Georgian Conflict Manipulated by U.S./NATO/Russia

With the advance of Russian troops and tanks into the Georgian city of of Gori, and the accompanying denunciation of the Bush Administration, which seeks a UN Security Council condemnation of the move, the crisis around the South Ossetia-Georgia conflict seems primed to enter a new, more dangerous stage.

The U.S. says there's no chance they will intervene militarily (but who knows what kind of CIA covert operation is in the offing), and the Germans are trying to be some kind of peace broker. Meanwhile, the latest breaking news via BBC is that the Georgians have totally pulled out of South Ossetia, and Russian forces occupy Tskhinvali.

But make no mistake: this is a very complex and dangerous situation. To even pose it as "now" Russian tanks are rolling in is to echo U.S./Nato propaganda.

The South Ossetian province of Georgia is not ethnically Georgian. They have sought their independence and/or autonomy from Georgia for some time now. (Think of Georgia as a kind of baby Russia, with its own oppressed ethnic groups.)

It was Georgia that reneged on an autonomy agreement and referendum with South Ossetia. (There is another breakaway Georgian province in the mix, too: Abkhazia.) On the other hand, Georgia has been a victim of "great Russian chauvinism" ever since Tsarist times. Lenin, just before his death, failed to out-maneuver Stalin on the question of national sovereignty for the then-new "Soviet Georgian Republic," who pressed forceable "union" between Soviet Russia and Georgia (and other former Russian provinces). The abuse of national rights by a portion of the Bolshevik party got so bad that Lenin asked Stalin to be removed as General Secretary of the Communist Party, in order to push a reassessment of national relations between Soviet Russia and its neighbors -- one that would respect the national sovereignty of other countries. But Lenin died suddenly, and the request to remove Stalin and change relations with Georgia was suppressed, only to surface years later as part of the famous Khrushchev revelations.

Now, both Russian and the U.S./NATO are cynically utilizing the conflict as a proxy for their own great power confrontation. This is dangerous posturing, similar to the use of the Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks and Greeks in the Balkan Wars that preceded World War I. The lust for U.S. dominance in every corner of the world is the major destabilizing factor of our time. In the east, it has stirred up the hornet's nest of radical Islamic fundamentalism (after first courting the very same insurgents it supported against a then Westernizing Soviet Union, and then abandoning them).

In old Europe, nationalist and revanchist causes rooted in centuries-old resentments and inequalities are being cynically manipulated by the U.S. and NATO allies and Russia. The last time such matchsticks were lit within Europe itself we witnessed the horror of the Bosnian War, with its genocide, concentration camps, and massive relocation of displaced civilians. The time before that... World War I.

From the UK Guardian:

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president turned prime minister, in his public statements seemed to put more importance on Georgia's ambitions to join Nato. At its summit in Bucharest this year, Nato agreed that Georgia would become a member of the western military alliance, which would not have gone down well with the Kremlin.

What is not in dispute is that Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, overplayed his hand or walked into a Russian trap, but that is almost besides the point. James Sherr, an analyst at the Chatham House thinktank, argues that what the episode shows is Russia's determination to protect its owns interests whatever it takes....

On Politico, Ben Smith looks at how Barack Obama and John McCain, the two US presidential hopefuls have reacted to the crisis. He notes that Obama took a very mainstream position, calling for negotiations, but that McCain took a much more confrontational stance towards Russia.

Then we have this from Steve Clemons at The Washington Note on "American culpability" in the crisis:

My own view is that the U.S. has displayed a reckless disregard for Russian interests for some time. I don't like Russia's swing to greater domestic authoritarianism and worry about its stiffened posture on a number of international fronts -- but Simes convinces me in his important Foreign Affairs essay, "Losing Russia," that much of what we are seeing unfold between Russia and Georgia involves a high quotient of American culpability....

By pushing Kosovo the way the US did and aggravating nationalist sensitivities, Russia could in reaction be rationally expected to further integrate and cultivate South Ossetia and Abkhazia under de facto Russian control and pull these provinces that border Russia away from the state of Georgia.

At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time.... The U.S. rejected Russia's secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.

Now thousands are dead. The fact is that a combination of American recklessness, serious miscalculation and over-reach by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as Russia's forceful reassertion of its regional national interests and status as an oil and gas rich, tough international player means America and Europe have yet again helped generate a crisis that tests US global credibility.

With a lame-duck president, as with the war drums beat over Iran, it's hard to know how far Washington will go in pushing a bellicose foreign policy. But the recklessness of a certain element within the Pentagon/CIA/Executive branch establishment, and the obliviousness and cowardice of many other actors there, means that no one should rest easy these days.

Once some people get the taste of war and conquest, they don't like to let go.

Is there no hope? (a threnody on Korea and Mosul)

It is enough to point out that even though there is an overwhelming amount of public information that Bush started an aggressive war based on lies and blatant propaganda, nothing is done to bring this criminal to the bar. Or that his administration countenances torture, openly, and is treated with deference by all mainstream authorities.

