RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the last debate of the 2012 presidential race Governor Romney discussed the potential threat of Russia. He was widely criticized by President Obama who maintained the Cold War ended in the 1980’s. Since then, of course, we have had a national “reset.” Vladimir Putin’s aggressive action in eastern Ukraine, Syria and his openly provocative statements about the Baltic states and the use of nuclear weapons offer revealing insights into Russian aims. Still there are those who believe Russia can be an ally, at least in areas where U.S.-Russian interests converge, e.g. battling militant Islam.

However, if one considers the history of Russia since the presumptive end of the Cold War, a different conclusion is plausible. Since 1989, Russian policy has been designed to undo the crumbling of the Soviet Empire, what might be described as Global Revenge. Putin’s stance is to reclaim the Near Abroad – those nations once within the Soviet orbit. Using the appearance of “democracy,” religious observance and elections, Russia’s president has moved assiduously to destroy internal adversaries and external opponents. The velvet glove of concern for those lost in the 9/11 attack concealed the iron fist of invasion and intimidation.

Despite its newly adopted nomenclature, the KGB operatives dominate foreign policy. The Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov is expected to be a magician who has veils behind veils in his Orwellian rhetoric. On the one hand, he speaks with compassion about the victims of bombing in Aleppo and then signals Russian planes to engage in indiscriminate bombing in this Syrian city. What you see is only what you think you see. Having played Secretary of State John Kerry like a drum, Lavrov has converted Russia into the strong horse in the Middle East and reduced the United States to irrelevance.

With the crumbling of communism, Russia became distracted by privatization schemes in the 1990’s. What these schemes truly represented was the emergence of a new elite that distributed national wealth to the soon to be oligarchs and the former KGB leaders who slowly entered into “partnerships” with the corporate and banking sectors. Revelations of Putin’s wealth suggest he may be the richest man on the globe. In fact, his daughter, who hasn’t engaged in any legitimate business activity, has an estimated wealth of $16 billion.

Ruling Fidesz party vice president pledges to ‘sweep out’ NGOs
Premier Orban, Trump backer, vowed to build ‘illiberal state’

Hungary plans to crack down on non-governmental organizations linked to billionaire George Soros now that Donald Trump will occupy the White House, according to the deputy head of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party.

The European Union member will use “all the tools at its disposal” to “sweep out” NGOs funded by the Hungarian-born financier, which “serve global capitalists and back political correctness over national governments,” Szilard Nemeth, a vice president of the ruling Fidesz party, told reporters on Tuesday. No one answered the phone at the Open Society Institute in Budapest when Bloomberg News called outside business hours.

“I feel that there is an opportunity for this, internationally,” because of Trump’s election, state news service MTI reported Nemeth as saying. Lawmakers will start debating a bill to let authorities audit NGO executives, according to parliament’s legislative agenda.

Orban, the first European leader to publicly back Trump’s campaign, has ignored criticism from the European Commission and U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration for building a self-described “illiberal state” modeled on authoritarian regimes including Russia, China and Turkey. In 2014, Orban personally ordered the state audit agency to probe foundations financed by Norway and said that civil society groups financed from abroad were covers for “paid political activists.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Photographer: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Orban and his administration have frequently singled out NGOs supported by Soros, a U.S. Democratic Party supporter with a wide network of organizations that promote democracy in formerly communist eastern Europe.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to get tough with the UN, a corrupt, bloated bureaucracy that for seven decades has existed to provide cushy jobs for international deadbeats, and to promote the interests of tyrannical regimes and anti-American pygmy states. Recognizing the UN’s failures and corruption, some commentators are calling for targeted reductions of the estimated $8-10 billion a year we spend on the UN and its 15 affiliated organizations, thus prodding Turtle Bay to reform. But the better argument is to withdraw completely. Changing the shade of lipstick on this multinational pig is not going to keep it from acting like a pig.

Indeed, “reforming” the UN is a mantra politicians periodically repeat in order to avoid doing what’s necessary to make significant changes. Remember the old UN Human Rights Commission? It was completely ineffective because it regularly seated some of the world’s worst human rights violators, including China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Uganda and Vietnam. At the same time, as stalwart UN critic Ann Bayefsky wrote in 2002, “Commission members seek to avoid directly criticizing states with human rights problems, frequently by focusing on Israel, a state that, according to analysis of summary records, has for over 30 years occupied 15 percent of commission time and has been the subject of a third of country-specific resolutions.” To add insult to the injury, that same year the Commission passed a resolution giving the Palestinian Arabs the de facto “legitimate right” to use terrorism against Israel.

