One of the most alarming aspects of the Russian invasion of Georgia is how it is being received in the West by the media and supposed experts in international relations. One such example comes in the form of an August 12th Globe and Mail editorial; It is largely about oil pipelines ; another from the Guardian UK entitled Obama advisor compares Putin to Hitler. The Guardian article is based on comments made by foreign policy advisor to US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski was national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 What is stunning about both the Globe and Mail editorial and Brzezinski’s comments quoted in the Guardian is that both are practicing a willful ignorance, both present clichéd and distorted versions of an event that is much more complex and dangerous than they would have us believe.
The Globe and Mail editorial characterizes Russian action as an “unnecessary, immoral and illegal military campaign.” The editorial implies the Russian invasion was somehow a naked unprovoked aggression when in fact it is more truthfully a necessary act in protecting its own strategic self-interest in response to US aggression in the region that has been ongoing since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Where the GM editorial claims that Russia “crossed a line” it was really drawing a line in the sand.
In this totally bizarre editorial you can take out references to Russia, substitute the US; take out Georgia, substitute Iraq and you have a parallel. The US invasion of Iraq was most popularly seen as removing a spent dictator, but then too it was clearly about oil and Iraq’s vast reserves, but more importantly it was about America’s desire to dominate the Middle East and a stepping stone in its imperialistic ambitions for global domination.
On the scale of recent wars the Russian attack on Georgia is only a minor skirmish. The war on Iraq has resulted in 1.2 million Iraqi casualties and an estimated 4 million refugees, and the killing goes on, and is expanding in both Afghanistan, Pakistan, and possibly Iran which lives under impending threat of attack from the USA as it too is another stepping stone.
Another stepping stone is the containment of Russia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the US has been working diligently to expand its control over the region, both commercially-oil and gas- and militarily with the building of Missile Defense in the region. Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili runs an American puppet regime with a military trained and armed by the US and Israel. Part of the US strategy in the region is to cleave off both Georgia and the Ukraine as NATO members. But as F William Engdahl reports in the Asian Times (noteworthy for its comprehensive analysis of Asian affairs) in an article, Russia marks its red lines :
Washington has steadily converted NATO into what can only
be called the military vehicle of an American global imperial rule linked by a network of military bases from Kosovo to Poland to Turkey to Iraq and Afghanistan.
If Georgia and the Ukraine join NATO they become US surrogates allowing the US to build missile defense bases right on Russia’s very borders. Just as the US had the legitimate right to block Khrushchev’s USSR from establishing ballistic missile bases in Cuba in 1962, Russia now has a legitimate right to block US territorial ambitions on its very door step. Clearly, the violence and bloodshed now stalking the Eurasian world is largely provoked by US imperial ambitions.
Brzezinski earned a reputation in the Carter administration as an anti-soviet hardliner and it appears at the age of 80 with the Cold War long gone he is still fighting that war. He might have a hard time acknowledging, as many Western historians are now, that Stalinist Russia for all its sins saved the West’s ass during WWII. When Hitler opened the Russian front he diverted most of his forces there and it was left to Russia to defeat them, most notably at the battle of Stalingrad- arguably the greatest battle ever fought. Consequently, it was Russia that took far more casualties than any allied country in the war. Had Hitler not been defeated in Russia this war could have had a very different outcome and the face of Europe could be very different than it is today.
Like so many others, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for example, Brzezinski makes inappropriate and fallacious analogies to WWII. Where Blair suffered Churchillian fantasies( and revealed a remarkable gift for mendacity) Brzezinski simply gets the shoe on the wrong foot. When he accuses Valdimir Putin of, “following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930’s, he has the wrong country. He should be referring to his adopted homeland the USA.
One of the precepts that prevented all out war between the Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War was that they showed some regard for each others “sphere of influence.” They fought proxy wars and regional wars but managed to avoid an all out confrontation. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union the US seized the opportunity to show no regard for any country’s sphere of influence and indeed to pursue global domination including the declared right to wage pre-emptive wars and serial warfare wherever and whenever it sees fit. Brzezinski is clearly a Cold War relic as he appears unfamiliar with the PNAC(Project for the New American Century), the neoconservative manifesto for global domination, and such terms as “Full Spectrum Dominance.” But then Brzezinski, like legions of others, including the mainstream media, are practicing a willful ignorance.
Polish born Brzezinski had every reason to revile Stalinist Russia but the new Russia is a very different and much diminished country. To try and paint present day Russia as the villain of peace in present day international affairs can only inspire head-shaking disbelief. One can only hope that his role as security advisor to Barack Obama is more honorific than actual. If the latter, the drift toward WWIII will continue under a Democratic president. The very presence of Brzezinski as a present day advisor to Democratic presidential candidates may also point to the utter paucity of legitimate policy options within the Democratic party.
In the August 13th edition, the Globe and Mail digs an even deeper black hole in its editorial boardroom when columnist Marcus Gee concludes his utterly ridiculous column Russian hypocrisy by suggesting that Russia must withdraw from Georgia, Ossetia and Abkhazia “to make way for genuine international peacekeepers.” So who are the “genuine” peacekeepers? Gee would no doubt reply NATO peacekeepers- but the US would love nothing better as NATO is in fact an arm of US foreign policy and these “peacekeepers” would in fact be an army of occupation. Hopefully, NATO countries would not be so easily duped into being proxies in another of America’s imperial wars as they have been in Afghanistan.
As Engdahl points out in his Asian Times article Missile Defense is really nuclear primacy in disguise. Nuclear primacy, which the US has been pursuing since the end of the Cold War, is to have an anti-missile system, even in some primitive form, that would virtually nullify any counter strike by the opposing side.
In other words the concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) that haunted both sides during the Cold War and helped avoid an all out confrontation would no longer apply. It would also allow the holder of nuclear primacy the leverage to impose an unchallengeable global tyranny.
There are commentators who maintain WWIII is already with us. It is simply a matter of how we want to define it; a series of regional conflicts fought over decades, or some grand conflagration involving nuclear weapons. The danger, of course, is that each regional conflict could be the 1914 Sarajavo trigger that started WWI and that plunges us into a hemispheric war. Western leaders were quick to jump on Russia’s action but with continued incursions into its sphere of influence( which Georgia has been part of for two centuries) by the US it was only a matter of time before Russia would push back and it might even be congratulated on its restraint in not doing so sooner and with even greater force- a restraint it seems neither the United States nor Israel are capable of.
Robert Billyard 2008 ©
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