Contradictions From the Gray Lady's Foreign Correspondents

At times I feel sympathy for the Gray Lady's foreign correspondents. They are, as I am, factotums. Their job is to produce copy that toes the paper's line, a line designed to mirror that of the USG. This requires reportage filled with contradictions. Take for instance today's Ukraine installment by Andrew Higgins and David Herszenhorn, "U.S. and NATO Warn Russia Against Further Intervention in Ukraine." The story begins with that prodigious liar Secretary of State John Kerry ominously claiming to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the pro-Russian protests and government building occupations in eastern Ukraine are the work of Russian saboteurs. Herszenhorn and Higgins then proceed to make a compelling case, complete with quotes from a Ukrainian Interior Ministry official, for the opposite. The uprising in the East is a bickering, not broadly representative movement led by pensioners whose goals are myriad and contradictory -- independence, accession to the Russian Federation, autonomous status within Ukraine:

Ukrainian security experts said the pro-Russia camp in Donetsk was bitterly divided over its goals and scoffed at its attempt to seize power. “They have no clear idea of what they want,” said Nikolai Yakubovich, an adviser to the Interior Ministry in Kiev. “It is a nonsense, a dangerous nonsense.” He said negotiations had started between protest leaders in Donetsk and the authorities but had been hampered by infighting between rival pro-Russia factions over their aims. 

As part of its efforts to regain control, the government in Kiev flew antiterrorism forces to the Donetsk airport on Tuesday and vowed to prevent eastern Ukraine from going the way of Crimea, where pro-Russia demonstrations paved the way for a formal annexation by Moscow.

If this was a Russian operation like Crimea, as Kerry claims, there would be nothing but precision and efficiency. That is what Crimea showed, prompting a love letter of sorts to the new Russian military from C.J. Chivers, an unlikely source. But the Gray Lady must stick to the script, which is that the pro-Russian protests are not a spontaneous vox populi; rather, they are the work of the evil Putin. This allows the U.S. State Department to call for a brutal crackdown on protesters when they inveighed against any such moves on the Maidan. Nonetheless the reporting shows the strain of the contradiction.

The same can be said for Andrew Higgins' "Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry Is Putin, Not Pogroms," which seems to be written in belated response to the widespread acceptance that neo-Nazis were an essential part of the putsch coalition that brought down Yanukovych in February. Call it damage control. But, once again, if one takes the time to read the story, the headline rings hollow. Higgins, in making the case that Jews have nothing to worry about from Right Sector and Svoboda, actually creates the impression that they should be very worried:

When protests against Mr. Yanukovych started in November, [Rabbi Kaminezki said], many Jews shared the pro-European aspirations of the demonstrators who gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square, though some worried about the role played by far-right groups. One such group, Svoboda, stirred particular unease because of anti-Semitic remarks by its leaders in the past and its lionization of Ukrainian nationalist heroes who, in some cases, helped the Nazis and shared their ethnicity-based concept of nationhood. 

But Rabbi Kaminezki [chief rabbi of Dnipropetrovsk] said fears of a fascist revival had faded, “as there is a difference between what these people say to their own crowd and what they do when they become legitimate political leaders.” Anti-Semitism, he added, “exists in Ukraine, like everywhere,” but it has shown no sign of increasing since Mr. Yanukovych lost power. 

After a series of unsolved anti-Semitic attacks since his ouster, including an assault on a rabbi and his wife in Kiev, the new head of Ukraine’s state security service told Jewish leaders that he would reopen a special unit to fight xenophobia and anti-Semitism that had been shut down under Mr. Yanukovych. 

Even Right Sector, a coalition of ultranationalist and in some cases neo-Nazi organizations, has made an effort to distance itself from anti-Semitism. In late February, its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, pledged during a meeting with Israel’s ambassador in Kiev to fight all forms of racism.

See, it is all good. Dmytro Yarosh is going to lead the struggle for tolerance.

One of the most bow-backed of the Gray Lady's scribes is Anne Barnard; she has had to shoulder untold column inches of manure fertilizing the canard that the war in Syria is result of a bloodthirsty dictator's lust to obliterate skyping pro-democracy activists in skinny jeans, rather than a region-wide war pitting Shiite-aligned states against the West and their Gulf sheikhdom clients. But at this point in the war, with any Syrian opposition swallowed up by jihadis, and the jihadis at war among themselves and regularly defeated on the battlefield by the Syrian Arab Army and its allies in Hezbollah, Barnard, while never missing an opportunity to denigrate or downplay the Assad government, lets it be known that Syria is winning the war. Her story today, "Muslim Shrine Stands as a Crossroads in Syria’s Unrest," is worth reading:

Hezbollah has long said that protecting the shrine [the tomb of Zeinab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, outside Damascus] was a major rationale for sending fighters to Syria, a move that upended regional alliances, deepened Lebanon’s political and sectarian divisions and turned crucial battles in the Syrian government’s favor. 

Hezbollah and Syrian officials long played down the party’s role, saying the Syrian Army led the fight. But with recent victories, their calculus appears to be shifting. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently declared that the Syrian government was safe from collapse and that his group’s only mistake was entering the battle “late.” 

Some in Syria are newly eager to catalog, as a show of strength, the added muscle from abroad, and not just from Hezbollah.

A Syrian who coordinates between government forces and Hezbollah around the shrine said that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards are not simply advising Damascus, but fighting near the northern city of Aleppo. Hezbollah and Iran, he said, have trained more than 100,000 Syrians, in Syria, Lebanon and Tehran, to form the National Defense Forces militias. On Tuesday, Iran delivered 30,000 tons of food supplies to Syria, The Associated Press reported. 

“The game is changed,” the coordinator said, asking not to be identified for his safety. He confirmed much of what Western officials assert about the government’s foreign support, calling it a trump card that Damascus saved for the right moment. 

“It is no longer a secret,” he added. “It is on the table.”

The government could not have advanced on the Lebanese border and east of Damascus without Hezbollah’s expert fighters, he said. But the bulk of Shiite volunteers, he added, are Iraqi Shiites, lightly trained in Iraq and sent to front lines in Damascus suburbs like Qaboun and Jobar because “we need numbers.” 

But now, after new training as the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigades, the Iraqis are “able to do something, not just coming to be killed,” the coordinator said.

This is a huge achievement for Hezbollah, Iraq and Syria. I assume a lot of the turmoil in Ukraine, Turkey and of course Iraq is connected to the bad fortune of the jihadis in Syria.