Source: Boiling Frogs Post
F. William Engdahl
Washington clearly wants ‘finito’ with
Russia’s Putin as in basta! Or as they said in Egypt last spring,
Kefaya–enough! Hillary Clinton and friends have apparently decided
Russia’s prospective next president, Vladimir Putin, is a major obstacle
to their plans. Few however understand why. Russia today, in tandem
with China and to a significant degree Iran, form the spine, however
shaky, of the only effective global axis of resistance to a world
dominated by one sole superpower.
On December 8 several days after
election results for Russia’s parliamentary elections were announced,
showing a sharp drop in popularity for Prime Minister Putin’s United
Russia party, Putin accused the United States and specifically Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton of fuelling the Russian opposition protesters
and their election protests. Putin stated, “The (US) Secretary of State
was quick to evaluate the elections, saying that they are unfair and
unjust even before she received materials from the Office of Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights (the OSCE international election
monitors-w.e.) observers.”[1]
Putin went on to claim that Clinton’s
premature comments were the necessary signal to the waiting opposition
groups that the US Government would back their protests. Clinton’s
comments, the seasoned Russian intelligence pro stated, became a “signal
for our activists who began active work with the US Department of
State.” [2]
Major western media chose either to
downplay the Putin statement or to focus almost entirely on the claims
of an emerging Russian opposition movement. A little research shows
that, if anything, Putin was downplaying the degree of brazen US
Government interference into the political processes of his country. In
this case the country is not Tunisia or Yemen or even Egypt. It is the
world’s second nuclear superpower, even if it might still be an economic
lesser power. Hillary is playing with thermonuclear fire.
Democracy or something else?
No mistake, Putin is not a world
champion practitioner of what most consider democracy. His announcement
some months back that he and current President Medvedev had agreed to
switch jobs after Russia’s March 4 Presidential vote struck even many
Russians as crass power politics and backroom deal-making. That being
said, what Washington is doing to interfere with that regime change is
more than brazen and interventionist. The same Obama Administration
which just signed into law measures effectively ripping to shreds the
Bill of Rights of the US Constitution for American citizens[3] is posing as world supreme judge of others’ adherence to what they define as democracy.
Let’s
examine closely Putin’s charge of US interference in the election
process. If we look, we find openly stated in their August 2011 Annual
Report that a Washington-based NGO with the innocuous name, National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), is all over the place inside Russia.
The NED is financing an International
Press Center in Moscow where some 80 international NGOs can hold press
briefings on whatever they choose. They fund numerous “youth advocacy”
and leadership workshops to “help youth engage in political activism.”
In fact, officially they spent more than $2,783,000 in 2010 on dozens of
such programs across Russia. Spending for 2011 won’t be published until
later in 2012. [4]
The NED is also financing key parts
of the Russian “independent” polling and election monitoring, a crucial
part of being able to claim election fraud. They finance in part the
Regional Civic Organization in Defense of Democratic Rights and
Liberties “GOLOS.” According to the NED Annual Report the funds went “to
carry out a detailed analysis of the autumn 2010 and spring 2011
election cycles in Russia, which will include press monitoring,
monitoring of political agitation, activity of electoral commissions,
and other aspects of the application of electoral legislation in the
long-term run-up to the elections.”[5]
In September, 2011, a few weeks
before the December elections the NED financed a Washington
invitation-only conference featuring the Russian “independent” polling
organization, the Levada Center. According to NED’s own website Levada,
another recipient of NED money, [6]
had done a series of opinion polls, a standard method used in the West
to analyze the feelings of citizens. The polls profiled “the mood of the
electorate in the run up to the Duma and presidential elections,
perceptions of candidates and parties, and voter confidence in the
system of ‘managed democracy’ that has been established over the last
decade.”
One
of the featured speakers at that Washington conference was Vladimir
Kara-Murza, member of the federal council of Solidarnost (“Solidarity”),
Russia’s democratic opposition movement. He is also “advisor to Duma
opposition leader Boris Nemtsov” according to NED. Another speaker came
from the right-wing neo-conservative Hudson Institute. [7]
Nemtsov, one of the most prominent of
the Putin opposition today is also co-chairman of Solidarnost, a name
curiously enough imitated from the Cold War days when the CIA financed
the Polish Solidarnosc workers’ opposition of Lech Walesa. More on
Nemtsov later.
And on December 15, 2011, again in
Washington, just as the series of US-supported protests were being
launched against Putin, led by Solidarnost and other organizations, the
NED held another conference titled, Youth Activism in Russia: Can a New Generation Make a Difference?
