MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA III: REALITY’S ROUT AND CHENEY’S VIAGRA
by Chris Floyd

The Baltimore Chronicle
Monday, 11 August 2008
MD

Russkies on the march! Aggression! Kremlin! The crisis in Georgia is
like a big dose of Viagra for these guys, taking them back to their
hot youth and all the Cold War hubba-hubba.As noted here the other day,
I don’t think the current crisis in Georgia will spiral into any kind
of military confrontation between Russia and the United States. The
U.S. government has a long history of egging on other people to slap
at Washington’s enemies — then abandoning them when the inevitable
slapback occurs. George Bush I’s incitement of a Shiite uprising in
Iraq in 1991 and his subsquent collusion with Saddam in crushing
the rebellion is a prime example. As I said earlier, the American
elite’s armchair militarists — like Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney,
and George W. "I Quit" Bush — prefer to slaughter defenseless
people in broken-down states, not take on nations with powerful
modern militaries.

Then again, there is a long, strong lunatic strain running through
the American militarist establishment, a cultish faction that has
always longed to unleash "the Big One" on the Russkies or the
gooks or the Ay-rabs or somebody out there. The Cheney faction
in particular is riddled with adherents of this cult, who, like
their leader, measure their manhood by the throw-weight of America’s
nuclear missiles. Thus every flashpoint on the international scene —
which inevitably involves "American interests," because the American
Empire has extended its military and monetary reach into every nook
and cranny of the world — carries with it a disproportionate danger
of escalation into annihilation. In almost every case, this threat is
extremely low; but it is always there, like background radiation, or
perhaps a dormant fever, and must be considered. Especially considering
the moral idiots in charge of the "great" powers of our day.

But although there is little chance of extreme escalation in the
Russia-Georgia conflict, the crisis has sufficient dangers in itself
— not least the increasing divergence from reality in the American
response. Excellent analyses of this and other aspects of the situation
continue to appear.

First up, The Nation provides an informative perspective on
Russia-Georgia from Mark Ames — Getting Georgia’s War On:

The outbreak of war in Georgia on Friday offers a disturbing and
somewhat surreal taste of what to expect from John McCain should he
become our nation’s Commander in Chief. As the centuries-old ethnic
animosities between Georgia and Ossetia boiled over into another armed
conflict, drawing in neighboring Russia, McCain issued a stark-raving
statement from Des Moines that is disturbingly reminiscent of the
language used in the lead-up to NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999,
a war McCain zealously pushed for:

"We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council
to assess Georgia’s security and review measures NATO can take to
contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation," McCain said.

Calling on NATO to "stabilize this dangerous situation" is not going
down well with Russia, where images of dead Russian peacekeepers and
of frightened Ossetian refugees streaming across its borders have
put the country in a very vengeful mood. It’s hard to imagine what
measures NATO could take under a McCain presidency, but in the mind
of a man who thinks US troops should stay in Iraq for 100 years, and
who runs around singing "Bomb Bomb Iran!" it’s not hard to guess–and
even harder not to be horrified by what it may mean come January 2009,
should he win….

The problem with McCain’s bold demand about going to the UN is that
Russia already tried doing exactly what McCain called for–and got
rejected by McCain’s neocon pals in the Bush Administration. Early
this morning, Russia convened an emergency session of the UN Security
Council, calling on both sides to immediately cease hostilities,
return to the negotiating table and renounce the use of force–but the
last part about renouncing the use of force is exactly what Georgia’s
president Mikhail Saakashvili refuses to do.

The Bush Administration showed that it too has no patience with crunchy
"renounce the use of force" resolutions. According to a Reuters report
from earlier in the day:

At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency
session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a
Russian-drafted statement.

The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the United States,
Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a
phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required
both sides "to renounce the use of force," council diplomats said.

The meaning of this is clear: the United States and Britain are backing
Saakashvili’s invasion. Why would we back Saakashvili’s reckless
war, when last year even Bush was denouncing the Pinochet-wannabe’s
violent attack on his own people during a peaceful opposition protest
in Georgia’s capital, as well as shutting down the opposition media
and exiling of political opponents? That would be a brain-teaser if
the last seven years hadn’t answered this question so many painful
times already.

But with McCain, answering this is a little trickier. When he issued
today’s Des Moines statement calling for Russia to do what Russia
already did a few hours earlier, you have to ask yourself: either
McCain’s short-term memory is totally shot, encased in an impenetrable
tomb of aluminum-zirconium plaque… or worse, McCain simply doesn’t
give a damn about reality, he just wants to get Georgia’s war on,
as badly as Saakashvili does.

