But Julia Ioffe is Still Wrong, and Look Who’s Re-Tweeting

Lawrence O'Donnell may have gotten the last word on TV, which doesn't count as much anymore, but @juliaioffe has won Twitter — many are rushing to her defense — and of course the link-o-sphere with her TNR rebuttal.

So….last night Julia Ioffe became the Reza Aslan of the Lawrence O'Donnell show. And just as Aslan spluttered that he had four degrees and had every right to write a revisionist version of the "historical Jesus" and easily bested a bumbling Fox anchor, so Ioffe, saying she is a native Russian speaker who spent three years reporting out of Russia could trump an abrasive talk show host.

But as with Aslan, it doesn't ultimately make her right. She's just got an educated bias.

Look, you say SHEH-REH-MEH-T-YE-VO! I say tomato and we agree they didn't call the whole thing off — Putin still gets legitimized in the G20 meeting.

But….here's where Julia really got it all wrong, and for all his blustering, O'Donnell was right.

(Bold is Julia Ioffe's text)

o Vladimir Putin is not omnipotent. He does not control
everything that happens in the Russian Federation, a vast and often
inhospitable landmass that spans 10 time zones.

The Soviet state used to control every piece of text, right down to the instructions on a matchbook cover. Putin has the vertikal which takes care of controlling most of what matters, namely TV and increasingly, the Internet. It doesn't matter if Russia is big, God is in His heaven and the tsar is far away. The tsar ensures that investigators from all over Russia are brought in to prosecute the Bolotnaya people when he can't get the Muscovites to fake the indictments. No significant opposition has emerged as we all know, and the temporary release of Navalny is Kabuki theater of the sort that was permitted when state TV became briefly critical of Putin during mass marches two years ago. Strategic; temporary.

o Similarly, Barack Obama does not have total control over the minutiae of the United States of America.

Why any would would compare the two is beyond me, or imply that Putin "like Obama" can't control everything when thousands of people are arrested and hundreds are disappeared or killed in the North Caucasus every year with virtually no objection from the international community. The typical "subject" of the Russian Federation, even with "compact nationalities" speaking other languages with other cultures than the dominant Russian has far less rights than an American state — for starters.

o Putin does not orchestrate, he reacts. Putin is no chess player. He is a knee-jerk, short-sighted little tyrant. Don't give him credit where credit isn't due.

Nice work calling Putin a mini-me of himself, but you know, this thing is pretty scripted. Assange could migrate to Moscow — like Snowden — because Moscow works very hard, through all kinds of remaining agents of influence and active measures, to control the narrative in the media and in parliamentary debates everywhere. The Snowden Affair and WikiLeaks might be a Mighty Accordian and not a Mighty Wurlitzer, but it is still very well played by Putin personally.

Indeed, arguably everything about RT is an active measure preparing the ground for Snowden — not only the saturation coverage of WikiLeaks in a positive light, with Assange getting his own show, and socialists like Steve Cohen supportive of Putin given the microphone, but the endless celebration of every arrested American hacker, every Anonymous threat and attack, and "progressive" opposition to every piece of US legislation trying to regulate crime on the Internet. It's a huge storm; it's a ceaseless barrage. To pretend that Putin is merely "reacting" in this context is ludicrous.

o Americans, especially Americans who have never been to Russia, overestimate the abilities of both Putin and the Russians. Because, I mean, come on. Tank!

I used to have to explain to people over and over during the Chechen wars that Russia had 90,000 troops there, and was winning.

This is a result of Russia not telling us the guy it was tracking in Dagestan was with people the Kremlin had ordered assassinated who were jihadists. It is not about the FBI somehow "dropping the ball"; it's about the FSB holding the ball close.

o The Russians did not create the Snowden situation; Julian Assange and the U.S. government did.
Assange insinuated himself into the situation and sent Snowden to
Ecuador (the country granting him asylum) through Russia (his great
friend).

Now Julia is taking that "walk down nonsense lane" that Eli Lake described Alexa O'Brien taking when she extolled Bradley Manning as a hero and complained WikiLeaks did no damage.

Assange sent Snowden *to Russia*. HE DID NOT HAVE TO. Ecuador and Venezuela had their diplomats sort of met him at the airport, but so did a bunch of goons. That's how Russia works. This was not an accident. He was not in the lounge, but in a safe house in Yasenovo.

You can't concede that Assange is Russia's "great friend" and pretend that he just improvises and clicks around on Expedia thinking where Snowden could trip-plan. EXPLAIN WHY SNOWDEN DIDN'T GO TO ECUADOR OR VENEZUELA FIRST, JULIA, GO AHEAD, I'LL WAIT.

o The Obama administration trapped Snowden in Russia. The
U.S. unsealed the charges before it had Snowden in custody, revoked his
passport, then downed the plane of the president of a sovereign state
over other sovereign states because it thought Snowden was on board. The
only place, by design, where Snowden could go was back to the U.S.
Where he was charged with espionage, for which the maximum punishent is
death.

Ioffe clings to the idea that America is alone in the world downing a plane of a president over other states, but if America tried to whisk a defector out of the US through Alaska over Siberia, we'd get the difference very fast.

