A NEWER WORLD ORDER
Socialist Worker Online
er-world-order
Aug 21 2008
IL
Lee Sustar looks at the political impact of Russia’s invasion of
Georgia.
Russian soldiers look on as Georgia burns
THE RUSSIA-Georgia war has revealed a new balance of power in the
world–and exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. politicians and the media
who decry the imperialism emanating from Moscow, but embrace it when
it’s made in the USA.
John McCain, of course, wins the prize for setting the most outrageous
double standard. "In the 21st century," he informed us, "nations
don’t invade other nations." Unless, of course, we’re talking about
Afghanistan or Iraq, and the invading power happens to be the United
States. McCain demanded and immediate pullout of all Russian forces
from Georgia and insisted upon its "territorial integrity"–even as
he claims the right for the U.S. to occupy Iraq for the next 100 years.
The supposedly progressive Barack Obama sounded little different. "I
have condemned Russian aggression, and today I reiterate my demand
that Russia abide by the cease-fire," he said. "Russia must know that
its actions will have consequences."
One can imagine how a President Obama would respond if Russian Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dimitri Medvedev declared that
he wouldn’t withdraw all troops from Georgia right away, but would
leave behind a large occupation force in order to be "as careful
in getting out of Georgia as we were careless in getting in." That,
of course, is Obama’s excuse for keeping up to 50,000 U.S. troops in
Iraq for "force protection," the defense of U.S. military personnel
and "anti-terrorist" missions–the same kind of pretext that Russia
used to move beyond Georgia’s disputed South Ossetia region to a
full-fledged invasion.
The media has been even more two-faced than the politicians. The
same news outlets that parroted the Pentagon whitewash of civilian
casualties in the horrific U.S. blitz on Falluja in Iraq in 2004 or
aerial bombardment of wedding parties in Afghanistan now breathlessly
report on the Russian bombs and artillery shells that hit apartment
buildings and markets.
For the U.S. media, when Washington military action causes civilian
deaths–between 600,000 and more than 1 million in Iraq, according
to some estimates–it’s "collateral damage," a regrettable but
unavoidable part of modern warfare. Yet when a Russian plane drops a
bomb that kills innocent bystanders, it’s a barbaric disregard for
human life. One wonders just how much more unpopular the U.S. war
in Iraq would be if the media worked as hard at exposing civilian
casualties in that country as it has in Georgia.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
TO POINT out this U.S. hypocrisy isn’t to downplay the imperial nature
of Russia’s latest occupation of Georgia. Georgia may have initiated
the conflict by trying to smash the Russian-backed separatists among
the Ossetian minority–and likely did so with a green light from the
U.S. But Russia seized the opportunity to make an example of Georgia
through military might–and not for the first time.
The Tsarist rulers of old Russia conquered Georgia more than two
centuries ago. After a brief interlude following the Russian Revolution
of 1917, Georgia was again imprisoned in Stalin’s USSR. The Georgian
nationalist movement revived in the 1980s despite murderous repression
by the supposedly liberal Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of
the USSR.
The 1991 collapse of the USSR saw the non-Russian "federal republics,"
including Georgia, gain independence. With Russian imperialism in
crisis, U.S. imperialism was determined to fill the vacuum, not only
in Moscow’s former puppet states in Eastern Europe, but in countries
formerly part of the USSR.
Georgia, however, was slow going for the U.S. The pro-Western Georgian
nationalist leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, pushed a "Georgia for the
Georgians" line that frightened the 30 percent of the population that
was non-Georgian–people whom Gamsakhurdia ominously referred to as
"guests." The first non-Communist Party head of Georgia in the waning
days of the USSR, Gamsakhurdia went on to revoke the autonomous
status of Abkhazia and North Ossetia, which had been enshrined in
the USSR’s constitution. Resistance from the Abkhazians and Ossetians
led to civil war and ethnic cleansing and, with Russian intervention,
de facto independence for both regions since 1993.
