Robert Parry — The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow

The Kagan family, America’s neoconservative aristocracy, has reemerged having recovered from the letdown over not gaining its expected influence from the election of Hillary Clinton and from its loss of official power at the start of the Trump presidency.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders. (She is the wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan.)

Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow’s alleged help in electing Donald Trump.

In a Washington Post op-ed on March 7, Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a key architect of the Iraq War, jabbed at Republicans for serving as “Russia’s accomplices after the fact” by not investigating more aggressively.

Then, Frederick Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly Kagan, president of her own think tank, Institute for the Study of War, touted the idea of a bigger U.S. invasion of Syria in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on March 15.

Yet, as much standing as the Kagans retain in Official Washington’s world of think tanks and op-ed placements, they remain mostly outside the new Trump-era power centers looking in, although they seem to have detected a door being forced open.

Consortium News
The Kagans Are Back; Wars to Follow

Robert Parry

Sputnik — Nuland: US Spends $100Mln to Counter Russian Propaganda Since 2014

The numbers are revealing. Propaganda is expensive.

Sputnik
Nuland: US Spends $100Mln to Counter Russian Propaganda Since 2014

Enrico Braun — OWNED: Victoria Nuland Totally Shut Down by Matt Lee with One Question (Video)

An oldie but a goodie

Two minute clip says everything about US information policy.

This is the woman who is likely to be US secretary of state under Killiary.

Russia Insider
OWNED: Victoria Nuland Totally Shut Down by Matt Lee with One Question (Video)
Enrico Braun

Dimitri Konstantakopoulos — Nuland in Nicosia – towards “regime change” in Cyprus?

Many readers may think that what is happening in Cyprus, a small member-state of EU in Eastern Mediterranean, is of rather marginal importance. This is what mainstream media are implying by their (non) reporting on the real parameters of the Cyprus question. But, in reality the opposite is true. Cyprus, in spite of its magnitude, is too important to speak much of it!

What what will happen in Cyprus during the coming months may have huge consequences for the direction both the European and the Middle Eastern crises will take in the near future. It may determine EU-Turkey relations and it will also deeply affect Greek politics and Russian interests in the Mediterranean.

Why all this? First because the “solution”, now prepared, of the Cyprus conflict is tantamount to no more, no less than the … abolition of the state in Cyprus, something which will set an example for all nation-states in Europe. To make a long story short, the Annan plan – along the same lines will be the next proposal for Cyprus - was giving ultimate power in the island to three foreign judges and to dozens of other “international officials”, appointed by the General Secretary of the UN personally (without even the consent of members of the Security Council). Those judges and other “international officials” would be able even to appoint their successors!

Katehon
Dimitris Konstantakopoulos: Nuland in Nicosia – towards “regime change” in Cyprus?

Dimitri Konstantakopoulos | Journalist and writer, former Secretary of the Independent Citizens Movement, former member SYRIZA’s Central Committee, current editorial board member of the international magazine Utopia Review, ex-chief of the Greek Press Agency office in Moscow, formerly served as Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou’s adviser in East-West relations and arms control.

John Helmer — NULAND TELLS CYPRUS TO CUT RUSSIAN TIES – PRESSURES ANASTASIADES TO ACCEPT NATO PLAN FOR TURKISH TROOPS IN CYPRUS

The US is intensifying the pressure on Cyprus to accept a secret NATO plan to keep Turkish forces on the island.

Victoria Nuland, the State Department official in charge of regime change in Russia and Ukraine, met for talks last week with the President of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, and with Turkish Cypriot figures.…

After its attack and military occupation of the north in 1974, Turkey has insisted on keeping its forces on the island as a security “guarantee”, and refuses to comply with United Nations (UN) resolutions ordering their withdrawal.

