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Putin’s drivel

Vladimir Putin’s op ed in the New York Times was last night’s and this morning’s hot topic.  It really doesn’t merit much attention, but last time I looked had acquired 1343 comments and a lot of electrons in cyberspace, so here goes.

The problems start in paragraph 2:

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

I don’t really know whether in 1945 Roosevelt thought he had delegated decisions affecting war and peace to the UN Security Council and a (then-) Soviet veto, but I am certain few American presidents since have thought this.  Nor have Moscow’s leaders subjected their war and peace decisions (in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Georgia or for that matter Syria) to UNSC votes.

Putin compounds the illogic with this:

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

Russia has done more to weaken the UNSC by refusing to allow any resolution on Syria to pass than military action by the US would do.  By neutering the UNSC Moscow is risking precisely the fate of the League of Nations.

I happen to agree with Putin on the potential regional risks arising from Syria, but he is wrong to attribute these exclusively to a US strike.  Continuation of the war even without military intervention will lead to all these bad things:  more innocent victims and escalation, a new wave of terrorism, difficulty resolving the Iranian nuclear and Israel/Palestine issues as well as regional destabilization.

Putin continues:

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria.

It should surprise no one that the President of Russia can’t recognize a genuine democratic movement when he sees one.  He is blind to that sort of thing even in his own country.  All he sees are the extremists and the need for a thorough crackdown.

Russia he claims has been advocating for peaceful dialogue from the first.  True enough, but at the same time it has been arming, equipping and financing a regime committing massive human rights violations.  Putin nevertheless asserts Russia’s allegiance not to Asad, but to international law, which apparently in his library does not include the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.  It only includes that same hackneyed refrain about the powers of the Security Council:

Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.

Tell that to the Czechs and Hungarians and watch them laugh.

This is also risible, if it weren’t so sad:

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.

Human Rights Watch, and reportedly also the UN, have concluded that the August 21 attack was launched by regime forces.  This mythology of people who kill their own to precipitate foreign intervention was a standard refrain also in the Balkans in the 1990s.  Never demonstrated, always asserted.

Putin goes on to opine:

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

For sure there are big problems in all those places, but there are also pluses that he skips over, just as he fails to mention Russia’s use of extreme force in Chechnya (to what Putin would claim as good effect) as well as in Georgia, where Russia now occupies the territory of a neighboring state.

He then pitches not the chemical weapons proposal under negotiation today in Geneva but rather a far more general point:

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

This notion that the language of force is inconsistent with diplomacy is wrong, as recent Russian and Syrian behavior demonstrates all too well.

Putin’s closing isn’t so much wrong as hypocritical:

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

A president who not only countenances but encourages distinctions among people based on sexual orientation has certainly forgotten that God created us equal.

The only comfort I have reading this drivel is that the American PR firm that wrote it has extracted a substantial sum from Moscow for its obviously shoddy work.

PS:  The PR firm involved is Ketchum.