Nervous About Russia

Two weeks ago in Salisbury, less than 10 kilometres from the UK’s Porton Down chemical weapons establishment, a Russian and his daughter appear to have been poisoned. Sergei Skripal was a former Russian military intelligence officer who acted as a spy for the UK’s MI6. In 2006, he had been tried and convicted for high treason by the Russian authorities, but was released in 2010 as part of a ‘spy swap’ with the UK and settled in Britain. Skripal and his daughter remain in a critical condition, with medical staff reporting that they had been poisoned with a nerve agent.

The British government has claimed that the Skripals were poisoned with the nerve agent ‘Novichok’. But in the past two weeks it did not release any proof of this either to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), or to the Russian government that it blames both for producing the agent and for the attack. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, UK Foreign Secretary and blathering embodiment of a power in decline, has just revealed that the OPCW will investigate from tomorrow.

Not to be taken: Novichok

Novichok is the name given to a class of extremely toxic nerve agents reported to have been produced by the former Soviet Union and Russia up to 1993. The production took place in several locations, and, with the break up of the Soviet Union, supplies of it and/or knowledge of how to manufacture it could also have been passed on to other countries. It is likely that Porton Down has such knowledge, since that would have been necessary for them to claim the attack on the Skripals was with Novichok rather than something else.

Who dunnit?

Claims that Russia initiated the attack rest on some shaky foundations. It is not clear why such a specialist method was used that would inevitably be linked to the Russian state. Or even why there would be an attempt at assassination at all, unless Skripal had continued to work for the UK intelligence services. However, one could argue that a Russian link was deliberately used to deter other Russian spies who might consider collaborating with the UK – with the message that ‘Eventually, we will punish traitors’.

Less plausible is the view that Putin needed this episode to marshal support in today’s presidential election that will likely result in his fourth term in office. Less plausible still is the Russian argument that the Brits did it to smear Moscow, although anti-Russian hysteria has a long history in Britain so that was a natural reaction.

One notable feature of the UK’s mainstream media coverage of this event was how there was an immediate and unanimous condemnation of Russia, with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denounced when he called for evidence.[1] Such is the operation of the ‘free press’.

Winding up

If Russian policy was to poison Sergei Skripal, then, apart from its role as a deterrent, that action could best be understood as a political wind up. The Salisbury location reminds people that the holier-than-though UK also deals in chemical weapons. The rationale for the timing is less clear; although in the wake of Brexit and Trump’s America First policy, the UK is in a weak position to do anything more to Russia than has already been implemented. NATO’s encirclement of Russia is more or less complete, but Russia has now developed new missile systems that undermine this threat. Effective economic sanctions against Russia have probably also reached a limit, because Europe does not want to cut off Russian energy supplies.

Russia can embarrass the UK, an anti-Russian stalwart of the Anglosphere, with little cost. Such an action would also demonstrate that it is not to be trifled with, as already shown by its actions in Syria. By comparison, the Brits have a more appropriate international ambassador than they might have thought in Boris Johnson.

Tony Norfield

18 March 2018

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[1] Somewhat inconsistently, Corbyn also agreed with the UK Government’s expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats.

The Libyan Connection

Time and again Western security services have been shown to be up to their necks in promoting, training and giving operational support for Islamists to do their dirty work. It started in the 1950s as a strategy to mobilise the most backward and conservative sections of society against nationalist, independent and mostly progressive currents in the Middle East. They managed to destroy every single one of these currents, leaving a politically barren landscape dominated by political options that have no future and, despite their ultra-anti-Western rhetoric, which cannot fight against Western imperialism.

Then came the CIA’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, with the US funding Osama bin Laden’s group and other jihadis to fight the Russians. Then there was the training and deployment of thousands of jihadis to fight Serbia in the war in the former Yugoslavia. Then the training and deployment of thousands of jihadis to fight in Chechnya with the sole purpose of destabilizing Russia. Many of the latter had previously fought in Serbia. Then came Libya, where the security services sent hundreds of these operatives to undermine Gaddafi in 2011. Then came Syria, where the security services sent in hundreds of armed Libyan jihadis to fight Assad.

