Bush stijgt confrontatie met Rusland over Georgië
Door Barry Grey | In een provocatieve verklaring die van het Witte Huis wordt geleverd nam Tuin op Maandag, President George W. toe Bush steeg de confrontatie tussen de Verenigde Staten en Rusland over het huidige vechten in Georgië.
Bush stelde wat aan de kaak hij dramatische en brutale“ militaire escalatie van Rusland de „riep en eiste dat Moskou met directe cease-fire en de terugtrekking van zijn troepen van het Kaukasische land op zijn grens akkoord gaat. Hij beschuldigde Rusland van het van plan zijn om de luchthaven van Tbilisi te bombarderen en laadde dat Moskou tot doel had om de overheid de pro-V.S. van Georgische President Mikheil Saakashvili omver te werpen.
Bush herhaalde V.S.- verklaringen over inviolability van Georgische soevereiniteit en territoriale integriteit-diplomatieke taal ondersteunend de inspanningen van de overheid in Tbilisi om controle over de afgescheiden pro-Russische republieken van Zuid-Ossetië en Abchazië opnieuw te vestigen.
Opmerkingen van Bush volgden een verklaringsZondag door Ondervoorzitter Dick Cheney, die zei de Russische „agressie“ niet kon onbeantwoord gaan. Interventie van Cheney stelde het bestaan van een factie binnen het beleid van Bush voor dat voor een agressievere reactie van de V.S. op de Russische interventie in Georgië duwt.
De verklaringen van het Witte Huis drukken een wankelend niveau van schijnheiligheid uit. De overheid van de V.S. gaf geen protest uit toen de Georgische militaire krachten Zuid-Ossetië vorige Donderdag nacht aanvielen, lukraak richtend flatblokken in het kapitaal van Tskhinvali met tankkanon en mortieren. Men schat dat de Georgische invallers 2.000 burgers, bloodletting doodden die van het enorme grootste deel van burgerlijke tot op heden sterfgevallen rekenschap geeft.
Het was slechts toen Russische militair aan de Georgische aanval met een snelle en massieve tegenaanval antwoordde, verpletterend de veel kleinere Georgische kracht, dat Washington gealarmeerd werd.
Er zijn niets ver progressief in de militaire acties die door het regime Putin worden gevoerd. De Russische beslissende elite streeft zijn eigen roofzuchtige doelstellingen in de Kaukasus, een gebied na dat voor twee eeuwen door Moskou vóór het verbreken van de Sowjetunie in 1991 werd beslist.
Voorts onderstreept de uitbarsting van oorlog in de Kaukasus de tragische gevolgen van de ontbinding van de USSR. Het heeft de massa's van de vroegere Sowjetunie, met inbegrip van Rusland en de andere Sovjetrepublieken, aan de gevaren van oorlog en de plunderingen van de belangrijkste imperialistische bevoegdheden blootgesteld. For the peoples of the former USSR, the answer is to be found not in the nationalist and militaristic policies of Putin, but rather in the internationalist program of socialist revolution.
Notwithstanding the reactionary aims of the Russian regime, no objective observer can contest the fact that Washington’s provocative policy toward Russia—aimed at supplanting Russia in its long-time spheres of influence—is the primary factor behind the eruption of war between Russia and Georgia.
The media has been virtually silent on the visit just one month ago of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Georgia. Rice held talks with Saakashvili and gave a press conference at which she denounced Russia, backed Saakashvili’s efforts to reassert Georgian control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and reiterated US support for Georgia’s incorporation into NATO.
Russia has made clear that it considers the entry of former Soviet republics such as Georgia and Ukraine into NATO an intolerable threat to its security. Were Georgia already a part of NATO, as Moscow is well aware, the alliance’s member states would be legally bound to intervene military in Georgia’s support.
It is inconceivable that Saakashvili did not review in detail with Rice his plans for a military assault on South Ossetia. Georgia—which is totally dependent on US military, diplomatic and financial support—could not take such a portentous action without informing Washington in advance and securing American sanction.
Preparations for the attack would have been far advanced when Rice met with Saakashvili a month ago. The Georgian military, moreover, is dominated from top to bottom by US military advisers.
The United States has been pouring military aid into Georgia ever since the US-led air war against Serbia in 1999, and the pace and scale of American military aid have accelerated since Washington engineered the so-called “Rose Revolution” that brought Harvard-educated Saakashvili to power in early 2004.
An article in Monday’s New York Times describes “a Pentagon effort to overhaul Georgia’s forces from bottom to top.” The article states: “At senior levels, the United States helped rewrite Georgian military doctrine and train its commanders and staff officers. At the squad level, American marines and soldiers trained Georgian soldiers in the fundamentals of battle.
“Georgia, meanwhile, began re-equipping its forces with Israeli and American firearms, reconnaissance drones, communications and battlefield management equipment, new convoys of vehicles and stockpiles of ammunition.”
As for the principle of national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the US is highly selective when it comes to its application. No one in either political party or in the establishment media has sought to explain why Serbia’s military intervention against Kosovan separatists was a war crime, while Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia was legitimate.
The Bush administration was the prime mover behind Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia last February, on grounds indistinguishable from those claimed by anti-Georgian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Moreover, the US encouraged and financed the forces that sought to effect the secession of Chechnya from Russia in the 1990s.
Since the United States was clearly involved in the Georgian assault on South Ossetia, one must ask what were its intentions. It is difficult to believe that US policy makers believed Russia would take no action in response to such an immense provocation. Why then, would they support a move that would bring Russia into a direct conflict with one of Washington’s principal allies in the Caucasus—a region that constitutes a bridgehead between the resource-rich Caspian Basin and Western Europe and houses critical oil and gas pipelines?
The only plausible answer is that the United States is deliberately seeking a major escalation of tensions between Russia and the West. Even if the current conflict does not spiral immediately into a wider conflagration, the fate of “little Georgia” will be invoked by the United States to justify a far more aggressive and confrontational stance toward Russia.
The demands being raised by the Bush administration, the European Union, the United Nations and others for a return to the “status quo ante” in Georgia are drenched in hypocrisy. They all know very well that the US is not about to abandon what it has come to see as a critical prop to its position in the Caucasus and its long-term perspective of reducing Russia to a semi-colonial status.
The resumption of something akin to the Cold War underscores the real motives that underlay the decades of confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union. American imperialism considered the Soviet Union—and continues to view Russia—as an obstacle to its geo-strategic aim of securing hegemony over Eurasia.
There is undoubtedly a domestic political component to the US-backed provocation against Russia as well. The Bush administration and the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, want the November elections to take place under conditions of immense international crisis. They calculate that an environment of fear and insecurity will strengthen McCain’s chances, since a major prop of his campaign is his supposed foreign policy experience and national security expertise.
Obama, predictably and pathetically, is responding by seeking to assert his own militaristic credentials. Within minutes of Bush’s threatening statement against Russia on Monday, Obama issued his own denunciation of Russia in terms almost identical to those of Bush and McCain.
The immensely dangerous implications of the eruption of war in the Caucasus leave no doubt about where the drive of imperialism to carve up the world is leading. US imperialism intends to let nothing stand in the way of its goal of establishing global hegemony. It is dragging the American working class and the world into a catastrophe.
The only force that can stop it is the revolutionary mobilization of the American and international working class.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under War & Terrorism News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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