The awful truth is probably a combination of the two, which is the
worst of all worlds, considering McCain’s raving Russophobia, and
his campaign team’s financial and ideological ties to Saakashvili….

In 2006, McCain visited Georgia and denounced the South Ossetian
separatists, proving that Scheunemann wasn’t wasting his Georgian
sponsor’s money. At a speech he gave in a Georgian army base in
Senaki, McCain declared that Georgia was America’s "best friend,"
and that Russian peacekeepers should be thrown out.

Today, Georgian forces from that same Senaki base are part of
the invasion force into South Ossetia, an invasion that has left
scores–perhaps hundreds–of dead locals, at least ten dead Russian
peacekeepers, and 140 million pissed-off Russians calling for blood.

Lost in all of this is not only the question of why America would risk
an apocalypse to help a petty dictator like Saakashvili get control
of a region that doesn’t want any part of him. But no one’s bothering
to ask what the Ossetians themselves think about it, or why they’re
fighting for their independence in the first place. That’s because
the Georgians–with help from lobbyists like Scheunemann–have been
pushing the line that South Ossetia is a fiction, a construct of evil
Kremlin neo-Stalinists, rather than a people with a genuine grievance.

A few years ago, I had an Ossetian working as the sales director for
my now-defunct newspaper, The eXile. After listening to me rave about
how much I always (and still do) like the Georgians, he finally lost
it and told me another side to Georgian history, explaining how the
Georgians had always mistreated the Ossetians, and how the South
Ossetians wanted to reunite with North Ossetia in order to avoid
being swallowed up, and how this conflict goes way back, long before
the Soviet Union days. It was clear that the Ossetian-Georgian hatred
was old and deep, like many ethnic conflicts in this region. Indeed, a
number of Caucasian ethnic groups still harbor deep resentment towards
Georgia, accusing them of imperialism, chauvinism and arrogance.

One example of this can be found in historian Bruce Lincoln’s book,
Red Victory, in which he writes about the period of Georgia’s brief
independence from 1917 to 1921, a time when Georgia was backed
by Britain:

the Georgian leaders quickly moved to widen their borders at
the expense of their Armenian and Azerbaijani neighbors, and
their territorial greed astounded foreign observers. ‘The free and
independent socialist democratic state of Georgia will always remain
in my memory as a classic example of an imperialist small nation,"
one British journalist wrote…. "Both in territory snatching outside
and bureaucratic tyranny inside, its chauvinism was beyond all bounds."

Ames also points to the little-noticed — and apparently pre-planned
— PR offensive by Georgia to obscure the reality of the situation —
i.e., that Saakashvili provoked Russia’s massive response with his
own brutal military incursion into South Ossetia:

The invasion was backed up by a PR offensive so layered and
sophisticated that I even got an hysterical call today from a hedge
fund manager in New York, screaming about an "investor call" that
Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze made this morning with some
fifty leading Western investment bank managers and analysts. I’ve
since seen a J.P. Morgan summary of the conference call, which pretty
much reflects the talking points later picked up by the US media.

These kinds of conference calls are generally conducted by the heads
of companies in order to give banking analysts guidance. But as the
hedge fund manager told me today, "The reason Lado did this is because
he knew the enormous PR value that Georgia would gain by going to
the money people and analysts, particularly since Georgia is clearly
the aggressor this time." As a former investment banker who worked in
London and who used to head the Bank of Georgia, Gurgenidze knew what
he was doing. "Lado is a former banker himself, so he knew that by
framing the conflict for the most influential bankers and analysts in
New York, that these power bankers would then write up reports and go
on CNBC and argue Lado Gurgenidze’s talking points. It was brilliant,
and now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage
from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin,
that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia."

The really scary thing about this investor conference call is that
it suggests real planning. As the hedge fund manager told me, "These
things aren’t set up on an hour’s notice."

Where this war is leading is impossible to say, but as Iraq
and Afghanistan, not to mention Chechnya, have shown, wars have a
funny way of lasting longer, costing more in money and lives, and
snuffing out whatever individual liberties the affected populations
may have. As good as this war is for Saakashvili, who has become
increasingly unpopular at home and abroad, or for McCain, whose poll
numbers seem to rise every time the plaque devours another lobe of
his brain, it also bodes well for the resurgent Prime Minister Putin,
who seems to have become increasingly peeved with his hand-picked
successor, President Dmitry Medvedev’s flickering independence and
his liberalizer shtick. There’s nothing like a good war to snuff out
an uppity sois-disant liberal who’s getting in your way–even McCain
can still grasp this concept.

