GETTING GEORGIA’S WAR ON
By Mark Ames Reprinted with permission from The Nation
CBS News
August 12, 2008
NY
The Nation: What We Should Expect If John McCain Becomes Our Nation’s
Commander In Chief Comments 12
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.
McCain’s call to NATO-ize the war is not only frightening, it’s also
delusional: both NATO and US forces are already stretched beyond the
breaking point, even by Joint Chief of Staff chairman Michael Millen’s
own recent assessment.
But McCain’s brain remains undeterred by reality, a fact that became
painfully clear today in Des Moines when he also demanded, "The US
should immediately convene an emergency session of the United Nations
Security Council to call on Russia to reverse course."
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. As
has been reported, McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, neocon Randy
Scheunemann, has a long financial relationship with Saakashvili to
lobby his interests in the United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
In 2005, Mr. Scheunemann asked Sen. McCain to introduce a Senate
resolution expressing support for peace in the Russian-influenced
region of South Ossetia that wants to break away from Georgia, the
records show.
Such resolutions of Senate support are symbolic but helpful
to countries in their diplomatic relations. The Senate approved
Sen. McCain’s resolution in December 2005, and the Georgian Embassy
posted the text on its Web site.
Sen. McCain has endorsed Georgia’s goal of entering NATO, a matter
for which the country hired Mr. Scheunemann to lobby. In 2006,
Senator McCain gave a speech at the Munich Conference on Security
in Germany in which he said "Georgia has implemented far-reaching
political, economic, and military reforms" and should enter NATO,
a text of his speech on the conference Web site shows.
Scheunemann, a bearded, pear-faced gun geek who looks like what might
have happened to a GI Joe doll if it had spent years stuffing its face
at pricey restaurants while power-schmoozing politicians and petty
dictators, also worked for recently-disgraced Bush fundraiser Stephen
Payne, lobbying for his Caspian Alliance oil business. The Caspian
oil pipeline runs through Georgia, the main reason that country has
tugged the heartstrings of neocons and oil plutocrats for at least
a decade or more.
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."
On Thursday, following intense Georgian shelling and katyusha
rocketing into Tskhinvali, refugees streamed out of South Ossetia
telling reporters that the Georgians had completely leveled entire
villages and most of Tskhinvali, leaving "piles of corpses" in the
streets, over 1,000 by some counts. Among the dead are at least
ten Russian peacekeepers, who fell after their base was attacked by
Georgian forces. Reports also say that Georgian forces destroyed a
hotel where Russian journalists were staying.
In response, Russian jets bombed Georgian positions both inside
South Ossetia and into Georgia proper, attacking one base where
American military instructors are quartered (no Americans were
reported hurt). By mid-afternoon Moscow time, as local television
showed burning homes and Ossetian women and children huddling in
bomb shelters, armored Russian columns were crossing into Georgian
territory, and Georgia’s President called for a total mobilization
of military-aged men for war with Russia.
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.
As I’m filing this, Russian forces are battling to take back
Tskhinvali, while Saakashvili has been alternately claiming to have
pulled his forces back, or that his forces are in full control of
the city and defeating the Russians. Meanwhile, Georgia has been on a
massive, successful, multi-layered PR offensive in the West, helped
by years of cultivating people like John McCain as well as the army
of neocons and old cold warriors who naturally gravitate to a fight
with Russia.