NOAM CHOMSKY | Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston. \u201cNo satire of Funston could reach perfection,\u201d Twain lamented, \u201cbecause Funston occupies that summit himself… [he is] satire incarnated.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a thought that often comes to mind, again in August 2008 during the Georgia-Ossetia-Russia war. George Bush, Condoleezza Rica and other dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the United Nations, warning that Russia could be excluded from international institutions \u201cby taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with\u201d their principles. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously honored, they intoned \u2014 \u201call nations,\u201d that is, apart from those that the US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of others too long and familiar to mention.<\/p>\n
The junior partner joined in as well. British foreign secretary David Miliband accused Russia of engaging in \u201c19th century forms of diplomacy\u201d by invading a sovereign state, something Britain would never contemplate today. That \u201cis simply not the way that international relations can be run in the 21st century,\u201d he added, echoing the decider-in-chief, who said that invasion of \u201ca sovereign neighboring state\u2026is unacceptable in the 21st century.\u201d Mexico and Canada therefore need not fear further invasions and annexation of much of their territory, because the US now only invades states that are not on its borders, though no such constraint holds for its clients, as Lebanon learned once again in 2006.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe moral of this story is even more enlightening,\u201d Serge Halimi writes in Le Monde Diplomatique and CounterPunch newsletter, \u201cwhen, to defend his country’s borders, the charming pro-American Saakashvili repatriates some of the 2,000 soldiers he had sent to invade Iraq,\u201d one of the largest contingents apart from the two warrior states.<\/p>\n
Prominent analysts joined the chorus. Fareed Zakaria applauded Bush\u2019s observation that Russia\u2019s behavior is unacceptable today, unlike the 19th century, \u201cwhen the Russian intervention would have been standard operating procedure for a great power.\u201d We therefore must devise a strategy for bringing Russia \u201cin line with the civilized world,\u201d where intervention is unthinkable.<\/p>\n
There were, to be sure, some who shared Mark Twain\u2019s despair. One distinguished example is Chris Patten, former EU commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party, chancellor of Oxford University and a member of the House of Lords. He wrote that the Western reaction \u201cis enough to make even the cynical shake their heads in disbelief\u201d \u2014 referring to Europe\u2019s failure to respond vigorously to the effrontery of Russian leaders, who, \u201clike 19th-century tsars, want a sphere of influence around their borders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patten rightly distinguishes Russia from the global superpower, which long ago passed the point where it demanded a sphere of influence around its borders, and demands a sphere of influence over the entire world. It also acts vigorously to enforce that demand, in accord with the Clinton doctrine that Washington has the right to use military force to defend vital interests such as \u201censuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources\u201d \u2014 and in the real world, far more.<\/p>\n
Clinton was breaking no new ground, of course. His doctrine derives from standard principles formulated by high-level planners during World War II, which offered the prospect of global dominance. In the postwar world, they determined, the US should aim \u201cto hold unquestioned power\u201d while ensuring the \u201climitation of any exercise of sovereignty\u201d by states that might interfere with its global designs. To secure these ends, \u201cthe foremost requirement [is] the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament,\u201d a core element of \u201can integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.\u201d The plans laid during the war were implemented in various ways in the years that followed.<\/p>\n
The goals are deeply rooted in stable institutional structures. Hence they persist through changes in occupancy of the White House, and are untroubled by the opportunity for \u201cpeace dividends,\u201d the disappearance of the major rival from the world scene, or other marginal irrelevancies. Devising new challenges is never beyond the reach of doctrinal managers, as when Ronald Reagan pulled on his cowboy boots and declared a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army was only two days from Harlingen Texas, and might lead the hordes who are about to \u201csweep over the United States and take what we have,\u201d as Lyndon Johnson lamented when he called for holding the line in Vietnam. Most ominously, those holding the reins may actually believe their own words.<\/p>\n
Returning to the efforts to elevate Russia to the civilized world, the seven charter members of the Group of Eight industrialized countries issued a statement \u201ccondemning the action of our fellow G8 member,\u201d Russia, which has yet to comprehend the Anglo-American commitment to non-intervention. The European Union held a rare emergency meeting to condemn Russia\u2019s crime, its first meeting since the invasion of Iraq, which elicited no condemnation.<\/p>\n