Justin Raimondo is also on the case, noting, among other points
(including , how Barack Obama’s line on the conflict is quickly
melding with that of McCain, and the usual "bipartisan foreign policy
establishment" gang:

What’s really interesting, however, is how Barack Obama has taken up
this same cause, albeit with less vehemence than the GOP nominee. As
Politico.com reported:

"When violence broke out in the Caucasus on Friday morning, John
McCain quickly issued a statement that was far more strident toward
the Russians than that of President Bush, Barack Obama, and much
of the West. But, as Russian warplanes pounded Georgian targets far
beyond South Ossetia this weekend, Bush, Obama, and others have moved
closer to McCain’s initial position."

While calling for mediation and international peacekeepers, Obama went
with the War Party’s line that Russia, not Georgia, is the aggressor,
as the Times of London reports: "Obama accused Russia of escalating
the crisis ‘through it’s clear and continued violation of Georgia’s
sovereignty and territorial integrity.’" While his first statement
on the outbreak of hostilities was more along the lines of "Can’t we
all get along?", the New York Times notes:

"Mr. Obama did harden his rhetoric later on Friday, shortly before
getting on a plane for a vacation in Hawaii. His initial statement,
an adviser said, was released before there were confirmed reports
of the Russian invasion. In his later statement, Mr. Obama said,
‘What is clear is that Russia has invaded Georgia’s sovereign – has
encroached on Georgia’s sovereignty, and it is very important for us
to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.’"

This nonsense about Georgia’s alleged "sovereignty" rides roughshod
over the reality of the Ossetians’ apparent determination to free
themselves from Saakashvili’s grip, and it’s the buzzword that
identifies a shill for the Georgians.

"I condemn Russia’s aggressive actions," said Obama, "and reiterate my
call for an immediate cease-fire." This cease-fire business is meant
to feed directly into the Georgians’ contention that they have offered
to stop the conflict, even as they continue military operations in
South Ossetia, which have already cost the lives of over a thousand
of that country’s inhabitants.

That didn’t stop the McCainiacs from attacking Obama as a tool of
the Kremlin. Sunday the news talk shows were abuzz with rumors of
Democratic discontent over Obama’s seeming inability to hit back at
McCain’s viciously negative campaign, yet it’s much worse than that
– it’s not an unwillingness, but an inherent inability to do so. I
hate to cite Andrew Sullivan favorably, but he was one of the first
to note the convergence of the Obama camp and the McCain campaign
on such central issues as Iran, and the process continues with
this confluence of opinion on the Russian question. While the Obama
people have dutifully pointed out that Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s
foreign policy guru, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for his
public relations firm as a paid lobbyist for the Georgians, their
own candidate’s position on the matter differs little from McCain’s,
except, as the New York Times notes, in terms of "style."

Finally, Jonathan Steele weighs in at the Guardian with "This is not
pipeline war but an assault on Russian influence":

The flare-up of major hostilities between Russia and Georgia has been
dubbed by some "the pipeline war". The landlocked Caspian sea’s huge
oil reserves are a factor, especially since Georgia became a key
transit country for oil to travel from Baku in Azerbaijan to the
Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

The pipeline, which was completed in May 2006, is the second longest
in the world. Although its route was chosen in order to bypass Russia,
denying Moscow leverage over a key resource and a potential source
of pressure, the current crisis in the Caucasus is about issues far
bigger than oil.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is only a minor element in a much
larger strategic equation: an attempt, sponsored largely by the United
States but eagerly subscribed to by several of its new ex-Soviet
allies, to reduce every aspect of Russian influence throughout the
region, whether it be economic, political, diplomatic or military.

Needless to say, that inveterate old Cold Warrior, Dick Cheney,
has been predictably vehement in his reaction. (Cheney has always
appreciated the value of the "Russian threat" in advancing his lifelong
agenda of establishing an authoritarian, militarist, belligerent,
crony-capitalist regime in the United States.) In a call to buck up
the Administration’s Georgian protege, Cheney sputtered "that Russian
aggression must not go unanswered, and that its continuation would have
serious consequences for its relations with the United States, as well
as the broader international community," the New York Times reports.

"Serious consequences"! Russkies on the march! Aggression! Kremlin! The
crisis in Georgia is like a big dose of Viagra for these guys, taking
them back to their hot youth and all the Cold War hubba-hubba. But
let’s hope that this hormonal outburst doesn’t blind them totally
to vastly different circumstances surrounding the current situation,
and send that dormant fever spiking to nightmarish levels.

Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years,
working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various
newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd
co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of
Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.

This column is republished here with the permission of the author