The Israel Factor in Neocons’

Anti-Russia Warmongering over

Ukraine
https://archive.org/details/biden-kagan-kristol-neoconservatives-620x-410

Neocons' Ukraine-Syria-Iran
Gambit
The Ukraine crisis – in part stirred up by U.S. neocons –
has damaged prospects for peace not only on Russia’s
borders but in two Middle East hotspots, Syria and Iran,
which may have been exactly the point
ROBERT PARRY
Mar 20, 2014Consortium News

You might think that policymakers with so many bloody fiascos on their
resumes as the U.S. neocons, including the catastrophic Iraq War, would admit
their incompetence and return home to sell insurance or maybe work in a fast-
food restaurant. Anything but directing the geopolitical decisions of the world's
leading superpower.
But Official Washington's neocons are nothing if not relentless and resilient.
They are also well-funded and well-connected. So they won't do the honorable
thing and disappear. They keep hatching new schemes and strategies to keep the
world stirred up and to keep their vision of world domination - and particularly
"regime change" in the Middle East - alive.
Now, the neocons have stoked a confrontation over Ukraine, involving two
nuclear-armed states, the United States and Russia. But - even if nuclear
weapons don't come into play - the neocons have succeeded in estranging U.S.
President Barack Obama from Russian President Vladimir Putin and sabotaging
the pair's crucial cooperation on Iran and Syria, which may have been the point
all along.
Though the Ukraine crisis has roots going back decades, the chronology of the
recent uprising -- and the neocon interest in it - meshes neatly with neocon fury
over Obama and Putin working together to avert a U.S. military strike against
Syria last summer and then brokering an interim nuclear agreement with Iran
last fall that effectively took a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran off the
table.
With those two top Israeli priorities - U.S. military attacks on Syria and Iran -
sidetracked, the American neocons began activating their influential media and
political networks to counteract the Obama-Putin teamwork. The neocon wedge
to splinter Obama away from Putin was driven into Ukraine.
Operating out of neocon enclaves in the U.S. State Department and at U.S.-
funded non-governmental organizations, led by the National Endowment for
Democracy, neocon operatives targeted Ukraine even before the recent political
unrest began shaking apart the country's fragile ethnic and ideological cohesion.
Last September, as the prospects for a U.S. military strike against Syria were
fading thanks to Putin, NED president Carl Gershman, who is something of a
neocon paymaster controlling more than $100 million in congressionally
approved funding each year, took to the pages of the neocon-flagship
Washington Post and wrote that Ukraine was now "the biggest prize."
But Gershman added that Ukraine was really only an interim step to an even
bigger prize, the removal of the strong-willed and independent-minded Putin,
who, Gershman added, "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near
abroad [i.e. Ukraine] but within Russia itself." In other words, the new hope
was for "regime change" in Kiev and Moscow.
Putin had made himself a major annoyance in Neocon World, particularly with
his diplomacy on Syria that defused a crisis over a Sarin attack outside
Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Despite the attack's mysterious origins - and the
absence of any clear evidence proving the Syrian government's guilt - the U.S.
State Department and the U.S. news media rushed to the judgment that Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad did it.
Politicians and pundits baited Obama with claims that Assad had brazenly
crossed Obama's "red line" by using chemical weapons and that U.S.
"credibility" now demanded military retaliation. A longtime Israeli/neocon
goal, "regime change" in Syria, seemed within reach.
But Putin brokered a deal in which Assad agreed to surrender Syria's chemical
weapons arsenal (even as he continued to deny any role in the Sarin attack). The
arrangement was a huge letdown for the neocons and Israeli officials who had
been drooling over the prospect that a U.S. bombing campaign would bring
Assad to his knees and deliver a strategic blow against Iran, Israel's current
chief enemy.
Putin then further offended the neocons and the Israeli government by helping
to facilitate an interim nuclear deal with Iran, making another neocon/Israeli
priority, a U.S. war against Iran, less likely.
Putting Putin in Play
So, the troublesome Putin had to be put in play. And, NED's Gershman was
quick to note a key Russian vulnerability, neighboring Ukraine, where a
democratically elected but corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, was
struggling with a terrible economy and weighing whether to accept a European
aid offer, which came with many austerity strings attached, or work out a more
generous deal with Russia.
There was already a strong U.S.-organized political/media apparatus in place
for destabilizing Ukraine's government. Gershman's NED had 65 projects
operating in the country - training "activists," supporting "journalists" and
organizing business groups, according to its latest report. (NED was created in
1983 to do in relative openness what the CIA had long done in secret, nurture
pro-U.S. operatives under the umbrella of "promoting democracy.")
So, when Yanukovych opted for Russia's more generous $15 billion aid
package, the roof fell in on him. In a speech to Ukrainian business leaders last
December, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, a
neocon holdover and the wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, reminded the
group that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in Ukraine's "European aspirations."
Then, urged on by Nuland and neocon Sen. John McCain, protests in the capital
of Kiev turned increasingly violent with neo-Nazi militias moving to the fore.
Unidentified snipers opened fire on protesters and police, touching off fiery
clashes that killed some 80 people (including about a dozen police officers).
On Feb. 21, in a desperate attempt to tamp down the violence, Yanukovych
