U.S. Credibility Gap on Ukraine Vis-a-Vis Egypt and Seattle WTO

A full scale civil war is unfolding in Ukraine. Live fire is now the norm in Kiev as rebels broke the short-lived truce and recaptured Independence Square. In the country's west rebels have captured an Interior Ministry arsenal in Lviv, as well as police stations and government administration buildings. Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer, who have given up nearly all pretense of neutrality at this point and have become purely a conduit of the U.S. State Department, have the story, "Kiev’s Brief Truce Shatters in Bursts of Gunfire":

Beyond Lviv, antigovernment activists besieged or seized police stations and administrative buildings in the western cities of Uzhgorod, Lutsk and Khmelnitsky and the eastern city of Poltava. 

In Lutsk, protesters attacked the regional police department, which responded with stun grenades and other fire. The building was then set on fire by protesters throwing gasoline bombs.

This is an insurrection, a rebellion. What else could it be called? Yet Obama is threatening the Ukrainian government not to declare a state of emergency: This is from Steven Lee Myers, useful piece "Violence in Ukraine Creates Deepening Clash Between East and West":

President Obama, on a visit to Mexico, interrupted his opening meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto to tell reporters that “the United States condemns in the strongest terms” the violence that has claimed lives in the last two days. He pointedly warned the Ukrainian military on Wednesday to stay out of the political crisis that has already ravaged the streets of Kiev and said the United States would hold the government responsible for further violence. 

The president’s decision to address the Ukrainian situation without being asked reflected the growing concern by the White House that the standoff between the government and demonstrators in the street had spiraled out of control. 

“We have been watching very carefully, and we expect the Ukrainian government to show restraint, to not resort to violence in dealing with peaceful protesters,” Mr. Obama said. “There will be consequences if people step over the line.” 

The substance of that threat became clear on Wednesday evening, when the Obama administration said it had imposed a visa ban on 20 senior Ukrainian officials whom it accused of playing a role in the government’s crackdown on Tuesday. The State Department declined to say which officials were on the list, but a senior State Department official said it included “the full chain of command responsible for ordering the violence last night.”

Such perversity -- "peaceful protesters"!?! -- is mind-boggling. Bear in mind that Obama's Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, when he was Governor of Washington State, mustered the National Guard during the 1999 WTO ministerial in Seattle after one small Starbucks and the facade of Niketown were vandalized and some storefront plate glass was broken. A "No Protest Zone" was even declared. And here is Obama threatening sanctions against the government of Viktor Yanukovych if force is used to respond to the death of its security personnel, not to mention the country's capital being set ablaze or its armories seized.

Where are the sanctions on members of the Sisi military junta? Remember it was security forces under the command of the Egyptian coup government of Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi that slaughtered hundreds of peaceful sit-in protesters in what amounted to a "fish-in-the-barrel" shoot last August. Obama won't even call what happened in Egypt a coup.

Such mendacity cannot go without some form of blowback. And that blowback is already underway. It is an erosion of credibility all Western governments are experiencing, what at earlier time of political tumult was known as "the credibility gap."

There is a pattern to the collapse in Obama's public approval. Conventional wisdom points to the continuing aftereffects of the Great Recession and an economy that produces few new jobs and those that it does produce are for low wages. But I think, equally important, is Obama's steadfast advocacy for the U.S. national security state -- for the unconstitutional prerogatives of NSA spying, for hounding Snowden and Assange, for trumpeting the dawn of a democratic age in the Middle East and then backing an anachronistic military coup in Egypt and facilitating the rise of jihad in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

Now Obama is recreating the Cold War. Amazing. Like his Oval Office predecessor, W., everything Obama touches turns to shit. After five years, this should be obvious to everyone except for the most blinded of partisans.

But the United States should proceed with caution when it comes to throwing down the gauntlet to Russia. Russia is not some tribe of Sunni fundamentalists. Russia is a great state. And while the West too is a bloc of great states, they are states that daily grow farther removed from the populations they govern. Rebellion cannot be far off.

Gray Lady Obscures Cause of Deadly Kiev Clashes

Having suckled at the Gray Lady's teat for many a year, one grows sensitive to her wiles and her ways. Today's frontpage story, "Clashes in Kiev Kill Dozens as Protesters Cling to Square," by Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer is case in point. Usually in describing an event like the deadly clashes roiling Kiev's Independence Square reporters begin at the beginning, when hostilities were actually initiated. But to get that information the reader has to wade through many column inches before finally, near the story's end, arriving at a vague idea that violence began near the Ukrainian Parliament when street toughs attacked security forces after the opposition failed to pass constitutional amendments designed to curtail presidential powers:

Some protesters acknowledged that they had contributed to the violent spiral of events by attacking police officers during street battles early in the day near the Ukrainian Parliament, which the opposition had hoped would approve constitutional amendments curbing President Yanukovych’s powers.

“We have no other way,” said Lena Melniko, a 33-year-old accountant who joined a team of protesters digging up paving stones and passing them on to fighters to throw at the police, “We have been protesting for three months but are stuck in a dead end.”

Instead of opening their story in a way that would allow for readers to piece together the logic of the violence, Higgins and Kramer go out of their way to obscure and distract by beginning their report at the end of the action, like a sophisticated Coen brothers film noir:

KIEV, Ukraine — Protesters in Kiev stoked what they are calling a “ring of fire” separating themselves from the riot police in a desperate final effort on Wednesday to defend a stage on Independence Square that has been a focal point of their protests and keep their three-month-old movement alive. 

Men staggering with exhaustion dismantled the tents and field kitchens from the movement’s earlier and more peaceful phase and hauled their remnants onto the fires. They piled on mattresses, sleeping bags, tent frames, foam pads and whatever else looked flammable, burning their own encampment in a final act of defiance. 

Ukraine’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 25 people, including police officers, protesters and a journalist found dead on a side street near the square, had been killed after hundreds of riot police officers advanced on the antigovernment demonstrators Tuesday and in subsequent fighting on streets in the government district of the Ukrainian capital.

From there on out until almost the end of the piece you can get mostly sports reporting, the ebb and flow of the street battle, though Higgins and Kramer do find space in the middle of their story for the pro forma statements from Western officials warning Ukrainian officials against using force to take control of their burning capital:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. telephoned Mr. Yanukovych to “express grave concern regarding the crisis on the streets” of Kiev and urged him “to pull back government forces and to exercise maximum restraint,” the vice president’s office said in a statement on Tuesday. 

Secretary of State John Kerry urged Mr. Yanukovych to stop the bloodshed. “We call on President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian government to de-escalate the situation immediately, and resume dialogue with the opposition on a peaceful path forward. Ukraine’s deep divisions will not be healed by spilling more innocent blood,” he said in a statement. 

The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, warned the Ukrainian government that it could face sanctions. 

“Whoever is responsible for the decisions which have led to the bloodshed in Kiev and other parts of Ukraine should expect Europe to reconsider its position on imposing sanctions on individuals,” Mr. Steinmeier said in a statement on Tuesday night. The bloodshed erupted only hours after Mr. Steinmeier had received the two main opposition leaders, Vitali Klitschko and Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, in Berlin, where they also met Chancellor Angela Merkel.

This morning there is a story about another lethal terror bombing in southern Beirut by Al Qaeda affiliate Abdullah Azzam Brigades; five dead and dozens wounded. Can we expect a call from Joe Biden warning Lebanese President Michel Suleiman against responding with violence?