Category Archives: Russia

‘Who Is Minding The Store, As We Party In St. Paul?’

Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

So asks Pat Buchanan in another thoughtful column, “Distant Drums At Sarah’s Party.” Here are excerpts:

“U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into the biggest hornet’s nest on earth?

How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S. incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed President Musharraf, fall?

What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America’s great ally in South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what cost?

While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.

Is the end of America’s long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil Saakashvili’s army with weapons and training prior to his invasion of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and considering new military aid to Syria.

Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.

Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships.

In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine – a sphere from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be excluded.

This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, “We are all Georgians now!” – but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Josef Stalin’s birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost within 24 hours?”

Update II: POT. KETTLE. BLACK.

Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Russia

Easily one of the most mind-boggling spectacles in the Georgia/Russia conflict is that of Bush accusing Russia of “bullying and intimidation”; of Bush admonishing Russia about its unacceptable “way of conducting foreign policy in the 21st Century”; of Bush expressing “grave concern” about Russia’s “disproportionate response”; and of Bush condemning the violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation.

Bush may be describing Russia but he is also describing what he did to Iraq. Another of Bush’s Freudian projections and hypocrisies all rolled into one is to charge Russia with pursuing “a policy that promises only confrontation and isolation.”

Since the war in Georgia is one neocons and neoliberals can get behind, both factions–and most mindless media–have chosen to ignore this Bush burlesque.

Update I (August 16): More “pot-kettle-black” Bushisms, delivered to Russia:

“The days of satellite states and spheres of influence are behind us.”

What’s Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Some of the reasons given by American policy wonks for the U.S.’s lingering in these blighted spots are the fear of other players getting the upper hand in these regions.

What is that if not “sphere-of-influence” plotting and planning?

Perhaps I just don’t have the necessary partisan gene, or blind sport, required to ignore these pious, specious homilies.

Update II (August 20): Americans fall for these easy storylines politicians and pundits spin, rather than look at how we conduct ourselves in the world and the repercussions this has.
Why is it that the US can increase its spheres of influence with attendant invasions and military presence in countries across the word, yet when another super power acts comparably, our “analysts” apply different yardsticks to its conduct?

In the context of the Georgia/Russia conflict, who among big-time pundits is able to consider America’s national interests? Who is able to offer a perspective that doesn’t, atavistically, galvanize American opinion around imagined enemies, but rather, looks at the crisis from a bilateral perspective?

None other than Pat Buchanan. This from Buchanan’s latest, “Who Started Cold War II?”:

“Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis.
If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war.
The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of the old Leningrad.
Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars, will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is altogether a bridge too far.
And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought our friendship?”

Read the entire column.

***

(August 15): “Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us is not high among them,” writes Pat Buchanan in a sharp analysis of the conflict in Georgia, among which are some pesky facts mass media has concealed:

“Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.”

Neocons Resurrecting The Cold War

Bush, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

My colleague Vox Day has a perspicacious post about Russia’s assistance to the South Ossetian and neighboring Abkhazian separatists:

“This battle for Georgia – not South Ossetia – is a long time in coming. Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for it by altering the rules of the game in Serbia, in which it was made clear that a major power had the right to intervene on behalf of a breakaway republic if it cried “help, help, I’m being repressed” by the sovereign territory owner. The Russians rightly feel that they’re playing by our rules and they have every reason to believe they’re going to get away with it since there is zero sympathy for the anti-Russian US position in Europe. The European position, quite reasonably, is to shrug and assume that it’s just like Kosovo, except that they also don’t want to upset their Russian fuel supplies.

At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months.”

Myself, I warned against recognizing Kosovo some time back: Here and here.

The neocons are getting hot for war. These warmed-over Trotskyites yearn to resuscitate the Cold War. Andrew Sullivan, once a neocon, really seems to have repented—turned away from neoconery. He dishes it out:

“Krauthammer this morning goes into raptures about the possibility of reliving the 1970s and 1980s:
The most crucial and unconditional measure, however, is this: Reaffirm support for the Saakashvili government and declare that its removal by the Russians would lead to recognition of a government-in-exile. This would instantly be understood as providing us the legal basis for supplying and supporting a Georgian resistance to any Russian-installed regime.

This is a 1980s Afghanistan gambit, a de facto return to the Cold War, even though Russia is not a global expansionist power any more, and even though it is no longer communist. No thought given, apparently, to the chance that this could backfire on a power now occupying two countries rather closer to Russia than Georgia is to the US. Oh, well. They’ll figure that out later. There’s Russians to fight! One thing that baffles me: why does the US need a legal basis for anything in Krauthammer’s view?”

All that from a man who used to be a neocon of the deepest dye. Andrew may yet redeem himself.