The featured speaker was Tamirlan Kurbanov, who according to the NED,
“most recently served as a program officer at the Moscow office of the
National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, where he was
involved in developing and expanding the capacities of political and
civic organizations; promoting citizen participation in public life,
youth engagement in particular.” [8] The National Democratic Institute is an arm of the NED.
The shady history of NED
Helping
youth engage in political activism is precisely what the same NED did
in Egypt over the past several years in the lead up to the toppling of
Mubarak. The same NED was instrumental by informed accounts in the
US-backed “Color Revolutions” in 2003-2004 in Ukraine and Georgia that
brought US-backed pro-NATO surrogates to power. The same NED has been
active in promoting “human rights” in Myanmar, in Tibet, and China’s
oil-rich Xinjiang province. [9]
As careful analysts of the 2004
Ukraine “Orange revolution” and the numerous other US-financed color
revolutions discovered, control of polling and ability to dominate
international media perceptions, especially major TV such as CNN or BBC
is an essential component of the Washington destabilization agenda. The
Levada Center would likely be in a crucial position in this regard to
issue polls showing discontent with the regime.
By their description, the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a “private, nonprofit foundation
dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions
around the world. Each year, with funding from the US Congress, NED
supports more than 1,000 projects of non-governmental groups abroad who
are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.”[10]
It couldn’t sound more noble or
high-minded. However, they prefer to leave out their own true history.
In the early 1980’s CIA director Bill Casey convinced President Ronald
Reagan to create a plausibly private NGO, the NED, to advance
Washington’s global agenda via other means than direct CIA action. It
was a part of the process of “privatizing” US intelligence to make their
work more “effective.” Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the
legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[11]
Interesting. The majority of funds for NED come from US taxpayers
through Congress. It is in every way, shape and form a US Government
intelligence community asset.
The NED was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto CIA,
privatized so as to allow it more freedom of action. NED board members
are typically drawn from the Pentagon and US intelligence community. It
has included retired NATO General Wesley Clark, the man who led the US
bombing of Serbia in 1999. Key figures linked to clandestine CIA actions
who served on NED’s board have included Otto Reich, John Negroponte,
Henry Cisneros and Elliot Abrams. The Chairman of the NED Board of
Directors in 2008 was Vin Weber, founder of the ultraconservative
organization, Empower America, and campaign fundraiser for George W.
Bush. Current NED chairman is John Bohn, former CEO of the controversial
Moody’s rating agency which played a nefarious role in the
still-unraveling US mortgage securities collapse. As well today’s NED
board includes neo-conservative Bush-era ambassador to Iraq and to
Afghanistan, Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad.[12]
Putin’s well-rehearsed opposition
It’s also instructive to look at the
leading opposition figures who seem to have stepped forward in Russia in
recent days. The current opposition “poster boy” favorite of Russian
youth and especially western media is Russian blogger Alexei Navalny
whose blog is titled LiveJournal. Navalny has featured prominently as a
quasi-martyr of the protest movement after spending 15 days in Putin’s
jail for partaking in a banned protest. At a large protest rally on
Christmas Day December 25 in Moscow, Navalny, perhaps intoxicated by
seeing too many romantic Sergei Eisenstein films of the 1917 Russian
Revolution, told the crowd, “I see enough people here to take the
Kremlin and the White House (Russia’s Presidential home-w.e.) right
now…”[13]
Western establishment media is
infatuated with Navalny. England’s BBC described Navalny as “arguably
the only major opposition figure to emerge in Russia in the past five
years,” and US Time magazine called him “Russia’s Erin
Brockovich,” a curious reference to the Hollywood film starring Julie
Roberts as a trade union organizer. However, more relevant is the fact
that Navalny went to the elite American East Coast Yale University, also
home to the Bush family, where he was a “Yale World Fellow.” [14]
The charismatic Navalny however is
also or has been on the payroll of Washington’s regime-destabilizing
National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to a posting on
Navalny’s own blog, LiveJournal, he was financed in 2007-2008 by the
NED. His Washington NED contact person was Frank Conatser.[15] A facsimile of an email exchange between Navalny and Conatser fronm November 17, 2007 is partially reproduced here.
From: Frank Conatser [mailto:frankc@NED.ORG]
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 12:12 AM
To: Navalny Alexey; Aleksey Navalny
Cc: John Squier; Marc Schleifer
Subject: NED Agreements No. 2006-576 & No. 2007-688
…
Frank Conatser
Grants Administrator for Eurasia
National Endowment for Democracy
1025 F St, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20004
202-378-9660 (phone)
202-378-9860 (fax)
(Excerpt from email exchange between Alexey Navalty and NED)[16]
Along with Navalny, key actors in the
anti-Putin protest movement are centered around Solidarnost which was
created in December 2008 by Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and others.