Russia called for an emergency session of the Security Council, but no consensus was reached because, according to Council diplomats, the US, Britain, and some others rejected a phrase that called on both sides \u201cto renounce the use of force.\u201d<\/p>\n
The typical reactions recall Orwell\u2019s observations on the \u201cindifference to reality\u201d of the \u201cnationalist,\u201d who \u201cnot only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but … has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The basic facts are not seriously in dispute. South Ossetia, along with the much more significant region of Abkhazia, were assigned by Stalin to his native Georgia. Western leaders sternly admonish that Stalin\u2019s directives must be respected, despite the strong opposition of Ossetians and Abkhazians. The provinces enjoyed relative autonomy until the collapse of the USSR. In 1990, Georgia\u2019s ultranationalist president Zviad Gamsakhurdia abolished autonomous regions and invaded South Ossetia. The bitter war that followed left 1000 dead and tens of thousands of refugees, with the capital city of Tskhinvali \u201cbattered and depopulated\u201d (New York Times).<\/p>\n
A small Russian force then supervised an uneasy truce, broken decisively on August 7, 2008, when Georgian president Saakashvili\u2019s ordered his forces to invade. According to \u201can extensive set of witnesses,\u201d the Times reports, Georgia\u2019s military at once \u201cbegan pounding civilian sections of the city of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping base there, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.\u201d The predictable Russian response drove Georgian forces out of South Ossetia, and Russia went on to conquer parts of Georgia, then partially withdrawing to the vicinity of South Ossetia. There were many casualties and atrocities. As is normal, the innocent suffered severely.<\/p>\n
Russia reported at first that ten Russian peacekeepers were killed by Georgian shelling. The West took little notice. That too is normal. There was, for example, no reaction when Aviation Week reported that 200 Russians were killed in an Israeli air raid in Lebanon in 1982 during a US-backed invasion that left some 15-20,000 dead, with no credible pretext beyond strengthening Israeli control over the occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n
Among Ossetians who fled north, the \u201cprevailing view,\u201d according to the London Financial Times, \u201cis that Georgia\u2019s pro-western leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to wipe out their breakaway enclave.\u201d Ossetian militias, under Russian eyes, then brutally drove out Georgians, in areas beyond Ossetia as well. \u201cGeorgia said its attack had been necessary to stop a Russian attack that already had been under way,\u201d the New York Times reports, but weeks later \u201cthere has been no independent evidence, beyond Georgia\u2019s insistence that its version is true, that Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Russia, the Wall Street Journal reports, \u201clegislators, officials and local analysts have embraced the theory that the Bush administration encouraged Georgia, its ally, to start the war in order to precipitate an international crisis that would play up the national-security experience of Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.\u201d In contrast, French author Bernard-Henri Levy, writing in the New Republic, proclaims that \u201cno one can ignore the fact that President Saakashvili only decided to act when he no longer had a choice, and war had already come. In spite of this accumulation of facts that should have been blindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers, many in the media rushed as one man toward the thesis of the Georgians as instigators, as irresponsible provocateurs of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Russian propaganda system made the mistake of presenting evidence, which was easily refuted. Its Western counterparts, more wisely, keep to authoritative pronouncements, like Levy\u2019s denunciation of the major Western media for ignoring what is \u201cblindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers\u201d for whom loyalty to the state suffices to establish The Truth \u2014 which, perhaps, is even true, serious analysts might conclude.<\/p>\n
The Russians are losing the \u201cpropaganda war,\u201d BBC reported, as Washington and its allies have succeeded in \u201cpresenting the Russian actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian attack into South Ossetia on August 7, which triggered the Russian operation,\u201d though \u201cthe evidence from South Ossetia about that attack indicates that it was extensive and damaging.\u201d Russia has \u201cnot yet learned how to play the media game,\u201d the BBC observes. That is natural. Propaganda has typically become more sophisticated as countries become more free and the state loses the ability to control the population by force.<\/p>\n
