Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 16 – The growing
scandal in Washington around Moscow’s efforts to penetrate and influence the
Trump Administration recalls the FSB’s effort to avoid detection in its effort
to hide the ways it was covering up the Russian government’s program to give
its athletes performance enhancing drugs, Tigran Khzmalyan says.
That is because both actions reflect
Vladimir Putin’s penchant for getting involved in high-risk/high-value
operations in the expectation that he will be able to get away with them both
obscuring the issue through propaganda or simply with the passing of time so
that others will say it is time to “move on” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=58A4B735528C7).
But this inclination,
the Moscow commentator says, backfires on Putin and on Russia because the
Kremlin dictator cannot imagine and does not understand that democratic
countries, although apparently so easily open to influence, distraction and
delay, nonetheless have the flexibility and ultimately the ability to respond
forcefully to such attempts.
The Sochi doping scandal, which Putin
thought he could get away with but for which Russia is now paying a high price,
was “a complicated, long-standing, risky and illegal operation” that was
ultimately engulfed by “scandal, shame and failure,” Khzmalyan says. Flynngate
is the same but the consequences will be even more negative.
What the Sochi “urine” case did was
to destroy the reputation of some athletes and Russian sport as an institution,
but what the departure of the US national security advisor as a result of
Moscow’s efforts to influence him will result in is “a political flood” that
will sweep away far more than the collapsing dam in California.
“By an irony of fate,” Khzmalyan
continues, both cases involve “the smell of urine,” the first from samples of
that hidden by the FSB and the second in the so-called “Trump dossier” which as
Putin himself implied involved “the best prostitutes in the world’ in the luxury
hotels of Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
At one level, the
commentator says, both the Sochi doping scandal and the current one are nothing
more than the latest instances of what Viktor Chernomyrdin famously described
as the Russian proclivity for “wanting something better but having it turn out
like always.” But the scale of what is involved now, Khzmalyan says, begs for
closer examination.
First of all, he says, Flynn’s exit
will have “a domino effect,” something many in the US media and political elite
are now openly talking about. But even
if it doesn’t reach Trump, this episode will have “catastrophic” consequences
for Russia itself because for the foreseeable future, “the Russian theme has
become super-toxic in the US.”
That means no end to sanctions or to
a military competition Russia can’t win and is the direct opposite of what
Putin intended under his “special operation code named ‘Trump.’”
This is happening, Khzmalyan says,
because Putin “extrapolates his own image of the world onto others” who
operating according to entirely different rules than he can imagine. “The US is
not an empire, but a republic – and in this is its principled distinction and
fundamental advantage over Putin’s Russia.”
“The current crisis shows the
strength rather than the weakness of the American political system, in which an
ordinary judge suddenly turns out to be not only independent from the executive
in his decisions but also by law higher than the president himself, a situation
which is completely unbelievable in Russia” now, the commentator says.
What is quietly taking place, he
suggests, is that without any violence or revolution, the United States is
moving toward become “a parliamentary republic controlled by the Congress and
not by the president,” something Putin
can’t understand just as Stalin could not understand Churchill’s defeat at the
polls in 1945.
The Kremlin dictator simply doesn’t
understand that “in democratic America, everything is just beginning after
victory in the elections because society there consists of free people and not
of slaves and jailors. The press is independent from the authorities, and power
itself is divided into three parts, none of which can be totally swallowed up
by the other.”
According to Khzmalyan, “that is why
all empires are mortal: they are too dependent on the emperor. And any emperor
is not simply mortal but suddenly can be affected by weaknesses and fears,
passions and mistakes which in his empire no one can prevent or correct.” And
that is why “Russia is weaker than America and continues to weaken.”
“But in this history, there is yet
another side which seems instructive and interesting,” the crude and stupid way
that Russian officials and those close to the Kremlin celebrated in an utterly
tasteless way Trump’s victory last November.
And why take risks that no one in Moscow needed to take?
Why spread about pictures of Flynn
sitting with Putin? Why talk about “the best prostitutes of the word” as Putin
did? The answer, Khzmalyan suggests, is
to be found “not in state policy but in psychology,” the very same thing people
are now talking about in the case of Trump, about a need to show how rough and
tough he is when the reverse is the case.
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