The US gave diplomatic assurances — which is actually a standard procedure — that Snowden would not face the death penalty much less torture. Julia need not be dramatic.

o Russia is a brutal place where whistleblowers are harassed and killed, but Russia, unlike the U.S., has no death penalty. And it is only because the Russians made a stink about it, that Eric Holder was forced to come out and assure
the Russians that Edward Snowden won't be put to death. This happened
over a month after Snowden's arrival in Moscow, and after the charges of
espionage were unsealed.

Actually, the US provides diplomatic assurances even to people it renditions to certain torture. This is standard procedure. Let me know how all those Uzbeks rendered out of Russia back to Tashkent are doing now. Russia doesn't need the death penalty; it has an assassination policy for lawyers, journalists, and others who are too persistent with inconvenient truths.

o If a Russian Edward Snowden ended up in JFK Airport, there is no way in hell we'd turn him over to the Russians. Not in a hundred years, and not ever.

No, Julia, and that's because the nature of the Russian regime is really wildly different than the US administration. Truly, I think you know that, deep down.

o You can't back Putin into a corner and leave him no options. If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that.

Wait a minute. I thought he was this little shrub of a tyrant? Why is it up to us to leave options to Putin when it comes to our national security being compromised? It's not. There are some things Russia didn't try. Instead of posturing with those regime lawyers and coopted human rights groups, it could have summoned the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and they could have worked out the third country where Snowden would be sent. Oh, but that might involve having an actual honest reading of what "serious non-political crimes" means under the refugee conventions, eh? and maybe losing that propaganda attempt?

It's also not clear that every flight plan — or sailing plan! — was exhausted. Obviously, the Russians shipped their nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba in their day without getting stopped by the US in their waters…

o The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010?
Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered
by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink
over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent
transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of
spying for the U.S. Two planes landed on the tarmac in Vienna,
ten people went one way, four people went the other way, the planes
flew off, and that was it. That's how this should have been done if the
U.S. really wanted Snowden back.

Now this is really ridiculous. Huh? The Chapman arrest was one of the most ballyhooed, long-running news stories in the universe and still gets endless attention and laughter. There is no way this can be described as "quiet". If technically, the four sent back were more quiet, the propaganda advantage that Obama got — despite never having been tough on Russia — was enormous.

And there was no way to make the Snowden case quiet, either, not with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jacob Appelbaum running the agitprop machines. In fact, the response from the actual White House and State Department has been terribly muted — officials are always speaking in clipped sentences, saying they are "disapppointed" and that's it. While asking for a plane to be downed may seem like dramatic stuff — again, you just have to imagine this in reverse to get it.

o However, the decision to blow off the Moscow summit was a good one. See yesterday's post.

It's easy to look good praising this half-measure — the other side of it is that Ioffe said there was "no way" that the G20 could be cancelled because of its other participants who "did nothing wrong" — which is nonsense because many of them could be persuaded to cancel on Putin or more the meeting, for the same reasons the US is cancelling the summit.

o I am not a Putin apologist. I think he and his people do bad things, like kill people and fleece the country for its wealth. But neither do I think he's oppressing the Russian masses. He is their most extreme and natural, their most post-Soviet manifestation.

Oh, so it's like La Russophobe, is it? The Russian people aren't ready for democracy?

Then finally, there's this:

They assumed that the U.S. and its government was one sleek,
well-functioning monolith, that Obama was omnipotent, and that everyone
in the world, including other important (and nuclear!) world leaders,
act and must act as Russia demands it should, using Russian foreign
policy calculus, and with only Russian interests in mind.

But…Obama is pretty omnipotent when it comes to Russia. He has gotten his way on Russian policy despite many objections. His own personal stealth-socialist views on Russia, shaped over years in the "community organizing" single-issues movement that tactically concealed DSA politics for decades, overtook the entire agenda with Russia. We got "no first use of nuclear weapons" — appallingly, a staple of 1980s Soviet propaganda even pro-Kremlin peaceniks would chuckle at. We got fake civil society summits and arms talks that only led to them kicking out USAID, calling NGOs "foreign agents" and threatening to bomb our installations in Europe — something they had never done in the worst of the Andropov years, even.

I think there is a significant difference in the calculus here that Ioffe never admits. Countries have their interests, but when the US passes something like the Magnitsky Law, this isn't about dissing Russia for economic or political reasons, it's about standing up for the Kremlin's victims in the hopes that some day, there might be enough deterrence mounted, from within and without, to their persecutors. And I really think, for all her posturing and equivocating (she was in the process of telling everyone to adjust themselves to the reality of Putin in November 2011 when all of a sudden the big marches broke out a few weeks later), Julia really doesn't get this.

Lawrence O'Donnell was an assclown, but that's because he felt he had to shout through the horrid scrim which is Ioffe's actual pro-Kremlin politics. That she will get endless victimology points out of this is indeed unfortunate.

Meanwhile, look who's applauding:

Gleb Pavlovsky
‏@GlebPavlovsky