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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 4:47 pm Post subject: From Kosovo to Georgia by George Galloway |
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| Quote: | From Kosovo to Georgia
David Miliband should remember the scorn heaped on those of us who protested against Blair's Chicago speech in 1999
Some might call it a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. For others, however, the bitter aftertaste of Tony Blair's saccharine-coated "doctrine of the international community" was all too obvious when he outlined it nearly a decade ago.
The reheated cold warriors who've fulminated over events in the Caucasus this month would do well to go back to that speech at the Chicago Economics Club in 1999.
Nato bombs were raining on Belgrade, eviscerating TV make-up women and destroying civilian infrastructure. Shamelessly, Blair posed as the stoic British prime minister who had voyaged across the Atlantic to remind America of its world historic role at the hour of Europe's need.
"On its 50th birthday Nato must prevail," he said, "Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider."
He went on to locate the Kosovo war in the context of the then fashionable cliches of globalising capitalism and the changing roles of states and international alliances. The war's salience lay in recognising that the advance of the global free market depended on the preparedness of an undefined "international community" to, as he would put it two years later, "reorder this world" by force when necessary.
Thus, according to Blair in his address to Chicago neo-liberals, "The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts".
That meant riding roughshod over the doctrine of the sovereignty of nation states dating from the peace of Westphalia – clearly his urge to modernise outdated notions had burst beyond such trifles as the welfare state and the Labour party.
Those of us who protested were castigated and calumniated against as the real dyed in the wool conservatives who had not understood that the world had moved on. In fact, our concern was that the Kosovo intervention and its justification were taking the world back. The sovereignty of nations was never an inviolable and faultless principle – and none of us on the left had said otherwise. But Blair's humanitarian interventionism, his 21st century civilising mission, was no advance on it.
It was a throwback to the Gladstonian liberal imperialism of the 1880s, which also was born with ballyhoo about Balkan atrocities, at that time Bulgarian. Two consequences flowed at the end of the 19th century.
First, peoples across the globe rapidly came to suffer murder and mayhem far worse and more extensive than any visited by one Balkan nationality upon another. The carnage in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia still evades the North American and European imaginations because, quite simply, the victims were not white and the perpetrators were.
Second, as other states decided that they too had a duty to civilise, the scramble for Africa, China and elsewhere brought the European powers first into diplomatic conflict and skirmish, and then, when conquests in neither the east nor the west had filled their maw, into a cataclysmic clash on their own continent.
It's worth recalling the scorn heaped on those of us who raised these points nine years ago, warning of the vicious circle interventionist wars would unleash, and then turning to events today in the Black Sea's own Balkans.
Perhaps the mandarins of King Charles Street have a manual on how to hold a straight face and keep talking when all around are gasping incredulously. Maybe there's an homage to Kipling along those lines. Or maybe it's just the way our current foreign secretary is eerily adopting the tics and mannerisms of our former prime minister. Either way, David Miliband's performance over Georgia has been a spectacle to behold.
There was the bluster about the territorial integrity of small nations – this from a government that had only months previously proclaimed its support for ripping out Kosovo from what is left of Yugoslavia. The recognition by Washington and London of Kosovo's secession prompted a warning from Moscow, which, thanks to many years of Russian weakness and US triumphalism, was predictably ignored.
There are other nations besides Kosovo that might want to secede elsewhere and with greater claim, said the Kremlin, and if you recognise Kosovo against our wishes, don't be surprised if we end up recognising other secessionists against yours.
The frothing from Miliband and Condoleezza Rice when Russia did just that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of western policy as outlined by Blair. When it comes down to it, for all the talk of universal moral objectives in international affairs, the right to pursue them turns out not to be universal, but to be vested in particular powers, and, it seems, some nations' rights are more inviolable than others.
They call it the international community, but it is not even the community of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, still less the UN General Assembly. It is, as with Kosovo, a community that is coterminous with the biggest military alliance on the planet, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which has strayed very far indeed from the Atlantic.
For more than a decade, successive British and US governments could get away with this sleight of hand. Russia was enfeebled, robbed blind by foreign-domiciled billionaires. China was just a manufactured-in stamp piled high in the pound shop.
Not now. The unipolar future turns out to have been a moment in the past. And that makes the hubris that led from Kosovo through Iraq to today's missile shields and Cold War rhetoric all the more dangerous. One of the "collateral casualties" of the Kosovo war was the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The result of a similar air strike in "rogue" capitals today doesn't bear thinking about. Nor do the consequences that would have flowed had Georgia been a member of Nato with its mutual military obligations.
