But doesn’t Yushchenko want Ukrainians out of Iraq? Is that in US Govt interests? (and was Powell’s vocal support for Yushchenko a farewell poke?)

“”Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll.”" And to poison his opponent after the car crash didn’t work?

Ah yes, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. After John Laughland stood up for the human rights of an oppressed Belarusian president in the Guardian, I wrote a letter pointing out Amnesty International’s rahter different view of the situation.

More recently, Mr Laughland stood up for Russia’s War on Chechens by attacking neoconservatives supposedly soft on Chechen terrorism. (See also letters in response.)

Yeah. I snickered at that for some reason. What’s galling, though, is the utter condescension masked by Steele’s silly pseudo-contrarian arguments. For him, every country south or east of Vienna is one of “the new vassals” populated by people who can’t think for themselves. Anybody remember this column?

“The crisis over Iraq shows how the US will attempt to manipulate the latest adherents to the EU, the countries of central and south-eastern Europe. Nations that were once the vassals of the Soviet Union are now in danger of becoming vassals of the US.”

Right! Except for the part where they have open borders, a free press and elections and stuff like that…

“In 1989 there were those who thought these newly liberated countries would be bastions of new thinking. But the west was an attractive-looking club and they were anxious to join the winning side in the cold war…. After all, eastern Europe’s elites had spent 40 years accommodating themselves to superior power.”

Translation: Old school lefties like myself were disappointed when we discovered East Europeans actually wanted to join the West all along.

Same confused crap, different year.

As for the Living Marxism crowd - now calling themselves Spiked and the Institute of Ideas, IIRC - they were also the Revolutionary Communist Party who, as someone once remarked to me, were proof that politics is circular - go far enough round to the left and you end up coming out on the right. I can recall RCP candidates at a National Union of Students conference standing on a platform that’s best described as ‘defending the Serbs from Western aggression’ - in 1993.

(see also the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, as covered by Harry’s Place here.)

Yeah, the Living Marxism crowd. Oddly enough, they arrive at the same destination as a certain element of the British far right — google up some of Mark Almond’s stuff, if you must.

But they don’t turn them loose to comment on French or German affairs, as far as I can see. Is it, I don’t know, some sort of sop to some odd corner of the Grauniad’s perceived readership? They have to allow a certain number of these, but they don’t want to ruin their reputation by letting them write about stuff that matters, so they let them bloviate about affairs in Belgrade and Kiev?

Doug M.

He’s also right that OTPOR was funded by USAID. Wrong to think that made them a puppet. OTPOR’s brilliant branding was its own work, and kudos to those Serbian students for it. (The great OTPOR symbol — a graffiti-stencil of a white hand — was the work of a kid who wanted to be a fantasy artist. It was based on the “white hand” symbol of Tolkein’s evil wizard Saruman.)

He’s right to note that OTPOR’s model has been vastly influential. Yet he seems to think this is purely because the US has been pushing it. Georgians and Ukrainians aren’t bright enough to pick up clever ideas on their own? Hm.

In brief, the whole article suffers from the notion that the US is masterminding all these movements. OSCE is an American tool? The NDI and the IRI — the foreign-aid and international policy-teaching arms of the US Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively — are working hand in hand? George Soros is in cahoots with George Bush’s State Department?

The other article is mostly tripe. Yeah, Yushchenko’s no angel. It’s not good vs. evil; it’s so-so vs. really bad. That’s still not a hard distinction to make.

But Steele insists that they’re equivalent:

“Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll.”

(Yes, I had to read it twice too. You can almost smell the indignation. Damn the grammar, they’re trying to steal Ukraine!)

And then there’s this:

“Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by the US, which refuses to abandon its cold war policy of encircling Russia… The EU should have none of this.”

Yeah, I wonder why the other EU countries aren’t seeing the US hand at work. Joschka Fischer, have you sold out? You have, haven’t you?!

“Many Ukrainians certainly want a more democratic system. Putin is not inherently against this, however authoritarian he is in his own country.”

Oh, I’ll just stop.

But, really, it is quite remarkable how the Guardian seems to go completely mad once it gets south or east of about Vienna or so. I’ve commented on this before. They can give thoughtful, nuanced analysis of what’s going on in Brussels or Paris or Berlin… and then they’ll print some piece of crap about Serbia or Romania or Turkey, badly written, poorly reasoned, and filled with factual errors and glaring leaps to pre-assumed conclusions.

It’s weird.

Doug M.

Well, if they haven’t, maybe they should have. . .

But honestly, people, the strong, emotional, country-wide outpouring of support and energy among the Ukrainians is not something that cam simply be “bought” or imported from the US.