The serial ignoring of Sudan’s responsibility for the human rights disaster unfolding in Darfur, and the election of Sudan to the Commission finally put an end to the UNHRC, which was replaced in 2006 with the “reformed” UN Human Rights Council. After ten years it’s obvious that the change was cosmetic, as the Council has repeated the same sins of its predecessor. It continues to seat members from nations like current members China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, all notorious for violating human rights. And it continues its chronic demonization of Israel, which it has condemned five times more than any other country. Nor is this vicious bigotry confined to the Council: last March, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) condemned only one nation, Israel, for violating women’s rights.

One night this past fall, a U.S. radar plane flying a routine pattern over Syria picked up a signal from an incoming Russian fighter jet.

The American crew radioed repeated warnings on a frequency universally used for distress signals. The Russian pilot didn’t respond.

Instead, as the U.S. plane began a wide sweep to the south, the Russian fighter, an advanced Su-35 Flanker, turned north and east across the American plane’s nose, churned up a wave of turbulent air in its path and briefly disrupted its sensitive electronics.

“We assessed that guy to be within one-eighth of a mile—a few hundred feet away—and unaware of it,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Paul Birch, commander of the 380th Expeditionary Operations Group, a unit based in the Persian Gulf.
A Russian Su-35 Flanker fighter shadows U.S. F-15s as they refuel over Syria in September. The photo, taken by a camera on one of the American planes, shows the Russian pilot far closer than the three-mile safety limit set in a 2015 U.S.-Russian agreement. Photo: U.S. Air Force

The skies above Syria are an international incident waiting to happen, according to American pilots. It is an unprecedented situation in which for months U.S. and Russian jets have crowded the same airspace fighting parallel wars, with American pilots bombing Islamic State worried about colliding with Russian pilots bombing rebels trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Russian warplanes, which also attack Islamic State targets, are still flying daily over Syria despite the recent cease-fire in Moscow’s campaign against the anti-Assad forces, according to the U.S. Air Force.

The U.S. and Russian militaries have a year-old air safety agreement, but American pilots still find themselves having close calls with Russian aviators either unaware of the rules of the road, or unable or unwilling to follow them consistently.

“Rarely, if ever, do they respond verbally,” said Brig. Gen. Charles Corcoran, commander of the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, who flies combat missions in a stealth fighter. “Rarely, if ever, do they move. We get out of the way. We don’t know what they can see or not see, and we don’t want them running into one of us.”

Complicating the aerial traffic jam, the Russian planes don’t emit identifying signals, flouting international protocols. CONTINUE AT SITE

Entirely overlooked by the Hollywood scriptwriters whose recent movie hailed the military unit that saved great works of art from Europe’s rubble in the dying days of the World War II, Tom Dunbabin and John McDonnell deserve not merely to to be remembered but celebrated.
Aeneas John Lindsay McDonnell (1904–64) was born in Toowoomba and educated at Cranbrook School in Sydney, where he developed his early interest in art. In 1928 he joined in the partnership which ran the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. He had a particular interest in French art and architecture, spoke fluent French and travelled widely. He later became private secretary to the Governor of Queensland. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Red Cross in April 1940, serving in Africa and the Middle East until 1943. In May 1944, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and was commissioned as a lieutenant and then seconded to special duty with the British forces.

Owing to his expertise in art and his fluency in French, he was then assigned to the Civil Affairs Division of the Allied Armies as an Australian representative to the SHAEF Mission to France in early 1945. “At SHAEF Headquarters in London, McDonnell was tasked with creating the MFAA (Commission on Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives) Handbook for France alongside Monuments Officers Walter Hancock and Bancel LaFarge.” The MFAA was established by a directive of President Roosevelt:

to protect cultural artifacts and monuments from war damage [and] then afterwards, [to] repatriate cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners when and where possible. [It] was comprised of about 350 to 400 men and women who were trained as museum directors, curators, art historians and educators. From 1943 till the cessation of hostilities, officers of MFAA saved and protected countless cultural artifacts, monuments and churches across Western Europe.

The MFAA’s work has been described in L.H. Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994) and by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter in The Monuments Men (2010). McDonnell’s service as a Monuments Officer took him throughout the American and British Zones in Occupied Europe. In May 1945 he was with Lieutenant Commander Charles Kuhn, Deputy Adviser to the MFAA, during the ten-day inspection of Nazi art repositories in Germany. At Altaussee, McDonnell examined the Ghent Altarpiece by Van Eyck and the Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo. He also saw the very large collection of looted French art stored by the Nazis at the Schloss Neuschwanstein. He headed the first conference of the Archivists of the British Zone held at Bunde in 1946.

mcdonnellMcDonnell (left) was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour by the French government and was awarded the Australian Service Medal, the British War Medal (with the Mentioned in Despatches Oakleaf), and the France and Germany Star. His decorations set is now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

After his discharge in January, 1947, with the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel, McDonnell was appointed to be the London adviser to the Felton Bequest for the benefit of the National Gallery of Victoria, in which capacity he served until his untimely death in 1964. He worked closely with Sir Kenneth Clark and other art historians in London and on the Continent, on the Bequest’s campaign to augment the collections of the NGV. Among the major works the NGV acquired through the Felton Bequest during McDonnell’s time as its London adviser were paintings by Poussin, Rembrandt and Gainsborough, as well as the collection of Albrecht Durer prints amassed by Sir Thomas Barlow of Manchester.