The Russian action in Georgia has underscored the limits of US power, but Anglo-US arrogance is unabated. For the US – despite the dying days of the Bush administration – there is a logic. It is a global power, still the only true global power. However dangerous the game, it's not difficult to see why the US establishment, and not merely the Bush regime, plays it.
But why should Britain? Maybe it was the gap between western bombast and Russian facts on the ground, but there was something truly ridiculous about Miliband travelling to Ukraine to shake his fist at the east. He preached extending Nato membership to a country where two thirds of the people are not in favour of it and which is already ruptured by east/west tensions and internal conflicts that make Georgia look like Switzerland.
The Labour government in London again managed to outflank to the right Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and even Silvio Berlusconi – but for what? To share this time not in foolish, short-lived triumph in the Middle East, but in Bush's humiliation.
The world is at that most dangerous of places: where one way of ordering states and systems is giving way to another. That usually doesn't happen without some major rupture and frequently with attendant violence. The worst place to be in such circumstances is as some ersatz power, an imperial hangover not of yesterday, but of the last century, busy threatening rising or renewing powers with the armies belonging to an ailing one.
Georgia's hapless president, the New York lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, has just learnt what it means to plunge into dangerous waters on the ebb tide. It's a lesson that Britain's political elite would do well to heed. |
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/01/kosovo.georgia?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews where you can also check out the comments on the article ... |
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faceless
admin
Joined: 25 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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cheers Luke - a good read and probably the best article I've seen by Galloway in a long time.
I started reading the comments on the Guardian site, but many of those people (on both sides) just seem determined to mire the entire argument in extrapolation and pissing competitions. I'm all for a set-to, but when you spend that much time attacking such small details it really becomes a meaningless exercise. |
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Brown Sauce
Joined: 07 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:25 pm Post subject: |
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don't know if it fits here, but ...
Wag the Dog
by Eric Walberg / September 2nd, 2008
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a gritty, straight-talking 30-minute interview with CNN this week in Russian. It was not translated or reported on widely in the US media, which is a shame. He charged that US military personnel were in South Ossetia during the attack, and lectured about such topics as Ossetia’s long membership in the Russian empire (since 1801) and Ossetians’ age-old resentment of Georgian chauvinism, especially following the 1917 Russian revolution and the 1990 declaration of Georgian independence. A South Ossetian legislator has already mooted the possibility that it will eventually become part of the Russian Federation.
When asked by CNN if he would stop threatening neighbors now that the Ossetian crisis was over, he angrily dismissed the question as preposterous, saying it was up to the US and its new Eastern European clients to stop threatening Russia. It is the Polish and Czech missile bases and Ukrainian and Georgian pretenses to join in the nuclear-tipped encirclement of Russia that are the destabilizing developments forcing Russia to batten the hatches. The Russians see the bases as a precursor to a much larger system that would undermine the already seriously eroded Russian nuclear deterrent. “For the first time in history — and I want to emphasize this — there will be elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security. Of course, we have to respond to that,” said Putin at a press conference last year, which was also not reported in the mainstream US media.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined Putin’s words Monday, referring to “the reality of the post-America world” and warning that, “in the absence of a reasonable multilateral dialogue we will be forced to react unilaterally.” Europe’s inability to produce a new collective security system, “open for everyone and taking into account everyone’s interests,” was to blame for the Georgia crisis. He added: “There is a feeling that NATO again needs frontline states to justify its existence.”
As if to make his point, the Russian military carried out a successful test of a Topol RS-12M nuclear capable stealth rocket from the Plesetsk space centre. Analysts are already speculating that Putin (OK, Medvedev) may well “take out” the Polish missile site. “He has no other option. The proposed system integrates the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border. It’s no different than Khrushchev’s plan to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s,” writes Mike Whitney at Online Journal. At the very least he “will be forced to raise the stakes and send warplanes over the construction site. That is the logical first-step that any responsible leader would take before removing the site altogether.” So if Cold War II keeps accelerating and something like this happens later this year, what should we make of it? Is this Russia threatening and even invading its neighbor, or is it a justifiable warning to the US to back down from its attempts to instigate WWIII?
Is it possible that all this furfural is really just an early “October Surprise”, in the US electoral tradition that both Reagan and Bush II made such masterful use of? Recall that Ronald Reagan’s advisors orchestrated a delay in returning US hostages from Iran in 1980, tipping the balance in his favor in the elections that year. President George W Bush got a letter purportedly from Osama bin Laden weeks before the elections in 2004, conveniently reminding Americans that he is their defender against terrorists. This was the inspiration for the 1998 movie “Wag the Dog”, where a few weeks before the elections, a presidential advisor hires a Hollywood producer to fabricate and market a war in an ex-socialist bloc country (Albania) and ensure the incumbent’s re-election.