signed an agreement brokered by European countries. He agreed to surrender
many of his powers, to hold early elections (so he could be voted out of office),
and pull back the police. That last step, however, opened the way for the neo-
Nazi militias to overrun government buildings and force Yanukovych to flee for
his life.
With these modern-day storm troopers controlling key buildings - and
brutalizing Yanukovych supporters - a rump Ukrainian parliament voted, in an
extra-constitutional fashion, to remove Yanukovych from office. This coup-
installed regime, with far-right parties controlling four ministries including
defense, received immediate U.S. and European Union recognition as Ukraine's
"legitimate" government.
As remarkable - and newsworthy - as it was that a government on the European
continent included Nazis in the executive branch for the first time since World
War II, the U.S. news media performed as it did before the Iraq War and during
various other international crises. It essentially presented the neocon-preferred
narrative and treated the presence of the neo-Nazis as some kind of urban
legend.
Virtually across the board, from Fox News to MSNBC, from the Washington
Post to the New York Times, the U.S. press corps fell in line, painting
Yanukovych and Putin as the "black-hat" villains and the coup regime as the
"white-hat" good guys, which required, of course, whiting out the neo-Nazi
"brown shirts."
Neocon Expediency
Some neocon defenders have challenged my reporting that U.S. neocons played
a significant role in the Ukrainian putsch. One argument is that the neocons,
who regard the U.S.-Israeli bond as inviolable, would not knowingly
collaborate with neo-Nazis given the history of the Holocaust (and indeed the
role of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in extermination campaigns against Poles
and Jews).
But the neocons have frequently struck alliances of convenience with some of
the most unsavory - and indeed anti-Semitic - forces on earth, dating back to the
Reagan administration and its collaboration with Latin American "death squad"
regimes, including work with the World Anti-Communist League that included
not only neo-Nazis but aging real Nazis.
More recently in Syria, U.S. neocons (and Israeli leaders) are so focused on
ousting Assad, an ally of hated Iran, that they have cooperated with Saudi
Arabia's Sunni monarchy (known for its gross anti-Semitism). Israeli officials
have even expressed a preference for Saudi-backed Sunni extremists winning in
Syria if that is the only way to get rid of Assad and hurt his allies in Iran and
Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Last September, Israel's Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the
Jerusalem Post that Israel so wanted Assad out and his Iranian backers
weakened, that Israel would accept al-Qaeda operatives taking power in Syria.
"The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran,
to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that
arc," Oren said in the interview. "We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we
always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who
were backed by Iran."
Oren said that was Israel's view even if the other "bad guys" were affiliated
with al-Qaeda.
Oren, who was Israel's point man in dealing with Official Washington's
neocons, is considered very close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and reflects his views. For decades, U.S. neocons have supported
Netanyahu and his hardline Likud Party, including as strategists on his 1996
campaign for prime minister when neocons such as Richard Perle and Douglas
Feith developed the original "regime change" strategy. [For details, see
Consortiumnews.com's "The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War."]
In other words, Israel and its U.S. neocon supporters have been willing to
collaborate with extreme right-wing and even anti-Semitic forces if that
advances their key geopolitical goals, such as maneuvering the U.S.
government into military confrontations with Syria and Iran.
So, while it may be fair to assume that neocons like Nuland and McCain would
have preferred that the Ukraine coup had been spearheaded by militants who
weren't neo-Nazis - or, for that matter, that the Syrian rebels were not so
dominated by al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists - the neocons (and their Israeli
allies) see these tactical collaborations as sometimes necessary to achieve
overarching strategic priorities.
And, since their current strategic necessity is to scuttle the fragile negotiations
over Syria and Iran, which otherwise might negate the possibility of U.S.
military strikes against those two countries, the Putin-Obama collaboration had
to go.
By spurring on the violent overthrow of Ukraine's elected president, the
neocons helped touch off a cascade of events - now including Crimea's
secession from Ukraine and its annexation by Russia - that have raised tensions
and provoked Western retaliation against Russia. The crisis also has made the
continued Obama-Putin teamwork on Syria and Iran extremely difficult, if not
impossible.
Like other neocon-engineered schemes, there will surely be much collateral
damage in this latest one. For instance, if the tit-for-tat economic retaliations
escalate - and Russian gas supplies are disrupted - Europe's fragile recovery
could be tipped back into recession, with harmful consequences for the U.S.
economy, too.
There's also the certainty that congressional war hawks and neocon pundits will
press for increased U.S. military spending and aggressive tactics elsewhere in
the world to punish Putin, meaning even less money and attention for domestic
programs or deficit reduction. Obama's "nation-building at home" will be
forgotten.
But the neocons have long made it clear that their vision for the world - one of
America's "full-spectrum dominance" and "regime change" in Middle Eastern
countries opposed to Israel - overrides all other national priorities. And as long
as the neocons face no accountability for the havoc that they wreak, they will
continue working Washington's corridors of power, not selling insurance or
flipping hamburgers.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/03/20/neocons-ukraine-syria-iran-
gambit