The situation was little changed under the regime of Eduard
Schevardnadze, the former foreign minister of the USSR who returned
home to Georgia to take over the presidency after Gamsakhurdia was
ousted in a coup. During Schevardnadze’s decade in power, Russia and
the U.S. jockeyed for influence in Georgia.
Washington found a willing business partner in Schevardnadze. He was
in favor of an oil pipeline that would bypass Russia. He was also
a career Soviet politician who had run Georgia in the 1970s and who
refused to take a consistent anti-Moscow line. In 2003, an election
year in Georgia, Schevardnadze set off alarm bells in Washington by
making a deal with the Russian electrical power monopoly AES, which
followed an earlier "strategic partnership" with the huge Russian
gas company Gazprom.
In late 2003, the U.S., then still in the confident "Mission
Accomplished" phase of the Iraq war, decided to up the ante. It
backed the U.S.-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, the leader of
the mass protests of the "Rose Revolution" that ousted Schevardnadze
after his party tried to rig parliamentary election results. Modeled
on the rebellion that drove Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia
in 2000, the Rose Revolution was sustained in part by money from the
foundation controlled by billionaire financier George Soros. In the
wake of the Rose Revolution the Soros foundation and other donors,
as well as the United Nations Development Project, even paid salaries
for 11,000 civil servants as part of a three-year aid program.
The U.S. saw the Saakashvili government as a means to accelerate its
energy and defense plans for Georgia. Saakashvili’s presidential
inauguration in 2004 was attended by then-Secretary of State
Colin Powell, who announced $166 million in immediate aid as well
as a three-year, $500 million aid package to promote "economic
reforms." This was only part of a steady stream of U.S. dollars
to a country of just 4.6 million people. According to one study,
Georgia is the second highest recipient of U.S. aid per capita in
the world. Meanwhile, the European Union and the World Bank pledged
another $1 billion in assistance to Saakashvili’s government.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
SOON, THE White House was ready to plant the U.S. flag in the heart
of the South Caucasus. George W. Bush visited Tbilisi in May 2005 to
"underscore his support for democracy, historic reform and peaceful
conflict resolution," as the U.S. Embassy in Georgia put it in a
press release. These "reforms," according to Kakha Bendukidze, the
Russia-based industrial oligarch turned Georgian economy minister,
meant that the Georgian state would privatize "everything that can
be sold, except its conscience."
With Saakashvili in power, Washington moved aggressively to create in
Georgia a crucial gateway for oil and gas pipelines that could bypass
Russia on the north and Iran on the south. It was under Saakashvili
that the long-sought Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline was finally
completed in 2005, providing a means to get oil from Azerbaijan on
the Caspian Sea across Georgia to a Turkish port on the Mediterranean.
The U.S. had to strong-arm Western oil companies into building
BTC–ultimately, BP agreed to take the lead. The U.S. also had to
pressure the International Finance Corporation, the private development
arm of the World Bank, to loan $250 million for construction of
the pipeline.
"In the South Caucasus, U.S. and European state interests are bound
up with the commercial interests of major oil companies that form the
principal Caspian energy consortia," wrote Damien Helly and Giorgi
Gogia, two experts on Georgian politics. "To secure their investments
in the Caspian Sea Basin, these companies have found allies among
U.S. geostrategists who support a strong U.S. presence among Russia’s
neighbors. High-level former officials such as Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Brent Scowcroft, John Sununu, James Baker and Richard Cheney (when
he was head of Halliburton) have all visited Baku [Azerbaijan] and
the Caspian region and lobbied in favor of the oil companies."
These U.S. economic and political projects had to be secured
militarily. Thus, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. began to send military
advisers to Georgia. That move rankled Moscow, which also accused
Georgia of doing too little to stop the flow of arms and insurgents
across its border into neighboring Chechnya, where separatists were
fighting the Russian armed forces.