US military commanders and political leaders have never advocated Turkish withdrawal from the island, or compliance with the UN resolutions. Instead, they have recommended incorporating both parts of Cyprus into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The political and military commands in Ankara have been reluctant to accept a NATO solution for Cyprus because they object to what they regard as “dilution” of their army on the island. The Nuland plan is the latest attempt to give Ankara what it wants, and override Greek Cypriot objections.…

On April 5, just before Nuland’s arrival in Nicosia, senior Russian and Cypriot officials, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov (below, left) and the Permanent Secretary of the Cyprus Foreign Ministry, Alexandros Zenon (right), met in Moscow.
Their communique said that “during an exchange of views on the Cyprus settlement, the Russian side reiterated its commitment to the efforts made in the framework of the continuing intra-Cypriot talks under the UN aegis to promote a fair and lasting solution on the basis of the relevant UN Security Council resolutions, a solution that would meet the interests of both Cypriot communities and stem from their voluntary consent.”

As for the terms to be agreed, Moscow has added: “We oppose any attempts at imposing on the participants of the intra-Cypriot negotiations any formulas of settlement, artificial negotiating schedules, and arbitration.”…

[Cyprus President] Anastasiades has been forced into publicly defending himself and his associates from widely published, widely believed allegations of corruptly protecting their wealth when, in return for the European Union’s bailout of the Cyprus banks, Anastasiades agreed to the “haircut” – the confiscation of Cypriot depositors’ bank accounts on March 25, 2013. Anastasiades has also been linked to extortion by a former deputy attorney-general now on trial for abuse of power; and to privatization scams.… 

Keeping up with the intrigue.

Dances with Bears
NULAND TELLS CYPRUS TO CUT RUSSIAN TIES – PRESSURES ANASTASIADES TO ACCEPT NATO PLAN FOR TURKISH TROOPS IN CYPRUS
John Helmer

Yatsenyuk Announces Resignation

Yats was our man.

Fort Russ
Yatsenyuk Announces Resignation

Yatsenyuk's Facebook

More at

Russia Insider
Yatsenyuk Goes - Finally!

Alexander Mercouris

US hybrid war conducted through the US State Department

Agitator funded by US State Department, gets award from US State Department - or - how to make illegitimacy & foreign-funded subversion look legitimate.

Land Destroyer

Thailand: US State Department Gives Award to US-Created/Funded Agitator

Victoria Nuland at work in Cyprus promoting Turkey.

Under a Clinton administration, neoconservatives Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan would likely have choice positions in the US foreign policy establishment.

Dances with Bears
REGIME THREAT IN CYPRUS – VICTORIA NULAND TRIES BLOCKING RUSSIA-CYPRUS RELATIONSHIP
John Helmer

Patrick Smith interviews Ray McGovern — A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares

You prolly want to read this. Some bombshells.

Salon
“Intelligent people know that the empire is on the downhill”: A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares

Patrick Smith, Salon’s foreign affairs columnist and former foreign correspondent or the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, interviews Ray McGovern, twenty-seven year CIA veteran turned dissident.

Robert Parry — Seeking War to the End of the World

Neocon Washington power couple Kagan and Nuland on the march.

If the neoconservatives have their way again, U.S. ground troops will reoccupy Iraq, the U.S. military will take out Syria’s secular government (likely helping Al Qaeda and the Islamic State take over), and the U.S. Congress will not only kill the Iran nuclear deal but follow that with a massive increase in military spending.

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. In other words, more and more fires of Imperial “regime change” abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.…

On Friday, Kagan’s column baited the Republican Party to do more than just object to President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal. Kagan called for an all-out commitment to neoconservative goals, including military escalations in the Middle East, belligerence toward Russia and casting aside fiscal discipline in favor of funneling tens of billions of new dollars to the Pentagon.…

 Consortium News
Seeking War to the End of the World
Robert Parry

Robert Parry — The Mess that Nuland Made

As the Ukrainian army squares off against ultra-right and neo-Nazi militias in the west and violence against ethnic Russians continues in the east, the obvious folly of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has come into focus even for many who tried to ignore the facts, or what you might call “the mess that Victoria Nuland made.”