Neocons bent on starting another disaster

in Ukraine
US foreign policy is evidently held hostage by a venal, avaricious and, above all, reckless claque of elites

By JAMES CARDENDECEMBER 15, 2021

Ukrainian servicemen near an armored personnel carrier stationed

along the front line during confrontations with Russia-backed
separatists near the small town of Volnovakha in the Donetsk region on
June 23, 2021. Photo: AFP / Anatolii Stepanov

If anything, Washington’s neoconservatives have an unerring instinct for

survival. Having brought about multiple disasters in the two decades
since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, from the Iraq war to the
twin debacles in Libya and Syria, the neocons seem to have perfected the
art of failing up.

Harvard University’s Stephen Walt once quipped that “Being a Neocon

Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” And in this regard, the story
of the Kagan family is instructive.

Robert Kagan, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, a

senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of pseudo-
histories such as The Jungle Grows Back, has for years been a leading
advocate of American militarism.

His brother Frederick is a resident scholar at the neoconservative

American Enterprise Institute. Writing in The Hill on December 7,
Frederick Kagan claimed that Russian control of Ukraine “would create
an existential threat to Poland and even to Romania – one that could be
met only by major deployments of US and European ground and air
forces to what could become a new Iron Curtain.”

He and his wife Kimberly, who heads the Institute for the Study of War
– another pro-war Washington think-tank – were close advisers to
the disgraced general and former Central Intelligence Agency director
David Petraeus. Indeed, both Frederick and his wife are frequently cited
as the brains behind the surge strategy pursued by George W Bush’s
administration in 2007-2008.

But the most powerful member of the Kagan clan is Victoria Nuland,
who is the wife of Robert and is the US undersecretary of state for
political affairs.

Under Barack Obama, Nuland served as the State Department

spokeswoman, a position for which she was manifestly overqualified
(and that becomes especially clear if one takes the qualifications of
the current spokesman into consideration), before assuming the role of
assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

It was in this role that Nuland helped orchestrate the overthrow of a

democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych,
in February 2014 that led to a civil war in which more than
13,000 people have died, according to the United Nations.

Part of the reason the US is at grave risk of a war with Russia – and there
is precious little debate about the policies that have brought us to this
point – is that foreign policy in Washington is conducted by a virtually
closed circle.

And that circle is dominated by people like the Kagans.

Washington’s legacy media organizations play their part in perpetuating

these foreign policies as well by functioning as the permanent
bureaucracy’s echo chamber. For proof, look no further than the
Washington Post editorial page, which from the very start of the Ukraine
crisis has been cavalierly dismissing calls for diplomacy and engagement
and, instead, has been calling for outright war.

