These days it’s tempting to introduce practically every story about the Trump regime with "If Obama had done this ... " or "If you thought the adults were going to save you …" or "If you thought Republicans could feel shame ..."
In the not-so-distant past, if a high U.S. official, say the secretary of state, played a useful idiot and pushed a Russian operation to spread disinformation meant to exculpate the Kremlin from a previous disinformation project and to damage America’s elections and thus our security, we could have expected to have heard some loud callouts from Republicans. Even calls for impeachment or imprisonment. After all, post-World War II Republicans, many of whom were isolationists before 1941, were by 1946—with the Axis crushed—claiming that Democrats were Moscow’s marionettes and weak on defense. This went on for decades, being such effective propaganda that even all Democratic presidents except for Jimmy Carter bought into this nonsense by appointing a Republican as secretary of defense for at least part of their time in office. As if the Cold War liberals were too soft.
Even with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. three decades ago, this BS continued, in great part because it was tremendously useful as a vote-getter among some constituencies. Which, even for a party so full of pretense and hypocrisy as the GOP, makes what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is doing all the more astounding. Here is Aaron Blake:
Pompeo implied Tuesday that there is legitimacy to President Trump’s conspiracy theory about alleged Ukraine interference in the 2016 election — despite the intelligence community, in which he previously served as a leader, having debunked it. [...]
The response echoed what Pompeo said last month when asked a similar question. “Inquiries with respect to that are completely important,” he said. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other.”
Pompeo took the secretary’s post after serving as CIA director for 15 months.
The claim that it wasn’t Russia that interfered in the 2016 election but rather Ukraine has a proven origin: the Kremlin. That makes Pompeo a willing participant in an operation that can be categorized under a term the Russians invented: dezinformatsiya (дезинформация). Pompeo’s access to intelligence material at the CIA was probably equal to anybody’s but the president’s. So he knows. He is fully aware of what the entire intelligence community knows, including the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. Russia expert Fiona Hill also knows, and stated to the House Intelligence Committee in her Durham accent six days ago:
Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct campaign against our country and that perhaps somehow for some reason Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan congressional reports. It is beyond dispute. Even if some of the underlying details must remain classified. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is an adversary and Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016. These fictions are harmful even if for purely domestic political purposes.
These fictions are harmful.
But that makes no never-mind to Pompeo. No other nation on the planet except Russia says Russia didn’t interfere and Ukraine did. Russia cooked up this scheme, and spread it in old and new ways. In the past, however, it hadn’t been able to count on America’s chief diplomat to give a Kremlin black op a boost. Garry Kasparov notes succinctly that the purpose of disinformation is to “annihilate truth.” That is the project that Pompeo has joined.
Although the hammer and sickle have long since been ground to dust by Russian oligarchs and one-time party apparatchiks, and the last thing we need are American politicians revving up a renewed Cold War with reckless chest-thumping, we also need to remove leaders who knowingly give credence to Russian black ops.
While the possibility of nuclear war was quite real, the overall Soviet threat was regularly given more credence than it deserved by war hawks. This led to vast sums of money being dumped into the self-replicating war machine, as Dwight Eisenhower warned against six decades ago. But today there is little doubt that the autocrat Vladimir Putin and his cronies, while no longer operating under Leninist orthodoxy but still stuck on habits picked up at the KGB, are eager to make Russia an empire again. Crafting policy designed to keep that from happening without resorting to war ought to be the goal of American diplomacy. What clearly, obviously, should not is having a secretary of state on the Kremlin team.