WHY ARE NEO-CONS NEOCONS AGAINST PUTIN

THE NEO-CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON VLADIMIR PUTIN

Alistair McConnachie writes: Some readers may have been puzzled at the approach of some of the main British broadsheets to the massacre of school children in Beslan. Papers such as The Daily Telegraph have clearly been slanting their opinion to give the subliminal message that the Russians, and specifically, Putin, are to blame.

For example, the headline in The Daily Telegraph editorial of Saturday 4 September 2004 was "Russia's children pay with their lives". What do they mean "pay"? "Pay" for what?

The headline, splashed across the same paper's front page on Monday 6th September 2004 was, "What did we do to deserve this?" thereby implanting the subliminal thought that what happened to the children was "deserved".

Further, this headline attempted deliberately to redirect its readers' anger onto Vladimir Putin -- The Daily Telegraph's preferred target!

Imagine the difference if the headline had read, "Hunt down these bastards, now!" A headline, it could just as easily have run, and indeed a headline it would have run -- if it had seen a political advantage to its chosen side, in so doing.

Thus, through the skilful use of language can emotions be manipulated and sent in the desired political direction.

Clearly The Daily Telegraph, and others, are using the Chechnya turmoil as a stick to beat Putin and are trying to send British public opinion in an anti-Putin direction. Why?

The following article from The Guardian indicates that the anti-Putin line is being promoted by essentially the same neo-con clique who promote war with Iraq and belligerency towards other Islamic states in the region.

So, why should the neo-cons have it in for Putin?
When we are dealing with the neo-cons, the first thing we must realise is that their first priority is their own self-interest, not necessarily a loyalty to any kind of ideological consistency.

With this understanding, we would immediately suggest 3 reasons for the anti-Putin line of much of the British media:
1. The neo-cons, as well as the plutocratic Russian oligarchs, want a soft Russian leader, like Boris Yeltsin, whom they can push around and who will do what they want, in order that they can enrich themselves.
2. In attempting to pull Russia out of the grip of the oligarchs, Putin has upset many of them. They are now using their money and influence -- with a little help from their friends around the world -- to get back at him and attempt to pull him down.
3. Putin was not sufficiently for the Iraq War and has to be punished, just like France has to be continually mocked in the neo-con lexicon.

In addition to the neo-con names mentioned below, we would add people like Michael McFaul, and Lilia Shevtsova who, according to the blurb in her latest anti-Putin book, "divides her time between the Carnegie offices in Washington and Moscow."

The Chechens' American friends
The Guardian
Wednesday September 8, 2004, p. 23
John Laughland
Original here

The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as "Grief turns to anger", "Harsh words for government", and "Criticism mounting against Putin" have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand - to quote the Sunday Times - the "underlying causes" of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word "rebels" to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters.

The leading Russian critics of Putin's handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov - men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west's beloved Boris Yeltsin - and the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Centre.

Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank - which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia's role in helping the US restructure the "Greater Middle East" - has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow's claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida.

These people peddle essentially the same line as that expressed by Chechen leaders themselves, such as Ahmed Zakaev, the London exile who wrote in these pages yesterday.

Other prominent figures who use the Chechen rebellion as a stick with which to beat Putin include Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who, like Zakaev, was granted political asylum in this country, although the Russian authorities want him on numerous charges. Moscow has often accused Berezovsky of funding Chechen rebels in the past.

By the same token, the BBC and other media sources are putting it about that Russian TV played down the Beslan crisis, while only western channels reported live, the implication being that Putin's Russia remains a highly controlled police state. But this view of the Russian media is precisely the opposite of the impression I gained while watching both CNN and Russian TV over the past week: the Russian channels had far better information and images from Beslan than their western competitors.

This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist.

Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighbouring Georgia - a country which aspires to join Nato, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence - only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists on Monday.

Proof of any such western involvement would be difficult to obtain, but is it any wonder Russians are asking themselves such questions when the same people in Washington who demand the deployment of overwhelming military force against the US's so-called terrorist enemies also insist that Russia capitulate to hers?

John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group www.oscewatch.org

Here are a couple of good articles from Justin Raimondo which help to explain the anti-Putin agenda
Putin, the Patriot
Commissar Aaronovitch