re: The Official Thread: Russia invades Ukraine

What a Decade-Old Conflict Tells Us About Putin

But one event is missing from these analyses, an episode that combines political and emotional aspects, and helped crystallize Putin’s distrust of the West, his own sense of vulnerability, and his ultimate decision to return as Russia’s president: the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya that resulted in the violent death of the country’s eccentric dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

He described the resolution as a “medieval call for a crusade,” another war in a long line of wars initiated by the West—from Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq—to pursue regime change, sometimes under false pretexts, and ultimately dictate the rules of the global order.

Putin also believed that Medvedev had been naive. In his book All the Kremlin’s Men, Mikhail Zygar, a former editor in chief of the independent Russian TV station Rain, writes that Putin’s entourage whispered in his ear, “Medvedev betrayed Libya, he will betray you as well.”

Zygar writes that “Putin was apoplectic” when Gaddafi was killed. According to several accounts, including current CIA chief William Burns’s book The Back Channel, Putin frequently replayed the gruesome footage of Gaddafi being captured in a drainage pipe, being beaten to death. The capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein did not seem to affect Putin as much. He had flippantly told French President Nicolas Sarkozy that he would hang Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili just as “the Americans had hanged Saddam Hussein.” But the lesson Putin drew from Libya was different: Being a pariah had served Gaddafi best; only when he had opened up to the West had they come after him.

Though Syria has long disappeared from the headlines in the U.S. and around most of the world, Syrians are watching closely what is unfolding miles away, and many are expressing solidarity with Ukrainians as they wonder with trepidation how the outcome will affect them and Russia’s hold on their country.

Some will be rooting for Putin to be deposed by disgruntled oligarchs, but even if this were to be the ultimate outcome, they know the devastation that will first be wrought on Ukraine. More than most, perhaps, they understand how the impunity with which Russia was able to conduct the war in Syria, the first large-scale Russian military intervention outside the borders of the former Soviet Union, emboldened Putin. Unlike the West, he did not see Libya or Syria as faraway places with no strategic interests, but as part of a chessboard, one where every square—from the Middle East to Ukraine—mattered.

theatlantic

The Clowns own the Atlantic, this is the reality, the Russian cleptos noticed how, Gadaffbeatme... todeath was handled.



Yes, he had it coming, but did we really need to gloat like barbarians?
By SUZANNE MOORE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
UPDATED: 03:46 EDT, 24 October 2011