Poor John Kerry. He is prone to foot-in-mouth syndrome, but clearly the stress is getting to him. It’s understandable. The Secretary of State and his minions went and provoked a regime change in Ukraine to which they sang the chorus “democracy” and “people power” only to discover that: 1) the new leadership has a bad case of Basil Fawlty syndrome, stiff-arming at every opportunity; and 2) a good chunk of the country (as the rest of us could tell looking at voting maps) had no intention of going along with the US-engineered regime change in Kiev.
First Crimea, with a majority Russian and Russian-speaking population, rejected the self-proclaimed government in Kiev, then one by one eastern Ukrainians began mass demonstrations where the Russian flag was hoisted on public buildings.
In Kiev, the demonstrations are “people power.” In Donetsk and Sebastopol it is “armed gunmen.” That is the view of western governments and their media class. But the authorities in the autonomous province of Crimea — backed by tens of thousands in the streets — did the unthinkable: they asked the Russians to protect them against the new Kiev regime which was en route to crush dissent.
Interventionism is a dirty game and there is considerable danger in believing too closely in one’s own self-deceptions and on closed-loop analysis.
But what Kerry and his boss called a “invasion” looked a lot more like the neocon fantasy of how US troops would be greeted in Baghdad. In other words, for an invading force, the Russians seemed to be welcomed by the local population.
The stress was clearly too much. Today on Face the Nation Kerry delivered the kind of hilarious groaner that undermines the entire US manufactured outrage at Russia’s action next door in Ukraine. Said Kerry on camera:
It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country…You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.
One risks ruining the punchline by mentioning such words as Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and so on…
