A nerve agent was used to kill former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were found unconscious in Salisbury, England, on a Sunday afternoon in March; they remain critically ill. More than 25 countries, including the United States and European Union member states, announced their decision to expel Russian diplomatic workers after London stated that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for poisoning Skripal and his daughter. This wave of countries are expelling the Russian diplomats from their soil in a show of solidarity with the UK. But there is a bigger picture here, beyond the current diplomatic tit for tat. All the countries that have expelled diplomats so far are Western countries; there is not a single country in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, or even Latin America involved in this diplomatic purge. According to the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” However, every country has their own truth or rather their myth of truth. We can apply this to the world’s current situation from Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, to Afghanistan and North Korea—basically the battle for the future hegemony in the world or in certain geographical areas of the world. There is much talk about a new cold war, a comparison of present tensions between the West and Russia, but the comparison is faulty. During the cold war, the conflict pitted ideologies and military rivalries of the Soviet Union and the United States against each other, but today war is more about geographical hegemony than ideology. A perfect example is the war in Syria, which basically concerns future hegemony in the Middle East. The West and the United States have neither good leadership, a permanent plan, nor credibility in the Middle East. Because President Putin himself views the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, he has devoted his efforts to restoring the prestige and power of Russia. At first he started with the economy and security frontiers in the face of NATO and the European Union expansion, but now he focuses more on Russian’s role on the stage of global economics
Our world has so many problems and needs leadership to solve them, but America is spending all its energy and time determining if Russia intervened in the Presidential election or not. The CIA has already concluded that Russia meddled covertly to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy. According to the CIA, there is evidence that Russian security agencies hacked the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, as well as the Hillary Clinton campaign and released data to Wikileaks to undermine Hillary’s candidacy. So what? Will America declare war on Russia? Or will they impeach President Trump? Is only Russia intervening in other foreign nations' elections? The US has a history of ousting leaders of countries with methods that include not only financial support to preferred parties and the circulation of propaganda, but also assassinations of and coups against even democratically elected regimes in Italy, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Indeed, the US has a long history of meddling into the political affairs of other nations.
The leftist and main media in America drip hope into their programming, suggesting that Americans can impeach President Trump. The US Constitution states that the President shall be removed from the office by “impeachment for conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” We can see treason and bribery are very straightforward offenses, but there is much debate on what constitutes high crime or misdemeanors because the terms are not defined in either the Constitution or in federal statutes. The Democrats want to impeach President Trump, but the process would have to begin in the House of Representatives, where the Article of Impeachment must pass with a simple majority vote. Then, the removal of the President from office requires a two-thirds majority vote of the Senators. Both moves are unlikely to occur since Republicans control both the House and the Senate.
America’s main media outlets spend every day and night accusing Russia of meddling in elections and trying to undermine free societies as well as democracy itself. The world has more problems the need to be addressed. Meddling in elections is nothing new. In addition, Russia is not the only country interfering in other countries’ elections. Almost all countries, including those in the West and the United States, have a history of influencing polls, supporting military coups, channeling funds, and spreading political propaganda in other nations. The democratic ideal for America and the West is, at home and abroad, freedom to act as long as it conforms at minimum to our national interests and at maximum to our view of democracy. International relations is all about national interests; it is not about charity, so, therefore, whatever serves the national interests of the country, that country will do it to achieve that end. If knowledge is power, then intelligence itself is a form of power. Gathering intelligence about enemies from Napoleon to ISIS has been an immensely complicated and risky endeavor. The development of the art of intelligence, especially code breaking and espionage, grew in sophistication as the Allies struggled against Hitler. Every country has its own intelligence. The strategic level is where the interest and objectives of the nation as a whole get translated into government-wide policy. For example, the record of Davao City’s being one of the safest cities in the Philippines may be attributed to former Mayor, now President, Rody Dutterte and his intelligence gathering evildoers who tried to disrupt the peace of the city.
Now considered the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, Yemen is in a power war over intelligence and economics. The policies of the West, America, and Russia are failing because those strategies do not work in the Middle East. Middle Eastern countries are looking for new partners. Former allies to the United States such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt are actively engaging with Russia across a spectrum of areas including energy investment, sales of arms, and military training bases and are even forcing America to leave the region. The reason the Middle Eastern countries are developing relationships with Russia is because they do not trust the West and the United States anymore because those former allies do not have any serious plans for the Middle East. This time Russia, as the regional overseer, has managed to contain western power and has stopped the United States from removing Bahar Al-Assad from power in Syria. The most common policy of the West or USA toward Russia depends on the hope that Russia will be fully defeated or will become first a democracy and then a friend. But Russia is not a democracy, nor is it open to democratization. The West and the United States have to accept that Moscow is one of the most formidable power players in the world. Russia cannot be defeated nor contained in a multipolar world. Clearly, effective foreign policies remain more or less dependent on carefully and sophisticatedly gathered intelligence, a need of every country for its security and safety.
According to MI5, their mission is to collect intelligence, often secretly, to build up a detailed knowledge of threats to the UK, so they can assess and investigate those threats in order to determine their response and can put in place necessary protective measures. They “gather this information and use it to find out about organisations of interest and their key personalities, infrastructure, intentions, plans, and capabilities.” Whether through covert human intelligence sources, interception of communications, covert surveillance, equipment interference, or bulk communications data, the UK’s national security service aims at keeping the country safe by using intelligence to wage war against terrorism, espionage, cyber attacks, and proliferation of WMDs. Aeschylus rightly noted that in war, truth is the first casualty, but also we know that in war, intelligence can revitalize the truth.
Dr. Aland Mizell is President of the MCI and a regular contributor to Mindanao Times. You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