The Russian failure to provide credible evidence was partially overcome by the Financial Times, which discovered that the Pentagon had provided combat training to Georgian special forces commandos shortly before the Georgian attack on August 7, revelations that \u201ccould add fuel to accusations by Vladimir Putin, Russian prime minister, last month that the US had `orchestrated\u2019 the war in the Georgian enclave.\u201d The training was in part carried out by former US special forces recruited by private military contractors, including MPRI, which, as the journal notes, \u201cwas hired by the Pentagon in 1995 to train the Croatian military prior to their invasion of the ethnically-Serbian Krajina region, which led to the displacement of 200,000 refugees and was one of the worst incidents of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars.\u201d The US-backed Krajina expulsion (generally estimated at 250,000, with many killed) was possibly the worst case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Its fate in approved history is rather like that of photographs of Trotsky in Stalinist Russia, for simple and sufficient reasons: it does not accord with the required image of US nobility confronting Serbian evil.<\/p>\n
The toll of the August 2008 Caucasus war is subject to varying estimates. A month afterwards, the Financial Times cited Russian reports that \u201cat least 133 civilians died in the attack, as well as 59 of its own peacekeepers,\u201d while in the ensuing Russian mass invasion and aerial bombardment of Georgia, according to the FT, 215 Georgians died, including 146 soldiers and 69 civilians. Further revelations are likely to follow.<\/p>\n
In the background lie two crucial issues. One is control over pipelines to Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Georgia was chosen as a corridor by Clinton to bypass Russia and Iran, and was also heavily militarized for the purpose. Hence Georgia is \u201ca very major and strategic asset to us,\u201d Zbigniew Brzezinski observes.<\/p>\n
It is noteworthy that analysts are becoming less reticent in explaining real US motives in the region as pretexts of dire threats and liberation fade and it becomes more difficult to deflect Iraqi demands for withdrawal of the occupying army. Thus the editors of the Washington Post admonished Barack Obama for regarding Afghanistan as \u201cthe central front\u201d for the United States, reminding him that Iraq \u201clies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves,\u201d and Afghanistan\u2019s \u201cstrategic importance pales beside that of Iraq.\u201d A welcome, if belated, recognition of reality about the US invasion.<\/p>\n
The second issue is expansion of NATO to the East, described by George Kennan in 1997 as \u201cthe most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era, [which] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the USSR collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev made a concession that was astonishing in the light of recent history and strategic realities: he agreed to allow a united Germany to join a hostile military alliance. This \u201cstunning concession\u201d was hailed by Western media, NATO, and President Bush I, who called it a demonstration of \u201cstatesmanship … in the best interests of all countries of Europe, including the Soviet Union.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gorbachev agreed to the stunning concession on the basis of \u201cassurances that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the east, `not one inch\u2019 in [Secretary of State] Jim Baker’s exact words.\u201d This reminder by Jack Matlock, the leading Soviet expert of the Foreign Service and US ambassador to Russia in the crucial years 1987 to 1991, is confirmed by Strobe Talbott, the highest official in charge of Eastern Europe in the Clinton administration. On the basis of a full review of the diplomatic record, Talbott reports that \u201cSecretary of State Baker did say to then Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in the context of the Soviet Union’s reluctant willingness to let a unified Germany remain part of NATO, that NATO would not move to the east.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clinton quickly reneged on that commitment, also dismissing Gorbachev\u2019s effort to end the Cold War with cooperation among partners. NATO also rejected a Russian proposal for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone from the Arctic to the Black Sea, which would have \u201cinterfered with plans to extend NATO,\u201d strategic analyst and former NATO planner Michael MccGwire observes.<\/p>\n
Rejecting these possibilities, the US took a triumphalist stand that threatened Russian security and also played a major role in driving Russia to severe economic and social collapse, with millions of deaths. The process was sharply escalated by Bush\u2019s further expansion of NATO, dismantling of crucial disarmament agreements, and aggressive militarism. Matlock writes that Russia might have tolerated incorporation of former Russian satellites into NATO if it \u201chad not bombed Serbia and continued expanding. But, in the final analysis, ABM missiles in Poland, and the drive for Georgia and Ukraine in NATO crossed absolute red lines. The insistence on recognizing Kosovo independence was sort of the very last straw. Putin had learned that concessions to the U.S. were not reciprocated, but used to promote U.S. dominance in the world.Once he had the strength to resist, he did so,\u201d in Georgia.<\/p>\n
Clinton officials argue that expansion of NATO posed no military threat, and was no more than a benign move to allow former Russian satellites to join the EU (Talbott). That is hardly persuasive. Austria, Sweden and Finland are in the EU but not NATO. If the Warsaw Pact had survived and was incorporating Latin American countries \u2014 let alone Canada and Mexico \u2014 the US would not easily be persuaded that the Pact is just a Quaker meeting. There should be no need to review the record of US violence to block mostly fanciful ties to Moscow in \u201cour little region over here,\u201d the Western hemisphere, to quote Secretary of War Henry Stimson when he explained that all regional systems must be dismantled after World II, apart from our own, which are to be extended.<\/p>\n
