Russia Has Already Invaded Ukraine: Strobe Talbott

A man with a Russian flag greets armed men in military fatigues blocking access to a Ukrainian border guards base not far from the village of Perevalne near Simferopol on March 3, 2014. About 1,000 armed men surrounded the base of the 36th detached brigade of the Ukrainian Navy's coastal guards since yesterday in a tense standoff in the flashpoint Crimea peninsula. Russian troops and military planes were flowing into Crimea today in violation of accords between the two countries, Ukrainian bord | ALEXANDER NEMENOV via Getty Images


Strobe Talbott, one of America's top Russia experts who translated Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs into English, was Deputy Secretary of State from 1994-2001. He is presently President of the Brookings Institution. He spoke with WorldPost editor Nathan Gardels on Monday, August 18:

WorldPost: How should the West respond if Putin actually invades Ukraine?

Strobe Talbott: They have already invaded Ukraine. I find it maddening and incomprehensible how governments and the media keep talking about the possibility, the danger, the threat of Russia invading.

Russia invaded Ukraine early in the spring. They started with the so-called "little green men" -- Russian soldiers without insignia on their green uniforms -- then proceeded with uniforms with epaulets and the annexation of Crimea. Russia has been the force behind, and on the ground, with the separatists in eastern Ukraine.

It is an invasion that is already well in place. It is detrimental to managing the situation to play along with the transparent falsehood that the Russians are putting out that they have not invaded Ukraine.

WorldPost: Now that the Europeans have imposed stiffer sanctions, is the response of the West sufficient?

Talbott: It is good enough. Obviously it could be tougher, but whether it can be tougher in a way that preserves the solidarity of the Atlantic Alliance and that doesn't blow back domestically in the United States where the public is weary of war, is a challenge.

The fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken the lead and been nearly in lockstep with President Obama is a big plus. The sanctions are having an effect in Russia. As of mid-August, the Russians don't seem to have made up their minds as to what their next move is. I would like to think that the reason they have not escalated further is because of the unpleasant surprise to them that the West has been quite effective in its unified response.

WorldPost: Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski has argued that NATO must go further and "bolster its eastern flank." Would that be more of a deterrent or a provocation to Russia?

Talbott: I'm not sure exactly what he means. But NATO has already been bolstered in several ways, including in Poland. Moreover, there is a deliberately visible effort to put forces from the "original members of NATO" -- those who were members before the end of the Cold War -- in the Baltic states, particularly Estonia. The British and the Germans are supplementing Americans with air support.

One essential requirement has been met: to persuade the Russians that any countries that are full members of NATO now are totally covered by Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which says each member must defend the others with boots on the ground in the event of a threat. That is a deterrent.

WorldPost: What is Putin ultimately after?

Talbott: It is only a slight oversimplification to say that what Putin is after is a rollback of the reforms that were instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev and then picked up and advanced by Boris Yeltsin.

In these back-to-back tenures of the last president of the Soviet Union and the first president of post-Soviet Russia, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, over a period of 20 years, put Russia on a new and promising track -- promising for Russia itself.

The basic components of those reforms were to open up Russian society, democratize and federalize the old Soviet Union so there was accountability and a sense among citizens that they had a say in the composition of the policies of their government. Their reforms aimed to get rid of the "big lie" -- hoodwinking the Russian people and masking what Russia was up to around the world. Substituting "glasnost" -- or transparency -- continued by the "open society" of Yeltsin.

In foreign policy, they abandoned as a losing cause the aggressively competitive zero-sum attitude toward the outside world and instead sought to follow a policy of partnership with the West and the international community.

All that is now in jeopardy and nullified by Putin. That is not just dangerous, as we are seeing in the Ukraine, but also bad for Russia in the long term.

One of the most important decisions that Yeltsin took as the most powerful of the post-Soviet leaders who managed the dissolution of the USSR was to guarantee that the inter-republic borders would become the international borders of the new independent states.

That alone made it possible for the dissolution of the Soviet Union to be, generally speaking, peaceful, non-violent and relatively orderly. It avoided the kind of bloody wars we saw with the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Putin has torn up that decision and is following the course of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader. In taking this course, Putin could very well be precipitating the violent dissolution of the Russian Federation.

WorldPost: Changing borders through the use of force -- and the response to it -- has broader implications for the global order as a whole. However justified the sanctions are against Russia, it is having the effect of pushing Russia together with the Chinese -- who see the American "pivot to Asia" as an effort to contain their rise -- into an anti-Western bloc.

Do you fear that?

Talbott: I see this as very much as a surface phenomenon without deep roots. The proclaimed intentions of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping would seem to indicate this splitting into blocs. But I don't think that is sustainable over the long haul.

First of all, the Russians and the Chinese fixate on what they see as American "hegemonism" as the great danger. That is not the danger.

The danger for both Russia and China is a future in which they isolate themselves.

Russia and China are very different and equally complicated cases. China is deeply integrated into the global economy and is benefitting from that. It does not want to jeopardize those benefits. That is a brake on China.

