war criminal “there are only world leaders who have not been faced with that choice.”
It’s a bad old world. Historically, the Russians and the Chechens have been killing each other for hundreds of years, and during that time whenever the Russians have shown weakness the Chechens have simply taken that as license to raid Russian territories. If any Western state had a rogue state of raiders like Chechneya on their borders they would have been faced with the same prospect as Putin was — armed suppression of the Chechens by military force.
That is, kill them till they stop killing you. Yes, in the Second Chechen War the Russian military did that with their customary heavy-handedness. But also effectively. Again, it’s a bad old world.
Astrid
After seeing the\”decency\” of Bernie Sanders in action. I\’ll take a Putin or even a Xi over ole sheepdog Sanders. What good is a \”leader\” who is unwilling to do what\’s necessary to ensure the welfare of his supporters? Who want to be a kind friend to people who dedicated their lives to destroying the lives of his supporters? Sure, he didn\’t dirty his hands, but he just ensured the annihilation of millions, maybe billions, through his inaction.
rkka
“I find the human need to idolize their leaders and their side tiresome. Putin’s a war criminal.”
So Russians must tolerate ethnic cleansing, hostage taking raids, kidnapping of officials sent to negotiate with the president of Chechnya, and armed invasions trying to peel off an adjacent region of the Russian Federation.
I can’t imagine any national leader with any regard for the interests of the population & country they govern doing that. And most actually existing government leaders Dealing with such a situation would be more brutal than Putin was.
Olivier
Ian, about Putin: “That he has also done good things and that he is competent also does not excuse him. ” Ah, but that’s the thing: he is competent! He is a real and effective statesman. In the age of clowns that’s a huge draw.
He sure isn’t perfect: his idea of good government in Chechnya for instance is apparently that loathsome thug of Kadyrov, but I can’t find it in me to damn one of the few sane and competent statesmen round.