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”…

Much of what has happened, of course, was predictable and indeed was predicted, but neocon Nuland couldn’t resist the temptation to pull off a “regime change” that she could call her own. 

Her husband (and arch-neocon) Robert Kagan had co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1998 around a demand for “regime change” in Iraq, a project that was accomplished in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s invasion.…

In other words, the neocons have struck again, dreaming up a “regime change” scheme that ignored practical realities, such as ethnic and religious fissures. Then, as the blood flowed and the suffering worsened, the neocons just sought out someone else to blame. 

Thus, it seems unlikely that Nuland, regarded by some in Washington as the new “star” in U.S. foreign policy, will be fired for her dangerous incompetence, just as most neocons who authored the Iraq disaster remain “respected” experts employed by major think tanks, given prized space on op-ed pages, and consulted at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Nuland is slated for a promotion in a Clinton administration, with talk of her becoming secretary of state.

Consortium News
The Mess that Nuland Made

Robert Parry

John Helmer — Secret Record Revealed In Austrian Court – Yanukovich Pressured Into Union With Eu By Nuland Threat To Imprison Firtash

Neocons caught playing dirty.

A Vienna, Austria, court has ruled that Victoria Nuland (right), the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, attempted to pressure the President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich (left), into accepting Ukrainian association with the European Union (EU) by threatening Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with arrest, extradition to the US, and imprisonment on allegations of bribery several years ago in India.

The details were exposed for the first time in public in a proceeding in the Landesgerichtsstrasse Regional Court last Thursday (April 30). Austrian judge Christoph Bauer was presiding on the application by the US Government for the extradition of Firtash. The transcript of the proceeding has not yet been issued publicly, nor the official text of the judge’s ruling from the bench.

Judge Bauer rejected extradition, ruling there had been improper political interference by the US Government in the Firtash case. This is a violation, according to Bauer’s judgement, of Article 4, section 3 of the US-Austria Extradition Treaty of 1998. “Extradition shall not be granted,” the proviso declares, “if the executive authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated.” Read the treaty in full here.

A New York Times reporter, David Herszenhorn (below, left), tweeted during the proceedings against Firtash (right, centre), and then published a report of what was translated for him from the German....

Dances with Bears

Secret Record Revealed In Austrian Court – Yanukovich Pressured Into Union With Eu By Nuland Threat To Imprison Firtash

John Helmer

John Helmer — So Long Siklebaum – Poland Under US Pressure Over Failure Of War Against Eastern Ukraine, Russia

Anne Applebaum and Victoria Nuland. Polish elections coming up.

Dances with Bears

So Long Siklebaum – Poland Under US Pressure Over Failure Of War Against Eastern Ukraine, Russia

John Helmer

James Carden — Reckless: Obama’s Advisers Go Rogue

On the issue of Ukraine, the president has lost control over key administration officials.

Of course, this begs the question of whether these officials have actually gone rogue.

The National Interest
Reckless: Obama’s Advisers Go Rogue
James Carden, Contributing Editor

Robert Parry — A Family Business of Perpetual War

Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have a great mom-and-pop business going. From the State Department, she generates wars and – from op-ed pages – he demands Congress buy more weapons. There’s a pay-off, too, as grateful military contractors kick in money to think tanks where other Kagans work, writes Robert Parry.

That's why they call it "endless war."

Family business or "cosa nostra."

Consortium News
A Family Business of Perpetual War

Robert Parry

Helena Smith — Deadlock over Greek debt crisis could play into Russia's hands

Greece’s battle to stay solvent and in the eurozone is becoming a game of dangerous brinkmanship. Beyond the war of words between Athens and Berlin, the dark arts of diplomacy are also being played.

On Tuesday, only hours after Greece’s leftist-led government announced that the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, had accepted an offer by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to visit Berlin, it was revealed that he would also be making a similar tour to Moscow. 

“The prime minister will visit the Kremlin on 8 April after being invited by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin,” his office said. 

Before the sun had set over the Acropolis, the top US diplomat Victoria Nuland had waded in, holding talks with Greece’s foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, in Athens.