An example of this is the Washington Post view published on its editorial

page on August 21, 2014:

“… It is tempting to look for a ceasefire or some kind of time out that

would lead to a period of diplomatic negotiation. But what would a
pause and diplomacy accomplish? Any negotiations that leave this blight
festering in Ukraine must be avoided. The only acceptable solution is for
[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s aggression to be reversed.”

As Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of The National Interest, and

I commented at the time, “Almost as bad as the callousness on display is
the lack of candor. At no point did the [Washington] Post actually
explain how it would propose to go about reversing Putin’s aggression.”
This remains the case even today. At no point do the armchair warriors
braying for war with Russia over Ukraine discuss how such a “reversal”
might be carried out, or, even more tellingly, what the odds might be of a
successful outcome of a war between the US and Russia.

Not much has changed since the start of the Ukrainian crisis nearly eight
years ago. Consider for a moment the testimony on “Update on US-
Russia Policy” by Nuland made before the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee (SFRC) on December 7.

Nuland testified:

“We don’t know whether Russian President Putin has made a decision to
attack Ukraine or overthrow its government but we do know he is
building the capacity to do so. Much of this comes right out of Putin’s
2014 playbook but this time, it is on a much larger and more lethal scale.
So despite our uncertainty about exact intentions and timing, we must
prepare for all contingencies, even as we push Russia to reverse course.”

Nuland went on to note that the US government has given $2.4 billion to
Ukraine since 2014 “in security assistance,” which includes $450 million
so far this year alone.

What, one wonders, has been the United States’ return on this massive
investment?

SFRC chairman Bob Menendez seems to be under the impression that

the Russians do not have the overwhelming military advantage on their
own border. Likewise, Democratic Senator Ben Cardin intoned that a
Russian invasion of Ukraine would “require us [the US] to escalate.”

Republican Senator Todd Young, meanwhile, pressed Nuland on “what

measures are being considered by the administration to counter Russian
aggression,” while Democrat Jeanne Shaheen indicated that during her
conversations with members of parliament from Estonia, they spoke
about the importance of “European unity with respect to Ukraine.”
Also, the MPs from Estonia along with Poland and other Eastern
European countries expressed anxiousness about “whether or not to
station more troops in the Baltic nations,” Shaheen said.

Sign up

The most astute comment of the day came from Republican Senator Ron
Johnson, who was clearly proud that the committee had achieved a rare
bipartisan agreement. He further emphasized that the US stands
“united” in support of Ukraine and against Russia.

And Johnson was absolutely correct: The committee was completely

united in its desire for conflict over Ukraine, with which the US has no
treaty obligations whatsoever.

Indeed, both Nuland and the SFRC seem to see US national interests
where none exist. More worrying still, they seem to possess a kind of
blind faith in America’s ability, indeed duty, to shape outcomes of
conflicts that are taking place thousands of miles from our shores
through a combination of sanctions and military threats.

The SFRC hearing showed, if nothing else, that American foreign policy
is held hostage by a venal, avaricious and, above all, reckless claque of
elites: from the members of the SFRC to the high government officials
who testify before them; from the staffers who brief them to the scholars
and policy hands on whom the staffers rely; right down to the reporters
and journalists who uncritically regurgitate what they are told by their
“anonymous” administration sources.

As such, one of the most urgent questions before us is: How do

Americans of good conscience finally break their stranglehold on power
before it’s too late?
This article was produced by Globetrotter, which provided it to Asia
Times, in partnership with the American Committee for US-Russia
Accord.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/neocons-bent-on-starting-another-disaster-in-
ukraine/
The Neocons' Primary War Tactic: Branding
Opponents of U.S. Intervention as Traitors
By rehabilitating neocons and elevating them as thought leaders, liberals live in their
framework. Thus are opponents of U.S. involvement in Ukraine deemed treasonous.