I have given this much thought, but we are finished as a civilization, and certainly as any progressive force in history. Humanity itself is very unlikely to survive the coming world war. This war is guaranteed due to the irrational insistence on nation-state production and competition for international markets and raw materials (including competition over labor as a production input).

It could be a chicken-or-egg dilemma, but the other side of this is the epidemic of narcissistic self-indulgence and self-reference that ridicules knowledge and stubbornly refuses to learn from humanity's mistakes. In this sense, America has gotten the president it deserves in George W. Bush, a narcissistic, sociopath-type, who sees the end of his party's rule (or his class's rule) as coterminous with an apocalyptic end of days.

The anti-intellectualism of U.S. society has poisoned any reasoned discourse, drenched as it is in anti-Marxist, triumphalist ideologies that are shallow in the extreme, and ridiculous in the concrete.

Mistake after mistake, crime after bloody crime, mass murder after mass murder, from Korea and Vietnam to the sectarian killing fields of Iraq, the U.S. and its impressionistic train of pundits, media stars, would-be critical bloggers, and brainless idiots full of the certainty of their own mentalistic creations, pontificate, bluster or excuse the disaster that has been U.S. foreign policy. They have nothing to replace it with. Liberals wash their hands of Iraq, crying crocodile tears over civil war, leaving moral posturing about democracy and a better life to the vicious GOP, who have no intention of helping anyone, unless it means lining their own pockets and bringing billions into the coffers of American corporations.

Meanwhile, revelations come out, about torture, about U.S. mass murder of civilians in Korea, about sectarian killings, and the response is inured neglect. A collective shrug of the shoulders. What outrage is possible is displaced onto meaningful but lesser atrocities, like the firings of the U.S. attorneys. (And I've written on the latter myself, so this is not aimed at anyone in particular).

The Korean revelations, as written up [at Daily Kos] by OneCrankyDom (see link above), or by Stephen Soldz at his blog, can be read in more detail at the AP story, "Declassified documents confirms U.S. killed civilians during 'Korean War'".

POHANG BEACH

A declassified U.S. Navy document confirms that on Sept. 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army's request, opened fire on a refugee encampment on a beach near the southern South Korean port of Pohang. Survivors say 100 to 200 refugees — mostly women and children — were killed.

KOKAN-RI SHRINE

... 83 were killed, including many children. Declassified documents show that commanders of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, operating in that area, had issued orders two weeks earlier to shoot civilians found in the war zone.

YOUNGCHOON CAVE

As many as 300 refugees were killed, many suffocated, on Jan. 20, 1951, when U.S. warplanes dropped apparent napalm firebombs at the entrance to a cavern where the South Koreans were sheltering 90 miles southeast of Seoul, survivors say....

DOON-PO STOREHOUSE

Also in January 1951, south of Seoul, U.S. warplanes killed 300 South Korean refugees as they jammed into a storehouse at the village of Doon-po, survivors say....

SANSONG VILLAGE

In another napalm attack that month, U.S. warplanes struck Sansong village, 125 miles southeast of Seoul, killing 34 villagers, a declassified U.S. military document said. It quoted U.S. officials saying Sansong villagers had helped North Korean troops, who kept supplies there, but it also reported "no enemy casualties" in the strike. Survivors denied they had aided the enemy and said they had no warning to evacuate.

And then there's the 21 Yazidis pulled off a bus near Mosul and lined up and shot. It was a reprisal killing by Muslims for an earlier barbaric death by stoning of a Yazidi woman, whose crime was falling in love with a Muslim and converting to Islam. The stoning death was reportedly put onto the Internet. Here's one of many press stories covering this tragedy.

Finally, there's the insanity of nation-states fighting each other over the world's finite markets and resources. Some diaries at Daily Kos went mano a mano over this issue, while missing the main point: capitalist production and an insistence on holding world productive capacities to an organization by nation state or regional alliance is certain to lead, as it did previously in 1914 and 1939 to a new and massively horrific world war.

People who know absolutely nothing about history, but love the sound of their own voices and worship their own thoughts, sneer at the promise of socialism. The corpses of the millions killed by Stalin and Mao fertilize their well-meaning sermonizing (giving them the benefit of the doubt), while their consciences seem not to blanch at the millions killed by imperialist conquest and rivalry in World War I and II (and numerous other wars, or by the sectarian and nationalist conflicts of which Iraq and Bosnia are only two well-known recent examples). The shadow of Hiroshima seeps ominously into what's left of our souls.

No, there is no hope. Humanity is inexecrably stupid and cruel. This does not, irrationally enough, mean that I will abandon all hope myself. It is nobler to act as if the universe were moral, that good can triumph, that reason will achieve a revolution in human manners and civilization, that the very being of humankind will evolve into something higher and finer.

How calmly does the olive branch
observe the sky begin to blanch,
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair!

Poem link