Russia is not integrated into the global economy, largely because it is overwhelmingly dependent on extraction and export of petroleum products. It does not have a modern manufacturing or service economy.

So, Russia and China do not really fit together.

Secondly, there are conflicting geopolitical and ethnographic realities. Russia has the largest territorial state on the planet, sharing a long border with the most populous state on the planet, China. Russia has a lot of what China wants -- raw materials.

That is a formula for serious competition down the road, and even for conflict.

If you take the long view -- which is not the one Putin is taking -- he ought to be much more concerned about the viability of Russian control over vast areas of eastern part of the country with lots of resources China wants and few people to defend them.

WorldPost: In other words, Putin is looking to the past, not the future.

Talbott: Worse, he is looking to the past for a model for the future. That is unwise in the extreme, for Russians -- and for the rest of us.

View photo

.

In the last week, right-wing blog WND published a column by Larry Klayman arguing that the president was the "Racist in chief" for siding with his "black brothers" against "'whitey.'" Fox News' Todd Starnes wondered why the president offered condolences to Michael Brown's family, but didn't offer his condolences to the cop who shot him. Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage magazine wrote that the president "tends to avoid explicitly racist rhetoric. Instead he empowers those who do."

The essays are the extreme example of what Pew shows is a common trend: 47 percent of white people think race is getting too much attention, as opposed to only 18 percent of blacks and 25 percent of Hispanics. Sixty-one percent of Republicans think race is receiving too much focus, compared to 46 percent of Independents and 21 percent of Democrats. The divide is more extreme now than when Trayvon Martin was killed, but still in both cases there was a divide between whites and blacks.

RELATED: Congress Members Can't Have the Same Obamacare As Everyone Else

With that in mind, it makes sense that white conservatives would see the president's remarks as race baiting. Last year, the president said Trayvon Martin "could have been my son" and explained that:

There are, frankly, very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. ... And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.

Then, too, he sparked negative conservative reactions including one from the aforementioned Todd Starnes:

If, like Starnes, you don't see how race is relevant to what happened in Ferguson, then Obama addressing race seems like an escalation. To people who think the Michael Brown shooting raises important questions about race, it seems normal for the president to acknowledge the racial politics of what's going on. If anything, people wish the president would go further.

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/08/people-who-dont-think-race-matters-in-ferguson-think-obamas-remarks-are-racist/378719/

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Islamic State militant group that has seized large parts of Iraq and drawn the first American air strikes since the end of the occupation in 2011 has warned the United States it will attack Americans "in any place" if the raids hit its militants.

The video, which shows a photograph of an American who was beheaded during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and victims of snipers, featured a statement which said in English "we will drown all of you in blood".

U.S. airstrikes on Kurdish forces in northern Iraq have helped the fighters take back some territory captured by Islamic State militants, who have threatened to march on Baghdad.

The latest advance by the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot, sent tens of thousands of members of the Yazidi ethnic minority and Christians fleeing for their lives and alarmed the Baghdad government and its Western allies.

Unlike al-Qaeda, Islamic State has so far focused on seizing land in Iraq and Syria for its self-proclaimed caliphate, not spectacular attacks on Western targets.

U.S. President Barack Obama said at a news conference on Monday that the Islamic State posed a threat to Iraq and the entire region.

(Writing by Michael Georgy; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Ferguson Unrest Shows Poverty Grows Fastest in Suburbs

(Corrects poverty figure in 11th paragraph of story published Aug. 16.)

A week of violence and protests in a town outside St. Louis is highlighting how poverty is growing most quickly on the outskirts of America's cities, as suburbs have become home to a majority of the nation's poor.

More from Bloomberg.com: Part-Time Workers a Full-Time Headache on Yellen Radar: Economy

In Ferguson, Missouri, a community of 21,000 where the poverty rate doubled since 2000, the dynamic has bred animosity over racial segregation and economic inequality. Protests over the police killing of an unarmed black teenager on Aug. 9 have drawn international attention to the St. Louis suburb's growing underclass.

Such challenges aren't unique to Ferguson, according to a Brookings Institution report July 31 that found the poor population growing twice as fast in U.S. suburbs as in city centers. From Miami to Denver, resurgent downtowns have blossomed even as their recession-weary outskirts struggle with soaring poverty in what amounts to a paradigm shift.

View gallery

Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, right, talks to a group of men outside a market, Friday, …

More from Bloomberg.com: Iceland Tells Airlines Volcano Under Glacier May Erupt

"We've passed this tipping point and there are now more poor people in the suburbs than the cities," said Elizabeth Kneebone, author of the report and a fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program in Washington. "In those communities, we see things like poorer health outcomes, failing schools and higher crime rates."

In predominantly black Ferguson, residents protesting the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown also complain about the lack of jobs and a city government that doesn't reflect the community's diversity. Inhabitants of the city -- which has lost more than 40 percent of its white population since 2000 -- said they've long felt disenfranchised by a mostly white city council and police force.