GLENN GREENWALD JAN 26, 2022

Former Bush White House speechwriter David Frum speaks to MSNBC's Joe
Scarborough about Russia, Nov. 30, 2021

One of the most bizarre but important dynamics of Trump-era U.S. politics is
that the most fanatical war-hungry neocons, who shaped Bush/Cheney militarism,
have become the most popular pundits and thought leaders in American liberalism.
They have not changed in the slightest — they are employing the same tactics they
have always invoked, and for the same causes — but they have correctly perceived
that their agenda is better served by migrating back to the Democratic Party which
originally spawned their bloodthirsty ideology.
The excuse offered by Democrats for their embrace of neocons — we did it only
as a temporary coalition of convenience to oppose Trump — is false for many
reasons. This unholy alliance pre-dated Trump. In 2014 — long before anyone
envisioned Trump descending down an escalator on his path to the White House
— the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “The
Next Act of the Neocons.” He predicted, correctly as it turned out, that “the
neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary
Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the
driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

The corporate media outlets consumed most voraciously by liberals are filled to
the brim with war-loving neocons. Liberals catapult their books to the top of best-
seller lists, spread their viral tweets, build their credibility into contracts with CNN
and NBC News or stints as columnists for The New York Times and The
Washington Post, and giddily applaud their cover stories for The Atlantic and The
New Yorker.
Bill Kristol's frequent appearances on MSNBC are due to his high levels of
popularity among its liberal audience. One of the most beloved hosts on that
network is the former spokesperson of the Bush/Cheney White House and 2004
Bush campaign, Nicolle Wallace. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson and Steve
Schmidt went from producing commercials in 2002 accusing War on Terror critics
of being on the side of Al Qaeda to wallowing in "generational wealth” from
gullible liberal donors giddy over their similar Trump-era ads accusing their
enemies of being Kremlin agents and traitors. Two of The Washington Post's most
popular-among-liberal columnists are Jennifer Rubin and supreme war advocate
(from a safe distance for him and his family) Max Boot. Security state officials
like former CIA Director John Brennan, former Bush CIA and NSA Director
Michael Hayden, and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper became
liberal TV stars with their endless accusations that various Trump supporters
were unpatriotic and treasonous. And on and on and on.
But perhaps the most influential and beloved pundit in U.S. liberal political life
now is former Bush White House speechwriter David Frum, now at The
Atlantic and CNN. His cover stories for that magazine warning that Trump is an
unprecedented evil (which has the convenient benefit of absolving him and the rest
of the D.C. establishment of all their past sins) were passed around and celebrated
as if they were this generation's Dead Sea scrolls. He frequently appears on CNN
and MSNBC to speak solemnly about matters of war, authoritarianism, and
patriotism, where he is treated like an elder statesman and the moral conscience of
America. He was one of seemingly millions of charlatans who cashed in with a
Trump-era book warning of the unique evils of the Orange Hitler;
“Trumpocalypse,” his Amazon page promised, "is both a warning of danger and a
guide to reform that will be read and discussed for years to come.”
He catapulted from roughly 300,000 Twitter followers at the start of the Trump
presidency to close to 1 million now. His tweets accusing people of being
unpatriotic and treasonous routinely go viral among liberals. Democrats cannot get
enough of David Frum and his worm-like tactics.
There are many common characteristics tying these neocons together and forming
a cogent ideological strain. Two of the most toxic of these have been on full
display over the last month. The first is that they are always — in every case — in
favor of any opportunities for the U.S. to involve itself in a new war. You wind up
a neocon, and they start inventing excuses for why the U.S. must either bomb and
invade other countries or enter a new proxy war to arm and fund other countries to
do so for it. It is, therefore, unnecessary to point out that they are all not just in
favor of U.S. involvement in a potential war between Russia and Ukraine
but fanatical and giddy about it.
Neocons derive purpose, self-esteem and arousal from watching other people's
children fight and die in wars. In 1776, Adam Smith warned of this demented
mindset in The Wealth of Nations:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote
from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the
war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the
exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the
small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and
those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are
commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their
amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory
from a longer continuance of the war.
But the other, related attribute that binds them together is the way neocons smear
anyone who opposes their plots to involve the U.S. in new wars as traitors, on the
side of whichever Bad Leader they want (others) to fight. Frum is the most
enthusiastic purveyor of this sleazy tactic, one he has perfected over more than
two decades. Back in 2003, right after he left the Bush White House where he had
authored speeches advocating for an invasion of Iraq and a broader War on Terror,
he wrote a National Review article accusing right-wing opponents of the Iraq War
of being on the side of America's enemies. Aptly entitled “Unpatriotic
Conservatives,” Frum cited Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Justin Raimondo and
other anti-war “paleoconservatives” who went beyond what Frum deemed
permissible dissent — namely, questioning how the U.S. could best topple
Saddam's government — and into treason:
The antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative
strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar
movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They
espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy
theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s
enemies.
One of the crimes committed by these unpatriotic conservatives, argued Frum, was
their willingness to join with anti-war voices on the left. “Common cause: The
websites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of
John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander
Cockburn, and other anti-Americans of the far Left,” the Canadian-immigrant-
turned-Super-American-Patriot wrote.
Condemning Buchanan's version of “America First” foreign policy — which
caused the former Nixon White House aide to become one of the most vocal
opponents of the new war which Frum and his neocon comrades were desperate to
send mostly working-class American families to go fight — Frum condemned
these anti-war conservatives of being guilty of every bigotry he could think of:
racism, anti-Hispanic animus, and anti-Semitism. He concluded his lengthy
accusatory screed with rhetoric that should sound very familiar to anyone who has
heard Frum cast similar aspersions over the last five years toward anyone not as
obsessed with Trump as he is, or more recently, not as eager as he is to send other
people's kids or American resources to fight Russia:
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this
president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have
chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned
their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
This rhetorical tactic — impugning the patriotism and loyalty of one's opponents
— is now the dominant theme in American liberalism precisely because liberals
are now led by neocons. Under this rubric, anyone (on the right or the left) who
opposed Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden during the Trump years was deemed
not just wrong but treasonous: a Kremlin agent. That included Bernie Sanders, Jill
Stein, WikiLeaks, leftist critics of Democrats, right-wing critics of Democrats, and
in general anyone who echoed President Obama's long-standing view that Russia
did not pose a serious threat to the U.S. I cannot count the number of times I have
been accused of being a Kremlin agent or asset not by random social media trolls
but by prominent Democratic Party and liberal media and political figures for
expressing those views.
That is now, by far, the favorite attack against anyone who believes that Ukrainian
borders are not important enough to U.S. interests to involve the U.S. in a war.
The most vocal media opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine has been Fox
News’ Tucker Carlson (though, as usual these days, war skepticism is also found
on many Fox shows, including Laura Ingraham's, where I recently appeared to
make that case, but almost never on CNN or MSNBC). Carlson, on an almost
nightly basis, has posed the question few others in corporate media are willing to
ask: why is Ukraine a sufficiently vital interest to the U.S. to risk lives, resources
and potentially war with Russia in defense of it?