Nemtsov is hardly one to protest corruption. According to Business Week Russia
of September 23, 2007, Nemtsov introduced Russian banker Boris Brevnov
to Gretchen Wilson, a US citizen and an employee of the International
Finance Corporation, a financing arm of the World Bank. Wilson and
Brevnov married. With the help of Nemtsov Wilson managed to privatize
Balakhna Pulp and Paper mill at the giveaway price of just $7 million.
The enterprise was sucked dry and then sold to the Wall Street-Swiss
investment bank, CS First Boston bank. The annual turnover of the mill
was reportedly $250 million. [17]
CS First Boston bank also paid for
Nemtsov’s trips to the very expensive Davos World Economic Forum. When
Nemtsov became a member of the cabinet, his protégé Brevnov was
appointed the chairman of the Unified Energy System of Russia JSC. Two
years later in 2009 Boris Nemtsov, today’s “Mr. anti-corruption,” used
his influence reportedly to get Brevnov off the hook for charges of
embezzling billions from assets of Unified Energy System. [18]
Nemtsov also took money from jailed
Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 1999 when the latter was using
his billions to try to buy the Russian parliament or Duma. In 2004
Nemtsov met with exiled billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky in a
secret gathering with other exiled Russian tycoons. When Nemtsov was
detailed by Russian authorities for allegations of foreign funding of
his new political party, “For Russia without Lawlessness and
Corruption,” US Senators John McCain and Joe Liberman and Mike Hammer
of the Obama National Security Council came to support of Nemtsov. [19]
Nemtsov’s close crony, Vladimir
Ryzhkov of Solidarnost is also closely tied to the Swiss Davos circles,
even founding a Siberian Davos. According to Russian press accounts from
April 2005, Ryzhkov formed a Committee 2008 in 2003 to “draw” funds of
the imprisoned Khodorkovsky along with soliciting funds from fugitive
oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky and western foundations such as the
Soros Foundation. The stated aim of the effort was to rally “democratic”
forces against Putin. On May 23, 2011 Ryzhkov, Nemtzov and several
others filed to register a new Party of Peoples’ Freedom to ostensibly
field a presidential candidate against Putin in 2012.[20]
Another prominent face in the recent
anti-Putin rallies is former world chess champion turned right-wing
politician, Garry Kasparov, another founder of Solidarnost. Kasparov was
identified several years ago as being a board member of a Washington
neo-conservative military think-tank. In April 2007, Kasparov admitted
he was a board member of the National Security Advisory Council of
Center for Security Policy, a “non-profit, non-partisan national
security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions,
and resource needs that are vital to American security.” Inside Russia
Kasparov is more infamous for his earlier financial ties to Leonid
Nevzlin, former Yukos vice-president and partner of Michael
Khodorokvsky. Nevzlin fled to Israel on being charged in Russia on
charges of murder and hiring contract killers to eliminate
“objectionable people” while Yukos vice-president. [21]
In 2009 Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov
met with no less than Barack Obama to discuss Russia’s opposition to
Putin at the US President’s personal invitation at Washington’s Ritz
Carlton Hotel. Nemtsov had called for Obama to meet with opposition
forces in Russia: “If the White House agrees to Putin’s suggestion to
speak only with pro-Putin organizations… this will mean that Putin has
won, but not only that: Putin will become be assured that Obama is
weak,” he said. During the same 2009 US trip Nemtsov was invited to
speak at the New York Council on Foreign Relations, perhaps the most
influential US foreign policy think-tank. Significantly, not only has
the US State Department and US-backed political NGOs such as NED poured
millions into building an anti-Putin coalition inside Russia. The
President personally has intervened into the process.[22]
Ryzhkov, Nemtzov, Navalty and Putin’s former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin were all involved in organizing the December 25th Moscow Christmas anti-Putin rally which drew an estimated 120,000.[23]
Why Putin?
The salient question is why Putin at
this point? We need not look far for the answer. Washington and
especially Barack Obama’s Administration don’t give a hoot about whether
Russia is democratic or not. Their concern is the obstacle to
Washington’s plans for Full Spectrum Dominance of the planet that a
Putin Presidency will represent. According to the Russian Constitution,
the President of the Russian Federation head of state, supreme
commander-in-chief and holder of the highest office in the Russian
Federation. He will take direct control of defense and foreign policy.
