I promised myself to put commenting on the Litvinenko Affair to bed, but a friend alerted me to this interesting comment by Neil Clark. His words sum up my position on much of the rhetoric and baseless accusations against the Kremlin in regard to Litvinenko’s death.
Clark writes,
From a socialist perspective there are certainly plenty of grounds for criticising the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. He’s introduced a flat-rate income tax, which greatly benefits the wealthy, and plans the partial marketisation of Russia’s education and health systems. And while some of Russia’s notorious oligarchs, who made their fortunes from fleecing public funds in the 1990s under Yeltsin have been bought to justice, others remain free to flaunt their ill-gotten gains, in a country where the gap between rich and poor is chasmic.
Even so, those on the left who have been enthusiastically joining in the current wave of Putin-bashing sweeping the western media, ought to consider whose cause they are serving. For it is beyond doubt that the driving force behind the campaign to portray the Russian President as a sinister totalitarian despot, have been Washington’s neo-conservatives.
Even before the recent unexplained deaths of journalist Anna Politskaya and former secret service man Alexander Litvinenko, hawks in the U.S. were doing all they could to discredit the Russian government. In 2003, Bruce P.Jackson, Director of the ‘Project for a New American Century’ and a key figure in several other neo-con pressure groups, talked of the way Putin’s re-nationalisation of energy companies threatened the West’s ‘democratic objectives- and claimed Putin had established a ‘de facto Cold War administration’. Jackson’s prognosis was simple: a new ‘soft-war’ against the Kremlin, a call echoed by many other leading neo-conservatives. The neo- cons are gunning for Putin not because of concern over alleged anti-democratic practices, but because the current Russian regime stands in the way of their plans for global hegemony. Their imperialistic strategy was recorded in the infamous ‘Wolfowitz memorandum’ a secret Pentagon document, leaked to the New York Times in 1992, which targeted Russia as the biggest future threat to US geo-strategic ambitions. The memorandum, authored by the then under-secretary for defence Paul Wolfowitz, considered by many to be the architect of the Iraq war, projected a U.S.-Russian confrontation over NATO expansion.