For Russia, Georgia was seen as a red line that the U.S. and NATO could
not cross. In the early 1990s, Russia had no choice but to allow the
expansion of NATO to include its former satellites in Eastern Europe
and the three former Soviet Republics on the Baltic. But the U.S. push
to include Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance–as well as efforts
to place anti-missile systems in the Czech Republic and Poland–was
too much for the Kremlin.
After Saakashvili took over in Tbilisi, U.S.-Russian tensions over
Georgia increased dramatically. In 2004, NATO approved Georgia’s
"Individual Action Partnership Plan," the first step toward membership
of the alliance, and stationed a liaison officer in Tbilisi. In the
years since, the U.S. and Israel have sent military trainers to upgrade
Georgia’s military to NATO standards, and Saakashvili has showed his
loyalty to the U.S. by sending 2,500 Georgian troops to participate in
the occupation of Iraq. By 2007, the Georgian armed forces, previously
a ragtag outfit unable to defeat irregular militias in South Ossetia
or Abkhazia, was well-drilled, lavishly equipped and NATO-ready. The
U.S. pushed for a fast-track acceptance into the alliance.
All that state-of-the-art weaponry, of course, is now smashed or
captured by the Russian army, and the armed forces shattered by the
Russian occupation. What began as the latest U.S. attempt to use a
small nation as an outpost of the American Empire has ended with a
brutal invasion by a rival empire, one just as determined to police
its own "backyard" as the U.S. has been in Latin America. And in
the wake of the Russia-Georgia war, oil-rich Azerbaijan–which has
its own separatist region populated by ethnic Armenians allied with
Russia–will think twice about crossing Moscow to sign up with the
U.S. and NATO.
But the consequences of the Russian invasion go far beyond the
South Caucasus region. The war has exposed the expanded NATO as
a hollow organization. "For an organization that has come to rely
heavily on words and symbolism, NATO issued a disconcertingly evasive
communique at its emergency meeting on Georgia," journalist Vladimir
Socor wrote. "The first mention of Russia appears only in the second
paragraph, and it is a positive mention: NATO ‘welcomes the [armistice]
agreement reached and signed by Georgia and Russia.’ No reference to
the Russian military duress, under which this flawed armistice was
‘reached.’ The communique urges prompt, good-faith implementation of
the armistice, politely ignoring its loopholes."
So much for NATO’s vaunted "one-for-all, all-for-one" principle. The
U.S. and NATO have bankrolled and armed a tiny nation, encouraged or
tolerated a military attack that was bound to trigger a response from
a neighboring great power–and, when that small country was invaded
and occupied, the U.S. stood back and did nothing.
So much for the neoconservative dream of a "new world order" under
U.S. domination, guaranteed by pre-emptive warfare and regime
change. The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were intended to
allow Washington to consolidate its grip on the Middle East and
project its power into the Caucusus and Central Asia. Instead, the
U.S. finds itself militarily overstretched, incapable of protecting
its new client states and unable even to get a strong resolution
out of NATO condemning Russia’s invasion of Georgia–to say nothing
of NATO countries’ reluctance to commit troops to the losing war
in Afghanistan.
There are other examples of waning U.S. imperial clout–the ouster
of Pervez Musharraf as dictator of Pakistan being the latest serious
example. The cracks in the empire, in turn, are widened by the ongoing
U.S. financial crisis which is increasingly dragging down the entire
world economy. The entire U.S. economic model–the pro-business,
free-trade neoliberal program–is being discredited. The recent
collapse of the latest World Trade Organization negotiations is a
case in point.
U.S. imperialism is far from a spent force, of course. The country
still has enormous military might and economic resources, and a
President Obama would likely bring in a foreign policy and military
team that’s more competent than the Bush administration hacks. But
no matter who’s in charge in the White House, the shift in the world
balance of power–economically, militarily and politically–is bound
to lead to further instability and crises.