From: Yemane Natnael (yemane_natnael@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Aug 13 2008 - 15:44:23 EDT
Imperialist hypocrisy over war in Georgia
As ceasefire takes hold
By Patrick Martin
13 August 2008
Fighting has largely subsided between Russian and Georgian
troops, following the declaration of a halt in hostilities by
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. He made the announcement in
Moscow after ceasefire talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy,
who represented the European Union.
Sarkozy then flew to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, where
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili agreed to the same ceasefire
terms, including a pull-back of Russian troops to South Ossetia
and Abkhazia and an end to Georgian military operations against
both territories, nominally part of Georgia but autonomous and
under Russian protection since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The five-day war has revealed the extremely tense state of
international relations, posing the danger of a direct conflict
between major powers for the first time since the end of the Cold
War. It has also underscored the complete hypocrisy of the Bush
administration and the American media, which have vilified Russia
for military actions that are dwarfed by the ongoing wars of aggression
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is nothing progressive about Russia’s military intervention
in Georgia. The Russian ruling elite is pursuing its own predatory
aims in the Caucasus, a region that was ruled for two centuries
by Moscow before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. However,
the main force behind the eruption of the crisis in the Caucasus
is US imperialism, which has carried out a provocative policy
aimed at supplanting Russia in that country’s former spheres
of influence in order to establish American hegemony over the
Eurasian land mass. A central instrument in this policy has been
the pro-American Saakashvili regime, which came to power in 2004
in the US-engineered “Rose Revolution.”
Georgia initiated the current conflict with its sudden assault
last week on South Ossetia, which included a devastating artillery
attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of the region, in which as many
as 2,000 people may have been killed. The overwhelming Russian
response, including hundreds of tanks and fighter jets, quickly
routed the Georgian military forces.
The two governments traded charges of genocide and ethnic cleansing
in South Ossetia. Tens of thousands of Ossetians—a population
distinct from Georgians in language and culture—fled into
the Russian territory of North Ossetia, just across the international
border, seeking to escape the violence.
Refugees told journalists that there were hundreds, if not
thousands, killed in the initial Georgian attack on their homeland,
and that Georgian troops had killed civilians indiscriminately.
An aid worker told the Associated Press that the road from Tskhinvali
“was full of bodies, whole families died there, children,
the elderly.” Another described a Georgian plane bombing
a column of fleeing refugees. A Reuters reporter found at least
200 people being treated for bullet wounds in Vladikavkaz, the
capital of North Ossetia.
The Georgian government filed charges with the International
Court of Justice in The Hague, claiming that Ossetian fighters
were carrying out atrocities against Georgian villages and portraying
these attacks as part of a pattern of “ethnic cleansing”
backed by Russia. The Georgian health minister put the death toll
in his country at 175—suggesting that media reports of a
Russian “blitz” were exaggerated—while UN officials
estimated that 100,000 people have been forced from their homes
on both sides.
Saakashvili declared a unilateral ceasefire Sunday, as soon
as the scale of the military debacle became clear. But Russian
forces ignored this declaration, pushing ahead to destroy Georgian
military facilities just outside the disputed territories of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia, in the towns of Gori and Senaki.
Russian President Medvedev said Russian troops had inflicted
“very significant losses” and left the Georgian military
“disorganized.” Press accounts confirmed that there
was little to differentiate retreating Georgian soldiers and civilians
fleeing the Russian advance. Georgian troops abandoned armored
vehicles, supplies and even their helmets and weapons in their
panic, suggesting that there would have been little sustained
resistance to a Russian push into the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
However, Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and high-ranking
military officers have repeatedly declared since Sunday that they
had no intention of carrying out such an action.
There have undoubtedly been back-channel assurances to the
European Union, NATO and the United States that the Russian military
incursion had aims limited only to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
This did not stem the apocalyptic rhetoric from the Bush administration,
the US media, or Saakashvili. The Georgian president went on state
television to accuse Russia of the “preplanned, cold-blooded...
murder of a small country.”
With the shooting halted, at least for the time being, it is
worth reflecting on the hysterical tenor of the Western media,
particularly in the United States, which have repeatedly compared
the Russian military operation to Hitler’s assault on Czechoslovakia
in 1938, the Soviet invasion of the same country in 1968, and
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The general thrust of these commentaries is that the United
States must resume something like the Cold War against an expansionist
Russia. The New York Times, in an editorial Tuesday, declared,
“Moscow claims it is merely defending the rights of ethnic
minorities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which have been trying
to break from Georgia since the early 1990s. But its ambitions
go far beyond that. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin... appears determined
to reimpose by force and intimidation as much of the old Soviet
sphere of influence as he can get away with.”
