-Caveat Lector-
http://antiwar.com/justin/
December 6, 2004
The New Cold War We're in a "war of civilizations" and not just against Islam
by Justin Raimondo
The U.S. effort to export "democracy" to Ukraine has some skeptics of interventionism baffled and confused. A seeming throwback to the Soviet era, Leonid Kuchma, and his chosen heir, ward-heeler Viktor Yanukovich, were widely perceived as having stolen the election, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court, supposedly a tool of the regime, agreed. While one may argue about which side engaged in election fraud, and to what extent, in any case the Yanukovich crowd is closer to the Sopranos than the Boy Scouts, and anything would seem to be an improvement. Hundreds of thousands of orange-clad protesters seem to think so. But the view from Kiev is quite different from that of Washington, where the Ukrainian divide is depicted in more realistic terms: as the latest front in a geopolitical struggle for power.
Listen to neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who writes with eye-watering clarity about the hypocrisy and double standards employed by Western liberal cheerleaders for Yushchenko who question the bona fides of the U.S. effort to implant "democracy" in Iraq:
"Zbigniew Brzezinski, a fierce opponent of the Bush administration's democracy project in Iraq, writes passionately about the importance of democracy in Ukraine and how, by example, it might have a domino effect, spreading democracy to neighboring Russia. Yet when George Bush and Tony Blair make a similar argument about the salutary effect of establishing a democracy in the Middle East and we might indeed have the first truly free election in the Middle East within two months if we persevere 'realist' critics dismiss it as terminally naive."
The conflict dividing Ukraine, Krauthammer writes, is "civilizational" war, with an evil authoritarian Russia on one side and the angels of the West on the other:
"So let us all join hands in praise of the young people braving the cold in the streets of Kiev. But then tell me why there is such silence about the Iraqis, young and old, braving bullets and bombs, organizing electorate lists and negotiating coalitions even as we speak. Where is it written: Only in Ukraine?"
Critics of Western intervention in Iraq questioned the democratic-liberal bona fides of an "opposition" headed by an embezzler with a deserved reputation as a ruthless opportunist, whose U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress fed our intelligence agencies and the American media a steady diet of lies about nonexistent Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction." But their skepticism evaporates like dew in the morning sun when it comes to those two dubious vessels of Ukrainian "democracy," former prime minister and head of the central bank Viktor Yushchenko and oligarch Yulia Timoshenko (his sidekick and probable prime minister in a "reform" government).
Yushchenko, as head of the National Bank of the Ukraine (NBU), presided over an unprecedented case of fraud, which enriched certain oligarchs and especially the firebrand Timoshenko and her faction, who control the western part of the country: their power is centered in the energy monopoly that is the domain of the "gas princess," as Timoshenko is popularly known. Remember that Chalabi, too, was a banker, but with this difference: while the Ali Baba of the neocons stole millions, not only from the Jordanian Petra Bank but also from U.S. taxpayers, and used it to benefit himself directly, scandal swirls around Yushchenko, but never actually touches him personally. He is seen as a "reformer" because he never enriched himself, only his cronies and political supporters.
Timoshenko's patron, the embezzler Pavlo Lazarenko who, with the complicity of the NBU, stole a good portion of the International Monetary Fund bailout money and laundered it in the West eventually had to flee the country, and was indicted and jailed in the U.S.
Yushchenko's Chalabi-esque tendency to spin some very tall tales is evidenced in his insistence that he was poisoned by some sinister conspiracy involving the pro-Yanukovich forces darkly implying the KGB did it. This story has been trumpeted from here to Kingdom Come by the pro-Yushchenko Western media, but its ubiquity is reminiscent of the sort of open-mouthed credulity that accompanied Chalabi's lies about Iraqi WMD: as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, "There is no there there." The New York Times ran a story completely denying Yushchenko's contention, and then followed up with a more sympathetic but still skeptical and very revealing account:
"The candidate refused a biopsy of his face because he did not want to campaign with stitches. But dioxin and related toxins are detectable in the body years after exposure. [Yushchenko press secretary Irina] Gerashchenko said such tests had still not been performed."
Okay, so let's see if we get this straight: He was willing to campaign with a
