{"id":15338,"date":"2015-12-16T08:18:56","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T13:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15338"},"modified":"2015-12-16T08:19:35","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T13:19:35","slug":"15338","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15338","title":{"rendered":"How \u2018Obscure\u2019 Bureaucrats Cause Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How \u2018Obscure\u2019 Bureaucrats Cause Wars<\/a><\/h3>\n

Exclusive:<\/strong>\u00a0Official Washington\u2019s anti-Russian \u201cgroup think\u201d is now so dominant that no one with career aspirations dares challenge it, a victory for\u00a0\u201cobscure\u201d government bureaucrats,\u00a0like Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,\u00a0as Jonathan Marshall explains.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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History isn\u2019t just made by impersonal forces and \u201cgreat men\u201d or \u201cgreat women.\u201d Sometimes relatively obscure men and women acting in key bureaucratic posts make a real difference.<\/p>\n

Thus, the international crisis in Syria traces back in part to the decision of President Barack Obama\u2019s first ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, to reject peaceful rapprochement with the Damascus regime in favor of \u201cradically redesign[ing] his mission<\/u><\/a>\u201d to promote anti-government protests that triggered the civil war in 2011.<\/p>\n

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\"Assistant<\/a><\/p>\n

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland during a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on Feb. 7, 2014. (U.S. State Department photo)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In much the same way, Obama\u2019s Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland\u00a0did her best<\/u><\/a>\u00a0to foment the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch against the democratically elected Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych, \u201cwhile convincing\u00a0the ever-gullible U.S. mainstream media that the coup wasn\u2019t really a coup but a victory for \u2018democracy,\u2019\u201d as journalist Robert Parry wrote last July.<\/p>\n

Nuland, a former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and wife of neoconservative luminary Robert Kagan, helped achieve in Ukraine the kind of \u201cregime change\u201d that her husband had long promoted in the Middle East through the Project for a New American Century.<\/p>\n

Nuland now has a new counterpart in the Department of Defense who bears close watching for signs of whether the Obama administration will keep escalating military confrontation with Russia over Eastern Europe, or look for opportunities to find common ground and ease tensions.<\/p>\n

On Dec. 14, Dr. Michael Carpenter started work at the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, with added responsibilities for the Western Balkans and Conventional Arms Control. He replaced Evelyn Farkas, who stepped down in October.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How \u2018Obscure\u2019 Bureaucrats Cause Wars Exclusive:\u00a0Official Washington\u2019s anti-Russian \u201cgroup think\u201d is now so dominant that no one with career aspirations dares challenge it, a victory for\u00a0\u201cobscure\u201d government bureaucrats,\u00a0like Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,\u00a0as Jonathan Marshall explains. History isn\u2019t just made by impersonal forces and \u201cgreat men\u201d or \u201cgreat women.\u201d Sometimes relatively obscure men and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6563,6963,7430,584,620,11068,776,6705,865],"class_list":["post-15338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-bureaucrats","tag-consortium-news","tag-jonathan-marshall","tag-obama","tag-pentagon","tag-robert-ford","tag-syria","tag-us-department-of-defense","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15338"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15340,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15338\/revisions\/15340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}