Cold War returns via Georgia
August 11, 2008
For some time the US has been priming Georgia for a provocative confrontation with Russia. Israeli and US military ‘advisers’ have been training and equipping the Georgian military. The US has been trying to bring it into NATO. Its military expenditures have shot through the roof. It is also the route for the long-in-planning Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. All in all, a useful foothold for the US in the Russian sphere of influence. And then strikes disaster.
Through a miscalculation worthy of Saddam Hussein, Georgia sends troops into the breakaway South Ossetia to reclaim territory. The Russians, who have been waiting for an excuse to dampen Georgian ambitions, send the still formidable remains of the old red army marching in with characteristic brutality. Georgians beat a hasty retreat, and now have Russian tanks advancing on their own territory. Now, Col (ret.) Sam Gardiner reports, tactical nukes have been thrown into the equation. All in all, a situation more explosive than the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gardiner argues.
Besides Gardiner’s report, here are a couple of useful commentaries to bring you up to speed. First is Laura Rozen’s interview with former CIA station chief Milt Bearden:
In Escalating Russian-Georgian Conflict, the Cold War is Back
As Russia stepped up attacks against Georgian moves to reassert control over the breakaway pro-Russian province of South Ossetia, and many civilians were reported killed and thousands displaced, I asked former deputy director of the CIA’s Soviet and East Europe division Milt Bearden why Russia and Georgia had chosen to escalate their long simmering dispute over South Ossetia now.
“As far as Russia goes, it’s easy: They’re baaack!” Bearden said. “And the Russians are doing what comes naturally to them in their new mood. They know the Europeans don’t want a face-off with Russia/Gazprom. They know the U.S. is so preoccupied with its own self inflicted disasters that it can do nothing but wring it hands. So why not now? It also would seem to stop NATO enlargement in its tracks. Just imagine Georgia inside NATO, and protected under Article 5!!”
The Pakistan Conundrum
January 16, 2008
Scott Ritter on Pakistan.
The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhuto has prompted much instant analysis and ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ by observers of that volatile region. Early assessment’s agree that public sentiment in Pakistan has turned decisively against both President Pervez Musharraf and the Islamic Parties who oppose him (and from the ranks of which the alleged assassins were recruited). President Musharraf himself has given weight to such assessments by reaffirming Pakistani sovereignty (he would treat any unilateral American military incursion into the Northwest Frontier as an invasion which he would oppose by force) and by projecting his own personal political vulnerability (he expects opposition parties to make gains in the coming elections, and if the newly empowered majority seeks to impeach him, he will resign).President Musharraf’s pro-American posturing and the material support Pakistan has provided in the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ have been decidedly unpopular among the majority of the Pakistani population. Islamabad has always tried to tread lightly when it came to an American military presence on Pakistani soil. The quick ‘victory’ of the U.S.-led Northern Alliance over the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan allowed inconvenient American military bases in Pakistan to be transferred to the newly conquered territory inside Afghanistan. However, continued resistance in Afghanistan from the Taliban and al-Qaida, who depend on support networks throughout the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, have prompted the United States to pressure Pakistan’s government to crack down, and even in some cases to allow direct action on Pakistani soil, either in the form of the CIA or a military intervention.
A Vacancy in the Imperial Kennel
May 12, 2007
Blair’s imminent exit has brought about some predictable responses. While the majority are understandably relieved that his reign based on terror and war is coming to an end, others like Brian Brivati of Engage (a Zionist propaganda organization), a contributor to the pro-War online journal Democratiya (part of the same Ziocon Engage-Euston Manifesto network), assure us “we’ll miss him”. The sage pulls his head temporarily out of his posterior to add,
We will and we should miss him because of what he came to represent in his articulation of our democratic values in the global war on terrorism. I think we will miss his support for humanitarian interventions and, in partnership with Brown, his lead on issues like debt relief and development spending based on conditionality.
The most apt riposte to these hallucinations of a man whose life’s work is devoted to writing hagiographies of forgettable Labour politicians comes from a Guardian reader:
Looking to write yet another ‘biography of a Labour hero’, eh? What are you going to call this one, ‘Saint Tony, and how I varnished a turd?’ Just think of all the potential customers in Iraq who will not be able to buy it, not now they have been ‘humanitarianly intervened’.
The state’s propaganda organ, BBC, which he had long since intimidated into reflexive obeisance, still manages to feign nostalgia; failing to find anything worth praising about the execrable poodle, it seeks refuge in sentimentalities, and even manages to declare his speech at the last Labour conference “an emotional occasion”. Here is what the poodle actually said on the emotional occasion:
And of course, the new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit.
This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.
This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it.
It’s not the consequence of foreign policy.
It’s an attack on our way of life.
It’s global.
It has an ideology.
It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.