In the current “reality show” version, discretion is thrown completely to the wind, with a certain Randy Scheunemann playing both doctor and advisor to Republican “incumbent” Senator John McCain. Scheunemann’s two-man Orion Strategies lobby firm has been advising Latvia since 2001 and more recently, Georgia. Georgia hopes to following Latvia’s success in joining NATO and — why not? — the European Union. It has already paid Orion Strategies $300,000 to this end.
Putin firmly declared in his CNN interview that the attack on Russian peacekeepers by Georgia was given the green light by US officials as part of an US election campaign ploy. He was most likely referring to McCain, a personal friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and Scheunemann, McCain’s chief foreign policy advisor. Or possibly Joseph Wood, Cheney’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, who was in Georgia shortly before the war began. Or both.
But Putin is caught between a rock and a hard place in this US election year. Even if he’s right about Scheunemann, McCain’s advisor has his counterpart in Senator Barack Obama’s chief foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who while being no fan of Bush, is rubbing his hands in glee over the Russian move to protect Ossetia . So whoever wins in November will undoubtedly push CWII into high gear, come what may.
Will this “Wag the Dog” Part II bring in the votes for McCain? That is far from certain considering his admiration for the now-despised Bush, his endless gaffes and his patent lack of intelligence. However, the key to US elections — the Israeli lobby — is not happy with Brzezinski, and could scuttle Obama’s candidacy, despite Obama’s choice of self-proclaimed Zionist Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Recall that Brzezinski was foreign policy advisor to ex-president Jimmy Carter, whose Camp David accords forced Israel to give the Sinai back to Egypt.
Enter Scheunemann. He has no such skeletons in his closet. And he is a big fan of the current Middle East makeover designed to ensure Israeli supremacy. As director of Chalabi’s Committee for the Liberation of Iraq he pushed for the invasion in 2003. Mission accomplished, he found his new warrior prince in Tbilisi. Scheunemann is just one of dozens of US and Israeli advisors to the trigger-happy Georgian president. Israel has been actively supporting Saakashvili, eager to see the Georgian pipeline project bypassing Russia completed. Georgian Defence Minister Davit Kezerashvili and Minister of Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili are both Israeli citizens who returned to Georgia to enter politics.
If in fact the US Israeli lobby has decided on McCain for president, and passed the word on to Sheunemann, this could well account for the green light that Saakashvili clearly thought he had to attack Russian peacekeeping troops and Ossetia civilians, killing hundreds if not the 1,500 claimed by Russia. And what better way to force both candidates to shore up Bush’s policy of war and death, just in case by some fluke the suspicious Obama overcomes the many hurdles to a candidate not enjoying the full confidence (i.e., control) of “the lobby”.
You can’t fault Obama for trying to please them, short of firing his patron Brzezinski. Already, he has dropped his willingness to talk to “the enemy”, which clearly means Russia these days, every bit as much as Iran. Under him, Iraq will keep its US bases and Afghanistan will absorb any troops who leave Iraq. Whether or not Washington succeeds in bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is the only moot point in all this, and this really depends more on Russia than on who inhabits the White House for the next four years.
This is all very much like Brzezinski’s scheming as advisor to president Carter. He now boasts that by orchestrating US funding of Islamic extremists like bin Laden from 1979 on, he was responsible for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. This did nothing to wag Carter’s dog back into power in 1980, but that is of little consequence to these shadowy advisors, who are never without work in the higher echelons of US politics, just as Scheunemann will not suffer in the least if his candidate is found to have Alzheimer’s and forgets to show for his inauguration next January. And if Obama wins, he will merely cede his White House pass to Brzezinski and continue advising world leaders such as the hapless Georgian president.
It’s quite possible that this ratcheting up of tensions in the Caucasus is intentional. It clinched the Polish missile deal in a hurry and put Russia in a bad light, giving succor to those planning to make the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline the key link in a network bypassing Russia. But the Georgian pipeline was shut down by BP during the recent conflict, and it is far from clear that spin doctors and tweaking the Russian bear’s nose will bring the US any closer to cutting Russia down to size. What this episode and Putin’s steely evaluation did was to further expose the poison at the heart of American politics and confirm the world’s suspicions that Russia is not afraid to stand up for itself.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/09/wag-the-dog/
again some of the comments are great ... |
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