Nuland, who is assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, flew into the capital amid mounting US concerns that the great euro debt crisis has begun to pose a geopolitical threat. Allowed to veer out of control, Greece could end up in the ambit of Russia, financially bereft and without the EU links that keep it bounded to the west. 

Nato’s south-eastern flank would be immeasurably weakened at a time of mounting global security worries over Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East.

Under Tsipras’s steely leadership, the country has worked hard to stoke such fears. 

Exploiting his far-left Syriza party’s traditionally good ties with Moscow, the young leader has allowed his ministers to suggest openly that they would turn to Moscow as a strategic protector in the event of Athens being ejected from the 19-nation currency bloc. Russia, in turn, has said it would happily consider a Greek request for aid – despite its own financial woes – should its fellow Orthodox state ask....

The Guardian (UK)
Deadlock over Greek debt crisis could play into Russia's hands
Helena Smith in Athens

Greece is going to overhaul its state-run military enterprises that have suffered greatly from years of neglect, with the help from Russian defense companies, Greek Deputy Defense Minister Kostas Isihos told Sputnik...

[Greek Defense Minister Panos] Kammenos is expected to hold talks with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. They will discuss bilateral defense agreements and seek to deepen cooperation between the two nations, Isihos said.

Speaking with Sputnik on Tuesday, Isihos also said the Greek military would benefit from increased technical support and advice on the use of Russian-made arms.

Moscow and Athens have been ramping up military cooperation in the past few years. In December 2013, the two countries signed an intergovernmental deal on supplies of Russian arms and military hardware. Shoigu and then-Greek Defense Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos also discussed the possibility of joint personnel training events. Sputnik

Russia to Help Greek Defense Firms Recuperate From Neglect – Greek Official

Peter Hobson — No, Crimea Is Not 'Suffering Reign of Terror' Under Russian Rule

The Moscow Times, a liberal anti-government government newpaper that supports the Western viewpoint. It's a news front for the Russian "fifth column." It's somewhat surprising then, when , it jumps ship and throws Victoria Nuland under the bus for being so over the top as to appear ridiculous.

When American generals starting talking about having to kill Russians on Fox News and a representative of the US State Department talks nonsense, Russian liberals find themselves being undermined and are apparently concerned that they would appear ridiculous themselves if they don't speak up.

The Moscow Times
No, Crimea Is Not 'Suffering Reign of Terror' Under Russian Rule
Peter Hobson, business editor at The Moscow Times

Also

Oriental Review
German sociologists on Crimea’s choice
Konstantin Kosaretsky, Ukrainian freelance journalist and writer

Robert Parry — Nuland’s Mastery of Ukraine Propaganda

More about neocon propaganda than Ukraine.

An early skill learned by Official Washington’s neoconservatives, when they were cutting their teeth inside the U.S. government in the 1980s, was how to frame their arguments in the most propagandistic way, so anyone who dared to disagree with any aspect of the presentation seemed unpatriotic or crazy. 

During my years at The Associated Press and Newsweek, I dealt with a number of now prominent neocons who were just starting out and mastering these techniques at the knee of top CIA psychological warfare specialist Walter Raymond Jr., who had been transferred to President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff where Raymond oversaw inter-agency task forces that pushed Reagan’s hard-line agenda in Central America and elsewhere. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of ‘Perception Management.’”]

One of those quick learners was Robert Kagan, who was then a protégé of Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams. Kagan got his first big chance when he became director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America, a key outlet for Raymond’s propaganda schemes.

Though always personable in his dealings with me, Kagan grew frustrated when I wouldn’t swallow the propaganda that I was being fed. At one point, Kagan warned me that I might have to be “controversialized,” i.e. targeted for public attack by Reagan’s right-wing media allies and anti-journalism attack groups, like Accuracy in Media, a process that did indeed occur....

