- Was an independent Ossetia inevitable after Kosovo or
is it an US election ruse gone wrong, asks Eric Walberg
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- Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a gritty, straight-talking
30-minute interview with CNN this week in Russian. It was not translated
or reported on widely in the US media, which is a shame. He charged that
US military personnel were in South Ossetia during the attack, and lectured
about such topics as Ossetia's long membership in the Russian empire (since
1801) and Ossetians' age-old resentment of Georgian chauvinism, especially
following the 1917 Russian revolution and the 1990 declaration of Georgian
independence. A South Ossetian legislator has already mooted the possibility
that it will eventually become part of the Russian Federation.
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- When asked by CNN if he would stop threatening neighbours
now that the Ossetian crisis was over, he angrily dismissed the question
as preposterous, saying it was up to the US and its new Eastern European
clients to stop threatening Russia. It is the Polish and Czech missile
bases and Ukrainian and Georgian pretenses to join in the nuclear-tipped
encirclement of Russia that are the destabilising developments forcing
Russia to batten the hatches. The Russians see the bases as a precursor
to a much larger system that would undermine the already seriously eroded
Russian nuclear deterrent. "For the first time in history - and I
want to emphasise this - there will be elements of the US nuclear capability
on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of
international security. Of course, we have to respond to that," said
Putin at a press conference last year which was also not reported in the
mainstream US media.
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- Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined Putin's words
Monday, referring to "the reality of the post-America world"
and warning that "in the absence of a reasonable multilateral dialogue
we will be forced to react unilaterally." Europe's inability
to produce a new collective security system, "open for everyone and
taking into account everyone's interests," was to blame for the Georgia
crisis. He added: "There is a feeling that NATO again needs frontline
states to justify its existence."
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- As if to make his point, the Russian military carried
out a successful test of a Topol RS-12M nuclear capable stealth rocket
from the Plesetsk space centre. Analysts are already speculating that Putin
(OK, Medvedev) may well "take out" the Polish missile site. "He
has no other option. The proposed system integrates the entire US nuclear
arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border.
It's no different than Khrushchev's plan to deploy nuclear missiles in
Cuba in the 1960s," writes Mike Whitney at Online Journal. At the
very least he "will be forced to raise the stakes and send warplanes
over the construction site. That is the logical first-step that any responsible
leader would take before removing the site altogether." So if Cold
War II keeps accelerating and something like this happens later this year,
what should we make of it? Is this Russia threatening and even invading
its neighbour, or is it a justifiable warning to the US to back down from
its attempts to instigate WWIII?
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- Is it possible that all this furfural is really just
an early "October Surprise", in the US electoral tradition that
both Reagan and Bush II made such masterful use of? Recall that Ronald
Reagan's advisors orchestrated a delay in returning US hostages from Iran
in 1980, tipping the balance in his favour in the elections that year.
President George W Bush got a letter purportedly from Osama bin Laden weeks
before the elections in 2004, conveniently reminding Americans that he
is their defender against terrorists. This possibility was the inspiration
for the 1998 movie "Wag the Dog", where a few weeks before the
elections, a presidential advisor hires a Hollywood producer to fabricate
and market a war in an ex-socialist bloc country (Albania) and ensure the
incumbent's re-election.
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- In the current "reality show" version, discretion
is thrown completely to the wind, with a certain Randy Scheunemann playing
both doctor and advisor to Republican "incumbent" Senator John
McCain. Scheunemann's two-man Orion Strategies lobby firm has been advising
Latvia since 2001 and more recently, Georgia. Georgia hopes to following
Latvia's success in joining NATO and - why not? - the European Union. It
has already paid Orion Strategies $300,000 to this end.
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- Putin firmly declared in his CNN interview that the attack
on Russian peacekeepers by Georgia was given the green light by US officials
as part of an US election campaign ploy. He was most likely referring
to McCain, a personal friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili,
and Scheunemann, McCain's chief foreign policy advisor. Or possibly Joseph
Wood, Cheney's deputy assistant for national security affairs, who was
in Georgia shortly before the war began. Or both.
-
- But Putin is caught between a rock and a hard place in
this US election year. Even if he's right about Scheunemann, McCain's advisor
has his counterpart in Senator Barack Obama's chief foreign policy advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who while being no fan of Bush, is rubbing his hands
in glee over the Russian move to protect Ossetia . So whoever wins in November
will undoubtedly push CWII into high gear, come what may.
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- Will this "Wag the Dog" Part II bring in the
votes for McCain? That is far from certain considering his admiration for
the now-despised Bush, his endless gaffes and his patent lack of intelligence.
However, the key to US elections - the Israeli lobby - is not happy with
Brzezinski, and could scuttle Obama's candidacy, despite Obama's choice
of self-proclaimed Zionist Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Recall
that Brzezinski was foreign policy advisor to ex-president Jimmy Carter,
whose Camp David accords forced Israel to give the Sinai back to Egypt.
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- Enter Scheunemann. He has no such skeletons in his closet.
And he is a big fan of the current Middle East make-over designed to ensure
Israeli supremacy. As director of Chalabi's Committee for the Liberation
of Iraq he pushed for the invasion in 2003. Mission accomplished, he found
his new warrior prince in Tbilisi. Scheunemann is just one of dozens of
US and Israeli advisors to the trigger-happy Georgian president. Israel
has been actively supporting Saakashvili, eager to see the Georgian pipeline
project bypassing Russia completed. Georgian Defence Minister Davit Kezerashvili
and Minister of Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili are both Israeli citizens
who returned to Georgia to enter politics.
-
- If in fact the US Israeli lobby has decided on McCain
for president, and passed the word on to Sheunemann, this could well account
for the green light that Saakashvili clearly thought he had to attack Russian
peacekeeping troops and Ossetia civilians, killing hundreds if not the
1,500 claimed by Russia. And what better way to force both candidates to
shore up Bush's policy of war and death, just in case by some fluke the
suspicious Obama overcomes the many hurdles to a candidate not enjoying
the full confidence (i.e., control) of "the lobby".
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- You can't fault Obama for trying to please them, short
of firing his patron Brzezinski. Already, he has dropped his willingness
to talk to "the enemy", which clearly means Russia these days,
every bit as much as Iran. Under him, Iraq will keep its US bases and Afghanistan
will absorb any troops who leave Iraq. Whether or not Washington succeeds
in bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is the only moot point in all
this, and this really depends more on Russia than on who inhabits the White
House for the next four years.
-
- This is all very much like Brzezinski's scheming as advisor
to president Carter. He now boasts that by orchestrating US funding of
Islamic extremists like bin Laden from 1979 on, he was responsible for
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet
Union. This did nothing to wag Carter's dog back into power in 1980, but
that is of little consequence to these shadowy advisors, who are never
without work in the higher echelons of US politics, just as Scheunemann
will not suffer in the least if his candidate is found to have Aldzheimer's
and forgets to show for his inauguration next January. And if Obama wins,
he will merely cede his White House pass to Brzezinski and continue advising
world leaders such as the hapless Georgian president.
-
- It's quite possible that this ratcheting up of tensions
in the Caucasus is intentional. It clinched the Polish missile deal in
a hurry and put Russia in a bad light, giving succour to those planning
to make the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline the key link in a network
bypassing Russia. But the Georgian pipeline was shut down by BP during
the recent conflict, and it is far from clear that spin doctors and tweaking
the Russian bear's nose will bring the US any closer to cutting Russia
down to size. What this episode and Putin's steely evaluation did was to
further expose the poison at the heart of American politics and confirm
the world's suspicions that Russia is not afraid to stand up for itself.
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- ***
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- Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach
him at
- www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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