We must ask what policy? Clearly
strong countermeasures against the blatant NATO encirclement of Russia
with Washington’s dangerous ballistic missile installations around
Russia will be high on Putin’s agenda. Hillary Clinton’s “reset” will be
in the dustbin if it is not already. We can also expect a more
aggressive use of Russia’s energy card with pipeline diplomacy to deepen
economic ties between European NATO members such as Germany, France and
Italy, ultimately weakening the EU support for aggressive NATO measures
against Russia. We can expect a deepening of Russia’s turn towards
Eurasia, especially with China, Iran and perhaps India to firm up the
shaky spine of resistance to Washington’s New World Order plans.
It will take more than a few
demonstrations in sub-freezing weather in Moscow and St. Petersburg by a
gaggle of corrupt or shady opposition figures such as Nemtsov or
Kasparov to derail Russia. What is clear is that Washington is pushing
on all fronts—Iran and Syria, where Russia has a vital naval port, on
China, now on Russia, and on the Eurozone countries led by Germany. It
has the smell of an end-game attempt by a declining superpower.
The United States today is a de facto
bankrupt nuclear superpower. The reserve currency role of the dollar
is being challenged as never since Bretton Woods in 1944. That role
along with maintaining the United States as the world’s unchallenged
military power have been the basis of the American Century hegemony
since 1945.
Weakening the role of the dollar in
international trade and ultimately as reserve currency, China is now
settling trade with Japan in bilateral currencies, side-stepping the
dollar. Russia is implementing similar steps with her major trade
partners. The primary reason Washington launched a full-scale currency
war against the Euro in late 2009 was to preempt a growing threat that
China and others would turn away from the dollar to the Euro as reserve
currency. That is no small matter. In effect Washington finances its
foreign wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere through
the fact that China and other trade surplus nations invest their surplus
trade dollars in US government Treasury debt. Were that to shift
significantly, US interest rates would rise substantially and the
financial pressures on Washington would become immense.
Faced with growing erosion of her
unchallenged global status as sole superpower, Washington appears now to
be turning increasingly to raw military force to hold that. For that to
succeed Russia must be neutralized along with China and Iran. This will
be the prime agenda of whoever is next US President.
Endnotes:
[1] Alexei Druzhinin, Putin says US encouraging Russian opposition, RIA Novosti, Moscow, December 8, 2011
[2] Ibid.
[3] Jonathan Turley, The NDAA’s historic assault on American liberty, guardian.co.uk, 2 January 2012, accessed in http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty.
[4] National Endowment for Democracy, Russia, from NED Annual Report 2010, Washington, DC, published in August 2011, accessed in http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/eurasia/russia.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] NED, Elections in Russia: Polling and Perspectives, September 14, 2011, accessed in http://ned.org/events/elections-in-russia-polling-and-perspectives.
[8] NED, Youth Activism in Russia: Can a New Generation Make a Difference?, December 15, 2011, accessed in http://ned.org/events/youth-activism-in-russia-can-a-new-generation-make-a-difference.
[9] F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order,
2010, edition.engdahl press. The book describes in detail the origins
of the NED and various US-sponsored “human rights” NGOs and how they
have been used to topple regimes not friendly to a larger USA
geopolitical agenda.
[10] National Endowment for Democracy, About Us, accessed in www.ned.org.
[11] David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September-6 October,1991, 24-25.
[12] F. William Engdahl, Op. Cit., p.50.
[13] Yulia Ponomareva, Navalny and Kudrin boost giant opposition rally, RIA Novosti, Moscow, December 25, 2011.
[14] Yale University, Yale World Fellows: Alexey Navalny, 2010, accessed in http://www.yale.edu/worldfellows/fellows/navalny.html.
[15] Alexey Navalny, emails between Navalny and Conatser, accessed in Russian (English summary provided to the author by www.warandpeace.ru) on http://alansalbiev.livejournal.com/28124.html.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Business Week Russia, Boris Nemtsov: Co-chairman of Solidarnost political movement, Business Week Russia, September 23, 2007, accessed in http://www.rumafia.com/person.php?id=1648.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Russian Mafia.ru, Vladimir Ryzhkov: Co-chairman of the Party of People’s Freedom, accessed in http://www.rumafia.com/person.php?id=1713.
[21] Russian Mafia.ru, Garry Kasparov: The leader of United Civil Front, accessed in http://www.rumafia.com/person.php?id=1518.
[22] The OtherRussia, Obama Will Meet With Russian Opposition, July 3, 2009, accessed in http://www.theotherrussia.org/2009/07/03/obama-will-meet-with-russian-opposition/.
[23] Yulia Ponomareva, op. Cit.