It has been decades growing.
Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey.
Over 30 nations in the world.
It preys on every conflict.
It exploits every grievance.
And its victims are mainly Muslim.
This is not our war against Islam.
This is a war fought by extremists who pervert the true faith of Islam. And all of us, Western and Arab, Christian or Muslim, who put the value of tolerance, respect and peaceful co-existence above those of sectarian hatred, should join together to defeat them. It is not British soldiers who are sending car bombs into Baghdad or Kabul to slaughter the innocent.
They are there along with troops of 30 other nations with, in each case, a full UN mandate at the specific request of the first ever democratically elected Governments of those countries in order to protect them against the very ideology also seeking the deaths of British people in planes across the Atlantic.”
Needless to say – as the good people at Media Lens point out – every word of this is false. For the BBC, however, there is no reason to doubt the occasion was ‘emotional’ and ‘passionate’ since – Blair said so!
Unconstrained by the occupational hazards of seeking career within the state’s primary propaganda organ, Tariq Ali is then able to tell the truth that one could never trust the BBC to tell.
The departure, too, was spun in classic New Labour, Dear Leader fashion. A carefully selected audience, a self-serving speech, the quivering lip and soon the dramaturgy was over. He had arrived at No 10 with a carefully orchestrated display of union flags. Patriotic fervour was also on show yesterday, with references to “this blessed country … the greatest country in the world” – no mention of the McDonald’s, Starbucks, Benetton that adorn every high street – nor of how Britain under his watch came to be seen in the rest of the world: a favourite attack dog in the imperial kennel.
Tony Blair’s principal success was in winning three general elections in a row. A second-rate actor, he turned out to be a crafty and avaricious politician. Bereft of ideas, he eagerly grasped and tried to improve on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. But though in many ways Blair’s programme has been a euphemistic, if bloodier, version of Thatcher’s, the style of their departures is very different. Thatcher’s overthrow by her fellow Conservatives was a matter of high drama. Blair makes his unwilling exit against a backdrop of car bombs and carnage in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands left dead or maimed from his policies, and London a prime target for terrorist attack. Thatcher’s supporters described themselves afterwards as horror-struck by what they had done. Even some of Blair’s greatest sycophants in the media confess to a sense of relief as he finally quits.
Blair was always loyal to the occupants of the White House. In Europe he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merkel to Schröder, was seriously impressed by Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his support for Sarkozy. He understood that privatisation and deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as wars abroad.
If this judgment seems unduly harsh, let me quote Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on August 2 2006: “A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud’s. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the CIA’s box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent … Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair’s total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?”
This, too, is mild compared to what is privately said in the Foreign Office and MoD. Senior diplomats have told me it would not upset them too much if Blair were tried as a war criminal. But while neither Blair nor any of those who launched a war of aggression and occupation in Iraq have been held to account, a civil servant and MP’s researcher were yesterday shamefully jailed for exposing some of the dealings between Bush and Blair that lay behind the war.
What this reveals is anger and impotence. There is no mechanism to get rid of a prime minister unless their party loses confidence. The Conservative leadership decided Thatcher had to go because of her negative attitude to Europe. Labour tends to be more sentimental towards its leaders, and in this case they owed so much to Blair that nobody wanted to be cast in the role of Brutus. In the end he decided to go himself. The disaster in Iraq had made him hated and support began to ebb. One reason for the slowness was that the country is without a serious opposition. In parliament, the Conservatives simply followed Blair. The Lib Dems were ineffective. Blair had summed up Britain’s attitude to Europe at Nice in 2000: “It is possible, in our judgment, to fight Britain’s corner, get the best out of Europe for Britain, and exercise real authority and influence in Europe. That is as it should be. Britain is a world power.”
This grotesque fantasy that “Britain is a world power” is meant to justify that it will always be EU-UK. The real union is with Washington. France and Germany are seen as rivals for Washington’s affections, not potential allies in an independent EU. The French decision to reintegrate themselves into Nato and pose as the most vigorous US ally was a structural shift which weakened Europe. Britain responded by encouraging a fragmented political order in Europe through expansion, and insisted on a permanent US presence there.
Blair’s half-anointed successor, Gordon Brown, is more intelligent but politically no different. It is a grim prospect: an alternative politics – anti-war, anti-Trident, pro public services – is confined to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Its absence nationally fuels the anger felt by substantial sections of the population, reflected in voting against those in power, or not voting at all.
Yeltsin: A Gasbag Departed
April 24, 2007
The unrestrained praise garnered by Russia’s murderous former President from his present day American and British counterparts is in itself enough to make one skeptical. It would be some time before the true extent of the horrors wrought on the Russian people in general, and the Chechens in particular, would be recognized, but even with the limited information available today the picture that emerges isn’t particularly pretty.
