Sunday, November 8, 2015

Conflicting views of Russia's role in Syria

My onetime professor at NYU, Stephen Cohen, one of America's foremost Russia experts and formerly preeminent Sovietologist, was again interviewed on The John Batchelor Show. This was before the revelation that Russia's Metrojet Flight 9268 was probably downed by a terrorist bomb.

Since the Maidan revolution and Russian annexation of Crimea in early 2014, Mr. Cohen has become the best-known defender of Russia and Putin in Western media and academia. He isn't personally linked to Putin, so far as I've learned, but back in 2001 his friend Sergei Glazyev, who has been sanctioned by the West in relation to Ukraine and Crimea, spoke to our class in New York about early-Putin era Russia.

Thankfully, there are sane voices like John Batchelor who are clearly conservative white Americans, yet who aren't drunk on power lust and feel it's their God-given birthright to control the whole world. I'm personally sick of lunatics like Mark Levin who talk as if Russia's just a basket case that can be threatened into submission with Reagan-era "Star Wars" antics, and as if China's still a Maoist Potemkin village. But then again, they're such lunatics because they're sore losers whose worldviews are about 30 years behind and are rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history, and they're not taking it too well at all; so may the Lord forgive me, as I should be praying for them to actually see some light.

Russia Today on the other hand just interviewed Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf, the typical Washington neoconservative Jew, in an at-times confrontational session that has him bashing Putin and saying that Russia's actually best served by continued chaos and bloodshed in Syria, i.e. it's not serious about defeating ISIS and only wants to perpetuate a horrible Baath dictatorship.

We should know before too long whether the Kremlin is in fact already focusing most of its efforts against true terrorists - i.e. Al Nusra and other Al Qaeda affiliates - even as it prepares for the more ultimate showdown with ISIS.

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