Truthout: Big Bad Russkies and Nasty Neocons

[BurtWorm]

Excellent commentary from journalist Steve Weissman:


http://www.truthout.org/article/big-bad-russkies-and-nasty-neocons

Thursday 14 August 2008

by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective


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It's déjà vu all over again, and none have taken greater comfort in the still-escalating crisis than John McCain, his foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann (whose firm lobbied for the Georgians) and the same neoconservatives who pushed Americans to flex our great power muscles in Iraq in even more disgusting ways than Vladimir Putin has done in Georgia. Robert Kagan set the tone in The Washington Post, charging that Putin had "reestablished a virtual czarist rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world."

Wholeheartedly siding with "my friend Misha Saakashvili," McCain then announced on behalf of every American, "We are all Georgians now"

<We interrupt this commentary to bring instant analysis from Burt Worm: :puke: >

and called for NATO to step in to "stabilize this dangerous situation." He also repeated his long-standing demand to bring Georgia into NATO, a position that the less bellicose Obama is also taking. NATO membership would commit the United States and its allies to defend the Georgians against Russia with military force. This is a life-and-death commitment few Americans would want to make if anyone took the time to explain it to them.

More sensibly, the French, Germans, and other Europeans have never been eager to go along with American efforts to extend NATO membership into the unruly Caucasus, remembering all too well how the First World War began in the similarly chaotic Balkans. The Europeans will hardly change their minds now, having just seen how reckless Saakashvili and his American supporters can be.

McCain talks grandly of "a moral commitment" to defend "Georgian democracy." It's heady stuff, echoing back to November 2003, when Washington helped stage Georgia's Rose Revolution. The National Endowment for Democracy, which took over much of American covert funding from the CIA in 1983, supplied a good part of the cash and used many of the same nonviolent activists, youth groups and "civil society" fronts it would subsequently employ in Ukraine. Sadly, Misha Saakashvili turned out to be just about as democratic as Putin, manipulating elections, using force against his opponents and greatly restricting press freedom during a state of emergency in November 2007. Under his leadership, Georgia remains famously corrupt, and he has proved every bit as warm and compassionate toward the breakaway Ossetians and Abkhasians as Putin has been toward the Georgians.

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