Democracy Now reports:
But critics blame Yeltsin for plunging his country into year’s of economic and political turmoil after he dissolved the Soviet Union. He also presided over the disastrous military campaign to crush Chechnya’s drive for independence. The Washington Post puts it like this: “Yeltsin was no towering democrat. In launching a war against the breakaway southern region of Chechnya in 1994, he was responsible for the violent deaths of more Russian citizens than any Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin. As president, he tolerated, even authorized, the excesses of a system in some ways as corrupt and morally adrift as the one it replaced,” the Washington Post said…
Katrina vanden Heuvel now joins us, publisher of The Nation magazine and expert on US-Russia relations, joining us in the firehouse studio here in New York. Welcome to Democracy now!
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I’d like to talk to you about a number of issues, but let us start with Boris Yeltsin. Can you assess his career?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Boris Yeltsin was a man who squandered, in my view, the democratic possibilities he was given. In June 1991, he was elected president in the freest election in Soviet Russia…But he squandered the democratic possibilities, I believe, that Mikhail Gorbachev opened for Russia. He did so in three ways: he presided over the greatest fire sale in twentieth century history, in my view, strip-mining the country; he launched the war against Chechnya, killing hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians and Chechens; and he presided over a corrosive poverty that to this day afflicts Russia.
And the other thing that I think we need to remember is that he abolished the Soviet Union. He abolished it in a forest with three men. And you can argue about whether the Soviet Union, we are better off today without the Soviet Union, but in that undemocratic unraveling of a country, we see today some of the legacy of that undemocratic moment.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “in a forest with three men”?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Three men. With two other leaders of the former Soviet republics, of Ukraine and Belarus. In the Belovezh Forest, there was an unraveling of the Soviet Union. They signed a document. There was no referendum, as Gorbachev had tried to put through a year before. So I think all of those elements, particularly — Amy, two years later, after Boris Yeltsin had stood before the parliament and said, “I am a man of a parliament,” he launched with cannons and tanks, as you may recall, a destruction of the very parliament that had elected him.
In this country — let’s not forget, it’s very interesting to read the media today — most of the media in those Yeltsin years were boosters and cheerleaders of Yeltsin because, as so many Americans, particularly in, I think, our media, they wanted to see in Russia what they wanted to see, which was this transition to democracy and free markets. But it was far more complicated than that. And you see the kind of mea culpas in these editorials you just read. That line in the Washington Post is very strong, in terms of what Yeltsin did in Chechnya, comparing him to Joseph Stalin. But in those years, those Yeltsin years, it was Yeltsin as the guarantor of democracy.
But as one Russian journalist once quipped to me, Yeltsin in Russia today is viewed more as the guarantor of oligarchy than the guarantor of democracy. And that, I think, is how he is viewed by the majority of Russians, who associate him with the breakup of a country — they didn’t love the Soviet system — but the breakup of a country and an empire which they associated with, and also throwing the country into the greatest peacetime depression any nation has suffered and creating this small band of oligarchs with such enormous wealth, because they were given, in exchange for electing Yeltsin in 1996, the assets of this country — the great oil, gas and raw minerals of a country — in exchange for electing Yeltsin, who in 1996 understood that he might not have been elected without their help. And that election remains contested in Russian journalism today.
AMY GOODMAN: The response of people in Russia to his death?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, I was there about three weeks ago, but I can tell you that if nothing has changed since then, I think, for many Russians, the memory of that Yeltsin era is not a positive one. Amy, you have to understand that Yeltsin’s death, in my view, reminds us that the de-democratization of Russia didn’t begin with Putin, and that Putin is the inevitable consequence of Yeltsin and Yeltsinism. So think about how Russians relate to Yeltsin: if you look at what Putin represents, it’s the antithesis. It’s a man who has come back to take back those assets and to state control. It’s a man who has decided to take back the media, though it is, I think, inaccurate to argue that under Yeltsin the media was so free. What happened under Yeltsin is to some extent what we’ve seen in this country, where the media was given out to the oligarchical interests into private hands and was often manipulated for political purposes by the government.
So I think Russians associate him with this great pain and poverty and chaos, and they saw in Putin, a man — let’s not forget — who was essentially appointed by Yeltsin — the elections were rigged, by Putin, who — his first act was in a kind of Ford-Nixon move to give Yeltsin and his family immunity and from prosecution. They see in Putin a man who is restoring the greatness of the Russian state, whether we like it or not, and who is giving them some stability, a reprieve from the chaos they associate with the Yeltsin years.
Finally, the sad part of it is that Yeltsin and his band of merry reformers, those so touted by Larry Summers and Strobe Talbott and others in the Clinton administration, they gave democracy a bad name in Russia, because too many Russians today associate democracy with chaos, corruption and poverty.
