[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression

[Bill Totten]

War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive
as local conflicts. It's likely to be a taste of things to come

by Seumas Milne

The Guardian (August 14 2008)


The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered
an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians
and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian
imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick
Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared
that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered". George Bush denounced
Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and
threatening "a democratic government". Such an action, he insisted, "is
unacceptable in the 21st century".

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in
2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it -
the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds
of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a
ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon's
infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation
for the capture or killing of five soldiers?

You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression
that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an
all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order" - in
other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian
bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to
the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims
as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred
civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with
Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: "I saw a
Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and
children", one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters
on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for
Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy". Well it's certainly small
and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and
his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent
prettified as a "Rose revolution". Saakashvili was then initially
rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what
the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly
authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent
and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean
"pro-western" in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia - as well as Abkhazia, the
other contested region of Georgia - is the inevitable consequence of the
breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities
who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary
that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when
they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any
circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a
pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to
bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline
through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy
supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo
- whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia - and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet
collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully
fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US
and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence
the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the
weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are
particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate
John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been
paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush
administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global
hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a
resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence
secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as
Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.

Over the past decade, Nato's relentless eastward expansion has brought
the western military alliance hard up against Russia's borders and deep
into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across
eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one
anti-Russian client government after another through a series of
colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to
site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted
at Russia.

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression,
but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by
a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used the
South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should hardly
come as a surprise. What is harder to work out is why Saakashvili
launched last week's attack and whether he was given any encouragement
by his friends in Washington.

If so, it has spectacularly backfired, at savage human cost. And despite
Bush's attempts to talk tough yesterday, the war has also exposed the
limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia proper's
independence is respected - best protected by opting for neutrality -
that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has
squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some
counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of adjustment also
brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of Nato, this week's
conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation. That would be even
more obvious in the case of Ukraine - which yesterday gave a warning of
the potential for future confrontation when its pro-western president
threatened to restrict the movement of Russian ships in and out of their
Crimean base in Sevastopol. As great power conflict returns, South
Ossetia is likely to be only a taste of things to come.

_____

s.milne at guardian.co.uk

This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday August 14 2008 on page
35 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:09 on
August 14 2008.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/russia.georgia?commentpage=1


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