The Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, which precipitated a wider conflict between Georgia and Russia, was a move so boneheadedly perverse that it almost certainly has roots in the Bush White House. The Georgians obviously believed that they had sufficient backing from the West, i.e., from the US and its allies in the EU and NATO, such as they are, to risk provoking their much larger and much more heavily armed neighbor. Russia’s prompt and overwhelming response to the provocation apparently caught everyone, from Georgia to Texas, off guard.
This is puzzling, given Russia’s loud objections to consideration of Georgia and Ukraine for membership in NATO, and its equally vocal opposition to the placement of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Did anyone seriously think an armed attack against what is in essence a Russian protectorate, on the Russian border, would be taken more lightly than the crude diplomatic and military pressures behind the NATO membership drive and the Star Wars installations?
Bush delivered a whining complaint about the Russian smackdown of its presumptuous neighbor, saying that the Russian use of force was disproportionate to the provocation — not that he acknowledged there was one — and “unaccceptable in the 21st century.”
Think about this for a moment. The man who invaded two countries, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and turning millions more into refugees, all more or less in response to a flukily successful attack on the US by a handful of ambitious terrorists who killed fewer than 3,000 civilians, says that Russia’s response to an attack by a neighboring country, on a protectorate of theirs, on their own border, is “unacceptable in the 21st century.”
Approached logically, the statement allows for only two conclusions: either Bush thinks that the Russians haven’t killed nearly enough Georgian civilians and should have invaded some other country for good measure, or he thinks that Russia is way more out of control than the US has been during the past seven years. Either way, he’s flat fucken insane.
I won’t pretend to understand all the maneuvering by the US, Europe, Russia and China in the region, but it’s clear that two overlapping elements are dominating the mix: oil and gas and the transportation thereof, and various degrees of desire to keep Russia from regaining the clout it once exercised over the host of small countries upon which it borders.
The now-abandoned website of PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, once hosted a policy paper called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which held as one of its central theses that the United States should not permit any country or group of countries, allies or not, to become economic and military competitors with us. The idea was doomed even before we started pouring into the black holes of Afghanistan and Iraq however many trillions the tab will run before someone wises up and closes the tap, but that’s not to say that PNAC’s supporters and signatories, which included at one time just about everyone in the Bush administration other than Bush himself, probably because the document had no goat illustrations, and Colin Powell, who got pantsed for not enlisting, have given up on the dream.
Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld and a bunch of the other starry-eyed dreamers of American empire who signed the organization’s statement of principles — if you’re relatively familiar with the top two appointee tiers from bush’s first term, check out the list; it’s astonishing — are gone from the administration now, but several important ones remain, and one man who didn’t sign but has the statement engraved on his pacemaker still sits in the vice president’s chair. Cheney’s response to the Russian boot in Georgia’s ass was that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered,” which sounded pretty tough until he added that “its continuation would have serious consequences for [Russia's] relations with the United States.”
Well maybe so, but meanwhile Russia still has way more of what we need — gas, oil and pipelines — than we do, and they’re in the enviable position of enjoying both a surplus and a vertical monopoly of those commodities, which is to say that while we have almost no options between annoying the hell out of them and nuking them, they can pretty much cripple us without pulling a single trigger. For good measure, they’re buddies with Iran, whose ability to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, through which almost all of the oil we buy is shipped, means they can give our energy balls a good long squeeze if we get out of hand.
With most of our ground combat capacity either stapled to the desert in Iraq or off slaughtering wedding parties in Taliban country, we have been hemorrhaging credibility as a military threat for going on five years now. We’re in no position to kick anyone’s ass, unless it’s some place like Grenada, least of all Russia’s, and our inability to issue credible threats short of the nuclear makes us look even more stupid than has become usual during the Bush administration’s tenure, because the morons simply can’t refrain from talking trash even in the sure knowledge that it makes them look escalatingly more stupid.
John McCain signalled his four-square allegiance to stupidity when he announced that “we are all Georgians now,” as if Americans had risen up with one voice to denounce the Russian bear instead of looking irritably over their shoulders, anxious to get back to the coverage of the Olympics, to say, “what? who?”
McCain followed up by announcing that in this century, it’s unacceptable for one country to invade another, as if he’s running on Ghandi’s platform and not Curtis LeMay’s. Processing that level of bullshit would have at least momentarily paralyzed a real reporter, but the play ones covering McCain reported the comments with nary a stray titter. Barack Obama’s unexceptional call for a cease fire was the subject of more analysis than McCain’s weird histrionics, but no one offered the interpretation that in a perfect world would be the accurate one: we can’t do anything anyway, so we may as well ask them to stop fighting and see what happens.
If that’s what Obama was thinking, there might be hope for him yet.
Meanwhile, though, you go to bat with the administration you have, not the one you want, and the one we have has yet again managed to get killed some thousands of people who would otherwise still be alive, and to alienate some considerably larger number of the ones who managed to stay alive.
On paper this whole thing must have looked like a win-win situation to whoever came up with the crack-brained scheme. The Georgians would get their province back, the Russians would be embarassed by this flouting of their power at their very doorstep, and other former Soviet Republics would be encouraged to drift westward. There’s absolutely no reason at all to think it would work, even without benefit of hindsight, but this is an administration who want what they want and who apparently remain convinced that what they want is what will happen. It’s a very Soviet way of looking at things, and it’s serving us about as well as it served the Soviets.
About the only positive thing to come from all this is the probability that at least for the rest of this year, no other small countries will get suckered by the promise of US support into shooting at someone they oughtn’t. That’s by no means a bad thing, but the price of the lesson is as usual way too high and paid almost entirely by people who had no voice in the matter.
We should look, by the way, for the administration to somehow screw up before they leave town the little bit of progress they’ve made with North Korea; if there’s one thing recent history tells us, it’s that when these clowns do something right, it’s a mistake that they won’t leave uncorrected for long.