McDonnell was one of the two Australians who served with the Allied “Monuments Men” in Europe from 1943 to 1947. The other was Thomas James Dunbabin (1911–55) a classical scholar and archaeologist who served with SOE on Crete (alongside Patrick Leigh Fermor) from 1942 to 1945, after which he worked in Athens as the Director of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Allied Forces in Greece. Later, he returned to Oxford University, becoming Reader in Classical Archaeology and All Souls Bursar in 1950. His best-known published work is The Western Greeks: The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 BC (1948). Dunbabin died of pancreatic cancer at the age of only forty-four on March 31, 1955.

dunbabinDunbabin (right) was born in Tasmania, the son of the celebrated Australian journalist Thomas Dunbabin. He was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. As Derby Scholar in 1933, he travelled extensively in Sicily and southern Italy and by 1936 was already the youthful Director of the British School at Athens.

There was only leader who knew in which language to talk to Erdogan: Vladimir Putin. In November 2015, two Turkish F-16 jets shot down a Russian Su-24. Ankara said that as part of the new rules of engagement, any foreign plane violating Turkish airspace would be shot down. Putin immediately downgraded diplomatic relations, announced scores of punishing economic sanctions but, more importantly, he promised that the price Turkey would have to pay would not be limited to the economy and trade.

Erdogan panicked. He sent envoy after envoy to normalize ties with Russia. Moscow demanded an apology, which in mid-2016 Erdogan offered to Putin. Since then, Erdogan has been behaving like a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by Russia and China.

Erdogan’s balancing act has been successful because his Western counterparts were too naïve in deciphering him and his real political motives. He keeps fighting until the end, so long as he does not perceive or face any imminent major political or economic threat to his rule.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, until a few years ago, could astonish. Now the pattern of his primary political strategy boringly repeats itself.

The pattern started in 2009 with Erdogan’s shocking tirade against then Israeli President Shimon Peres. “When it comes to killing,” Erdogan told Peres at the Davos meeting, “You know very well how to kill.” In the following years, that romantic neighbourhood-bully behaviour against major powers added to his popularity at home — in addition to the anti-Zionist rhetoric and Jew-bashing that boosted his popularity both at home and on the Arab Street.

The target “tyrant” did not have to be non-Muslim. “Dictator Sisi” — his reference to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and the “Tyrant, murderer of Damascus” — his reference to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are still common currency.

There is, perhaps, no better metaphor to describe the failure of the West in terms of a Middle East foreign policy than the tragedy that is Aleppo, its consequence for the people of Syria, and the refuge crisis it unleashed on Jordan, Turkey and Europe. It opened the door for Russia, emboldened Iran and further divided and already divided Middle East between Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia and Shiites by Iran.

The bombing ceased in mid-December, but atrocities continued as Bashar al-Assad’s forces swept through former rebel strongholds in the eastern part of Aleppo. The battle for the city began a month before President Obama proclaimed on August 20, 2012: “…that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” Thirteen hundred tons of chemicals were subsequently removed, but not before Syrian helicopters launched at least two attacks using Chlorine gas, a chemical first used as a weapon by the German army in the First World War during the Second Battle of Ypres. We allowed that “red line” to become a sea of blood.

Syria’s civil war masked the arrival of ISIS. Distinguishing between rebels who wanted out from the oppression of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial control and ISIS fighters whose aim is a despotic caliphate is difficult. That confusion aids ISIS. The year 2011 gave rise to the “Arab Spring.” Democratic-leaning forces (or, rather, different totalitarian forces) toppled the heads of Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt that spring. In March of that year, peaceful protests began in Syria. President al-Assad responded by imprisoning thousands and killing hundreds of demonstrators. Nevertheless, by July military defectors had formed the Free Syrian Army, whose aim was to overthrow the Syrian government. Civil war had come to Syria.

Aleppo is an ancient city, located in northwest Syria near the Turkish border. Before the First World War, it was the capital of Aleppo Province, which then bordered the Mediterranean. Prior to the current civil war, it was Syria’s largest city, with 2.3 million people (more than 10% of Syria’s pre-war population), and it was the country’s commercial hub. It is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, dating back thousands of years. Excavations at Tell as-Sawda show the area was occupied 3000 years before the birth of Christ. The city was a strategic trading center between Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Mediterranean, which lies 75 miles to the west. The Province was the western terminus of the Silk Road, which passed through central Asia and Mesopotamia, on its way to the Mediterranean. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, trade was diverted to the sea and Aleppo began a long decline in terms of its commercial significance.