The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 @ColumbiaBugle

Tucker Carlson's Opening Monologue: Who Will Benefit From War With Russia?
"If the Neo-Cons aren't restrained, and soon, Americans are going to be a lot
poorer."

2:59 AM ∙ Jan 25, 2022

4,003Likes1,465Retweets
As punishment for arguing against the neocons’ latest plan to involve the U.S. in a
new war, Carlson has been widely vilified as a Kremlin asset or, at best, a
mouthpiece. “You're going to hear a lot of lying about Putin's War from Putin
apologists on the Carlson right and the Greenwald left,” warned Frum, adding:
“Putin apologists in US, UK, Germany, etc. should not be allowed to get away
with hanging Putin's War on any other neck.” A former Obama official and now-
Democratic Congressman from New Jersey who is often a voice for war — Tom
Malinowski (who, ironically, was a top official of Human Rights Watch before
running for office) — claimed on Monday that his office is being inundated with
calls demanding that he and the U.S. "side with Russia," and Malinowski asserts
that Carlson is somehow to blame for this. That insinuation of treason predictably
led to an immediate appearance on CNN, where Malinowski's claims were
converted into on-screen graphics from CNN suggesting that the Fox host is not
on the side of America but its enemies:

CNN's New Day, Jan. 25, 2021

This framework is hardly new. In 2018, The Guardian published an article

headlined: “Tucker Carlson says he's rooting for Russia in conflict with Ukraine.”
As usual, it was Frum who led the way in pushing this narrative of treason. “The
endorsement of Russia's aggression against Ukraine delivered tonight by Tucker
Carlson is a pretty specialized form of Trump admiration,” the grizzled tough
guy wrote back then, adding: "it's not characteristic of very many of those who
cast that misguided vote in 2016.” In 2019, a Media Matters employee whose job
is to watch Fox News copied Frum's tactic by writing: “Tucker Carlson defends
Vladimir Putin and says American media hate the United States more than Putin.”
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-neocons-primary-war-tactic-branding