To underscore the conclusion, in the midst of the current crisis in the Caucasus, Washington professes concern that Russia might resume military and intelligence cooperation with Cuba at a level not remotely approaching US-Georgia relations, and not a further step towards a significant security threat.<\/p>\n
Missile defense too is presented here as benign, though leading US strategic analysts have explained why Russian planners must regard the systems and their chosen location as the basis for a potential threat to the Russian deterrent, hence in effect a first-strike weapon. The Russian invasion of Georgia was used as a pretext to conclude the agreement to place these systems in Poland, thus \u201cbolstering an argument made repeatedly by Moscow and rejected by Washington: that the true target of the system is Russia,\u201d AP commentator Desmond Butler observed.<\/p>\n
Matlock is not alone in regarding Kosovo as an important factor. \u201cRecognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence was justified on the principle of a mistreated minority’s right to secession – the principle Bush had established for Kosovo,\u201d the Boston Globe editors comment.<\/p>\n
But there are crucial differences. Strobe Talbott recognizes that \u201cthere’s a degree of payback for what the U.S. and NATO did in Kosovo nine years ago,\u201d but insists that the \u201canalogy is utterly and profoundly false.\u201d No one is a better position to know why it is profoundly false, and he has lucidly explained the reasons, in his preface to a book on NATO\u2019s bombing of Serbia by his associate John Norris. Talbott writes that those who want to know \u201chow events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved\u201d in the war should turn to Norris\u2019s well-informed account. Norris concludes that \u201cit was Yugoslavia\u2019s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform \u2014 not the plight of Kosovar Albanians \u2014 that best explains NATO\u2019s war.\u201d<\/p>\n
That the motive for the NATO bombing could not have been \u201cthe plight of Kosovar Albanians\u201d was already clear from the rich Western documentary record revealing that the atrocities were, overwhelmingly, the anticipated consequence of the bombing, not its cause. But even before the record was released, it should have been evident to all but the most fervent loyalists that humanitarian concern could hardly have motivated the US and Britain, which at the same time were lending decisive support to atrocities well beyond what was reported from Kosovo, with a background far more horrendous than anything that had happened in the Balkans. But these are mere facts, hence of no moment to Orwell\u2019s \u201cnationalists\u201d \u2014 in this case, most of the Western intellectual community, who had made an enormous investment in self-aggrandizement and prevarication about the \u201cnoble phase\u201d of US foreign policy and its \u201csaintly glow\u201d as the millennium approached its end, with the bombing of Serbia as the jewel in the crown.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear from the highest level that the real reason for the bombing was that Serbia was a lone holdout in Europe to the political and economic programs of the Clinton administration and its allies, though it will be a long time before such annoyances are allowed to enter the canon.<\/p>\n
There are of course other differences between Kosovo and the regions of Georgia that call for independence or union with Russia. Thus Russia is not known to have a huge military base there named after a hero of the invasion of Afghanistan, comparable to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, named after a Vietnam war hero and presumably part of the vast US basing system aimed at the Middle East energy-producing regions. And there are many other differences.<\/p>\n
There is much talk about a \u201cnew cold war\u201d instigated by brutal Russian behavior in Georgia. One cannot fail to be alarmed by signs of confrontation, among them new US naval contingents in the Black Sea \u2014 the counterpart would hardly be tolerated in the Caribbean. Efforts to expand NATO to Ukraine, now contemplated, could become extremely hazardous.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, a new cold war seems unlikely. To evaluate the prospect, we should begin with clarity about the old cold war. Fevered rhetoric aside, in practice the cold war was a tacit compact in which each of the contestants was largely free to resort to violence and subversion to control its own domains: for Russia, its Eastern neighbors; for the global superpower, most of the world. Human society need not endure \u2014 and might not survive \u2014 a resurrection of anything like that.<\/p>\n
A sensible alternative is the Gorbachev vision rejected by Clinton and undermined by Bush. Sane advice along these lines has recently been given by former Israeli Foreign Minister and historian Shlomo ben-Ami, writing in the Beirut Daily Star: \u201cRussia must seek genuine strategic partnership with the US, and the latter must understand that, when excluded and despised, Russia can be a major global spoiler. Ignored and humiliated by the US since the Cold War ended, Russia needs integration into a new global order that respects its interests as a resurgent power, not an anti-Western strategy of confrontation.\u201d<\/p>\n