More from Bloomberg.com: Ferguson Unrest Shows Poverty Grows Fastest in Suburbs

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a 58-year-old Democrat who traveled to Ferguson Aug. 14, told reporters that Brown's death was like "an old wound that had been hit again," exposing underlying challenges. The St. Louis metropolitan area ranked as one of the most segregated in the U.S. in a 2011 study by Brown University.

View gallery

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson releases the name of the the officer accused of fatally shootin …

Ferguson, once a majority white community that's now about two-thirds black, highlights that dynamic. Coinciding with the decline in white population is a rapid rise in poverty since 2000, a period that includes the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009.

While Ferguson's median income in 2000 was on par with that of Missouri that year, it has since fallen behind. The median income of $37,500 trailed the state at $47,300 in 2012, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

"Looking at the neighborhood poverty rates, it's striking how much has changed over a decade," Kneebone said. "In Ferguson in 2000, none of the neighborhoods had hit that 20 percent poverty rate. By the end of the 2000s, almost every census tract met or exceeded that poverty rate. That's a really rapid change in a really short time."

The poverty rate in Ferguson was 22 percent in 2012, the most recent available, up from 10.2 percent in 2000, according to Census data.

Suburban locales from the outskirts of Atlanta to Colorado Springs have seen similar trends. The number of poor people living in impoverished U.S. suburbs has more than doubled since 2000, comparing to a 50 percent rise in cities. More than one-third of the 46 million Americans in poverty now live in suburbs, Kneebone said.

View gallery

Police wait to advance after tear gas was used to disperse a crowd Sunday, Aug. 17, 2014, druing a p …

"The median income is so low in Ferguson that people are really struggling, living from check to check, and they're even behind checks," state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat who represents the district that includes Ferguson, said in a telephone interview.

Rising suburban poverty has been greater in the Midwest, said Lincoln Quillian, professor of sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The housing crisis spurred the upward trend, while urban gentrification displaced poor people to the suburban fringe, he said.

There's "more risk" of unrest like the protests that shook Ferguson because of the suburban poverty increase, said Quillian, chairman of the Institute for Policy Research's program on urban policy and community development at Northwestern.

"In the U.S., poor black communities definitely are more likely to have something like that happen because of images that the police and other people have about poor people and black people, but also because these places on average tend to have higher crime rates," Quillian said in a telephone interview.

Colin Gordon, a professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, said "a chain of policies" fueled segregation in St. Louis that helped concentrate the black population on the north side of the city, where Ferguson is located.

President Obama Addresses Ferguson TensionsPlay Video

"For much of the latter half of the 20th century, it was a pattern of segregation by race, and that's been displaced somewhat by a segregation by income, which is growing starker and starker in cities like St. Louis," Gordon said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's Bloomberg Surveillance withTom Keene and Adam Johnson.

Race has been a central theme this week as protests over Brown's death turned violent. Police officers in riot gear drove black armored vehicles through the city and fired tear gas at protesters. The demonstrations began after Brown was shot dead by police near his grandmother's home in Ferguson.

Police say Brown attacked officer Darren Wilson and reached for his gun before he was shot. Residents said Brown was shot after raising his hands in surrender.

To contact the reporters on this story: Toluse Olorunnipa in Ferguson, Missouri attolorunnipa@bloomberg.net; Elizabeth Campbell in Chicago at ecampbell14@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.netJeffrey Taylor, Pete Young

KABC – Los Angeles
2 South Pasadena High School students arrested for mass shooting plot

SOUTH PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — Two teenage boys were arrested Monday after making specific plans to kill three staffers then gun down as many students as possible at their Southern California high school, police said.

The boys, who did not yet have weapons but were trying to get them, had been under constant surveillance since the school district informed police of their plans last Thursday, South Pasadena police Sgt. Brian Solinsky said.

He would not elaborate on the plans or what form they took, but Solinsky said they were "very specific" and included named targets.

"This is a prime example of school officials recognizing suspicious behavior," Solinsky said in a statement. "It was this information that helped prevent a horrific tragedy."

Police found evidence that the boys were researching rifles, submachine guns, bombs and other explosives, especially propane, police said.

"They were researching weapons and how to fire and assemble them," police Sgt. Robert Bartl told the Pasadena Star-News.

Enough evidence was gathered to serve warrants at the boys' homes Monday, Solinsky said.

One of them resisted, and police had to break into his house to take him into custody as he tried to run, Solinsky said.

The boys were both about to begin their senior year at South Pasadena High School in the community of about 25,000 people eight miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The school's first day of classes is scheduled for Thursday, and police had hoped to make the arrests before then, though they found no evidence of a date for a planned attack, Bartl told the Star-News.

Detectives had been working around the clock and monitoring the boys since the threat first emerged, Solinsky said. Relatives of both boys had been questioned, he said, but would not elaborate further on the investigation or the evidence.

The police chief plans a news conference Tuesday morning to reveal more details.

The arrests came the day after another Los Angeles County boy was arrested on suspicion of posting online threats to shoot students at local schools, though sheriff's officials acknowledged that those threats were intended as pranks.