But Kagan is perhaps best known these days as the husband of neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, one of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former advisers and a key architect of last year’s coup in Ukraine, a “regime change” that toppled an elected president and touched off a civil war, which now has become a proxy fight involving nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

In an interview last year with the New York Times, Nuland indicated that she shared her husband’s criticism of President Obama for his hesitancy to use American power more assertively. Referring to Kagan’s public attacks on Obama’s more restrained “realist” foreign policy, Nuland said, “suffice to say … that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”

But Nuland also seems to have mastered her husband’s skill with propaganda, presenting an extreme version of the situation in Ukraine, such that no one would dare quibble with the details. In prepared testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Nuland even slipped in an accusation blaming Russia for the July 17 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 though the U.S. government has not presented any proof.... 

The not-so-fine line between propaganda and lying.

Gets worse, too.

Besides heaping all the blame on the Russians, Nuland cited – in her Senate testimony – some of the new “reforms” that the Kiev authorities have just implemented as they build a “free-market state.” She said, “They made tough choices to reduce and cap pension benefits, increase work requirements and phase in a higher retirement age; … they passed laws cutting wasteful gas subsidies.” 

In other words, many of the “free-market reforms” are aimed at making the hard lives of average Ukrainians even harder – by cutting pensions, removing work protections, forcing people to work into their old age and making them pay more for heat during the winter.

Nuland also hailed some of the regime’s stated commitments to fighting corruption. But Kiev seems to have simply installed a new cast of bureaucrats looking to enrich themselves. For instance, Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko is an expatriate American who – before becoming an instant Ukrainian citizen last December – ran a U.S. taxpayer-financed investment fund for Ukraine that was drained of money as she engaged in lucrative insider deals, which she has fought to keep secret. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s Finance Minister’s American ‘Values.’”]....

Consortiums News

Nuland’s Mastery of Ukraine Propaganda

Robert Parry

Also

If even a smidgen of this is true....

Daniel Lazare, The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism

Wayne Madsen — Nuland attempts Kiev Version 2.0 in Skopje

[US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria] Nuland has been charged by Macedonian intelligence with conspiring with Zaev of the Macedonian Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), the former Communist Party that has been thoroughly co-opted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Soros operative. Also charged in the attempted putsch against Gruevski is Radmila Sekerinska. Zaev and Sekerinska are said by Macedonian insiders to be nothing more than fronts for former Prime Minister and President Branko Crvenkovski who continues to head up the SDSM and accept large amounts of largesse from such CIA NGO laundry operations as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House, and Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI) to foment a themed revolution against Gruevksi's right-of-center VMRO-DPMNE government.

Gruevksi, unlike many U.S.-installed and -influenced governments of the region has been reluctant to apply sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.…

Nuland’s husband [Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute] has the distinction of working as a foreign policy adviser for both McCain and presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.…

What occurred in Macedonia was a classic disinformation ploy to mire the democratically-elected government in a bogus political scandal. The ploy is directly from the CIA playbook and it is now being carried out against Presidents Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and Michelle Bachelet of Chile. All face financial scandals cooked up by the CIA and its owned and operated media in the three nations.

Hungary is next on the neocon list.

Strategic Culture Foundation
Nuland attempts Kiev Version 2.0 in Skopje
Wayne Madsen

Robert Parry — Neocons: The ‘Anti-Realists’

America’s neocons, who wield great power inside the U.S. government and media, endanger the planet by concocting strategies inside their heads that ignore real-world consequences. Thus, their “regime changes” have unleashed ancient hatreds and spread chaos across the globe, as Robert Parry explains.

Empire-building in the name of freedom, human rights, democracy and the American way.

Parry see President Obama as a reluctant (spineless) realist, who goes along to get along. I am not so sure he is not a card-carrying neocon that sometimes talks like a realist. But practically speaking, there is no discernible difference in behavior.

Consortium News
Neocons: The ‘Anti-Realists’

Robert Parry

Leslie H. Gelb — Countering the Neocon Comeback

Uh-oh.

Democracy — A Journal of Ideas
Countering the Neocon Comeback
Leslie H. Gelb | President Emeritus and Board Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations