[CitizensTruth] ARTICLE-So Ossetia-Tale of US imperialism

[Walterb306 at cs.com]

All,

Info is there, just being generally ignored by corporatist media.

Hall of mirrors.

Please share widely.

Beverley



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/14/russia.georgia

GUARDIAN.CO.UK

This is a tale of US expansion not Russian aggression
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 com


Seumas Milne 
The Guardian, 
Thursday August 14 200


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 borde


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 Russi


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

   
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