The newspaper demands, “The United States and its European
allies must tell Mr. Putin in the clearest possible terms that
such aggression will not be tolerated. And that there will be
no redivision of Europe.”
The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial headlined “Vladimir
Bonaparte,” demanded a series of actions that would lead
to a direct military confrontation between the United States and
Russia, the countries with the world’s two biggest nuclear
arsenals, including enrolling Georgia and Ukraine in NATO and
beginning an airlift of military aid to Tbilisi.
An op-ed column in the Journal, written by Josef Joffe,
editor of the conservative German daily Die Zeit, underscored
the strategic and economic interests underlying the conflict.
According to Joffe, Abkhazia and Ossetia, however obscure, “are
the flash points of the 21st century’s Great Game, and the
issue is: Who will gain control over the Caspian Basin, the richest
depository of strategic resources next to the Middle East.”
One of the most strident anti-Russian voices was that of former
US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a supporter
of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. In comments to
the British Guardian and the German Die Welt, he
compared Putin to Hitler and Stalin, and the Russian intervention
in Georgia to the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. “Georgia
is to an extent the Finland of today, both morally and strategically,”
he claimed.
Like Joffe, Brzezinski pointed to the central role of oil,
particularly the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline built over the last
decade with US support to bring oil from the region to the world
market, bypassing Russian territory. “If Georgia no longer
has its sovereignty, it means... that the West is cut off from
the Caspian Sea and Central Asia,” he said.
The strategists of US imperialism have broader interests than
oil, however. Brzezinski himself has long sought the breakup,
not only of the old Soviet Union, but of the Russian republic
which comprises the bulk of the land mass of the former USSR.
As the Guardian observed Monday, “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.”
The rhetorical onslaught over the Russo-Georgian crisis is
particularly cynical given the record of the Bush administration.
“Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state,”
Bush declared Monday. “Such an action is unacceptable in
the 21st century.”
Actually, the record of the 21st century consists of little
else, particularly for the government of the United States. Since
it took office in January 2001, the Bush administration has invaded
and occupied two sovereign states, Afghanistan and Iraq, while
supporting similar attacks by its client states: the invasion
of Lebanon by Israel in 2006, the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia
in 2007, and the invasion of Ecuador by Colombia earlier this
year.
The contrast between US howls about “Russian aggression”
in Georgia and its support for Israeli aggression in Lebanon is
particularly instructive.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice notably dragged her feet
on a ceasefire in the Lebanon conflict, visiting Beirut while
Israeli tanks and warplanes were ravaging south Lebanon and rejecting
the pleas of the US-backed Lebanese government to intervene.
Israel
had the right to secure its interests before being compelled to
pull back, she argued. But in Georgia, Rice declared that a ceasefire
was urgently needed and had to precede any other action.
The purpose of these bad faith arguments is as much domestic
as international. The Bush administration seeks to stoke up an
atmosphere reminiscent of the Cold War. This is widely viewed
in right-wing circles as the only way to engineer a victory by
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, under conditions
where the Bush administration and the Republican Party are widely
hated. (A poll published Tuesday found that 41 percent of Americans
regarded Bush as the worst president in US history, while 68 percent
wanted all US troops out of Iraq within a year).
The Bush administration wants the November election to be held
in an environment of international crisis, so as to intimidate
and divert popular opposition to the war in Iraq, Bush’s
reactionary social policies and the deepening economic crisis.
The idea is to have yet another “national security”
election which will favor McCain, whose campaign is largely based
on his military background and his supposed foreign policy experience.
The Democrats, including their presidential candidate Barack
Obama, are scrambling to match the provocative and confrontational
rhetoric of the Bush administration and McCain, denouncing Russia
in similar terms and echoing the Bush administration’s demand
that Georgia be admitted to NATO—something Russia considers
an intolerable threat to its security.
Slanted television news reports and articles in liberal (the
New York Times) as well as conservative (the Wall Street
Journal) newspapers that seek to whip up anti-Russian sentiment
are designed to condition public opinion for a major escalation
of Washington’s drive to establish US hegemony over the Caucasus
and the oil-rich regions on its borders.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/ruge-a13.shtml
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