Not a lot of people know that many of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay’s US military prison was or is a former CIA- or MI6-trained fighter. They sent them there because they knew they were committed jihadists, as opposed to the less dangerous Iraqi or Afghan nationalists who were just fighting to oust foreigners from their countries and had no global or ideological pretensions.

Now the web site MiddleEastEye lifts the lid on the Libyan connection to this week’s Manchester bombing that the British authorities do not want to talk about. It explains why, within hours of the attack, the security services were already declaring that a network was involved. They knew whom they were dealing with!

Susil das Gupta, 26 May 2017

The Anti-Russia Syndrome

I normally cast aside explanations of events based on the psychology of the actors, but this has been hard to do in recent months. How else, apart from signs of paranoia, can one explain the never-ending stories in the mainstream media about the Russian menace?

A constant tirade against Russia emanates from television and radio channels, and from all the ‘quality’ newspapers and reporters. (See this Youtube video of Putin explaining that the BBC’s John Simpson has no ‘common sense’). Only the topic changes with the times. One early focus was Russia’s intervention in Crimea/Ukraine, which upset US and European strategy. The next was how Russia’s support for Assad in Syria unravelled and sidelined disastrous western policy. One of the latest is the election of Trump, billionaire-in-chief of the US hegemon. A shocked US political elite can only put down Trump’s election to the nefarious Russkies, not to domestic political reaction. Right on cue, a British ex-MI6 agent provided a dossier of ‘evidence’ to ‘demonstrate’ that Putin was in a position to blackmail Trump! If that were not bad enough to show how the commies were undermining western liberal democracy, new stories are about Russian support for Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France and other rightwing parties in Europe.

The anti-Russia syndrome reflects two things outside the realm of psychosis. Firstly, it is a sign of big power frustration with a permanent member of the UN Security Council that can veto US-led UN resolutions and which can also back up its policies with military firepower. Secondly, the chronic phase of the crisis persists, and this is straining the political infrastructure, as most clearly seen with the Brexit and Trump votes. ‘Anti-communism’ is one of the few comfort blankets that the western powers can cling on to in these troubling times and pretend that they are all still in the same gang.

Take the UK government, for example. No longer invited to any EU soirées, the UK has to grandstand at NATO. The UK Ministry of Defence today declared that one of its key objectives for this week’s NATO summit in Brussels was

“to ensure the Alliance continues to make progress on taking forward the ambitious agenda agreed at Warsaw, in particular on modern defence and deterrence towards Russia. On that front (literally), the enhanced forward presence of NATO battlegroups is deploying this Spring to the Baltic States and Poland, with the UK proud to be leading the formation in Estonia, one of our most effective Allies in the Helmand campaign.”

The anti-Russian strategy has been a hallmark of British imperialism ever since the October revolution of 1917, and it has helped shape, or has been used in, almost all of its other policies. From the late 1930s/early 1940s, Britain focused upon splitting India into two countries, so as to make the new Pakistan a bulwark against any Russian incursion into its interests in the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. Britain also feared Soviet involvement to stymie its attempts to re-establish its colonial empire (and those of other powers) in the late 1940s. Britain went out of its way to support Moslem fundamentalism in the Middle East and North Africa as a counter-weight to local demands for freedom from foreign domination, usually put forward by secular nationalists, and it justified this by using the fear of ‘communist subversion’, even when that was completely unfounded. Similarly, Britain used the Soviet threat as a way to get the Americans to back its policies, as with the US involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran. There were many other such initiatives, as documented in Stephen Dorrill’s MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations.

Russia has completely embarrassed British and American political strategy at a time when Britain wants to hold on to its role as facilitator for that strategy in European and beyond. Now, post-Brexit, the Brits are high and dry, but Theresa May hopes to continue to hold hands with Donald Trump over NATO.

Tony Norfield, 15 February 2017