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Hypocrisy of this Magnitude has to be Respected.
By William Blum
06/09/08 "ICH"
- -- Im sorry to say that I think that John McCain is going
to be the next president of the United States. After the long
night of Bush horror any Democrat should easily win, but the
Dems are screwing it up and McCain has been running more-or-less
even with Barack Obama in the polls. The Democrats should run on
the slogan "If you liked Bush, you'll love McCain", but that
would be too outspoken, too direct for the spineless Nancy
Pelosi and her spineless party. Or, "If you liked Iraq, you'll
love Iran." But the Democrat leadership is not on record as
categorically opposing either conflict.
Nor, it seems, do the Democrats have the courage to raise the
issue of McCain not having been born in the United States as the
Constitution requires. Nor questioning him about accusations by
his fellow American prisoners about his considerable
collaboration with his Vietnamese captors. Nor a word about
McCain's highly possible role in the brutal Georgian invasion of
South Ossetia on August 7. (More on this last below.)
Obama has lost much of the sizable liberal/progressive vote
because of his move to the center-right (or his exposure as a
center-rightist), and he now may have lost even his selling
point of being more strongly against the war than McCain -- if
in fact he actually is -- by appointing Joe Biden as his running
mate. Biden has long been a hawk on Iraq (as well as the rest of
US foreign policy), calling for an invasion as far back as
1998.[1] In April, 2007, when pressed in an interview about his
vote for the war in 2003, Biden said: "It was a mistake. I
regret my vote. ... because I learned more, like everybody else
learned, about what, in fact, we were told."[2] This has been a
common excuse of war supporters in recent years when the tide of
public opinion turned against them. But why did millions and
millions of Americans march against the war in the fall of 2002
and early 2003, before it began? What did they know that Joe
Biden didn't know? It was clear to the protesters that George W.
Bush and Dick Cheney were habitual liars, that they couldn't
care less about the people of Iraq, that the defenseless people
of that ancient civilization were going to be bombed to hell;
the protesters knew something about the bombings of Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan; they knew about
napalm, cluster bombs, depleted uranium. ... Didn't Biden know
about any of these things? Those who marched knew that the
impending war was something a moral person could not support;
and that it was totally illegal, a textbook case of a "war of
aggression"; one didn't have to be an expert in international
law to know this. Did Joe Biden think about any of this?
If McCain had a role in the Georgian invasion of
breakaway-region Ossetia it would have been arranged with the
help of Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser
and until recently Georgia's principal lobbyist in Washington.
As head of the neo-conservative Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq in 2002, Scheunemann was one of America's leading advocates
for invading Iraq. One of McCain's primary campaign sales
pitches has been to emphasize his supposed superior experience
in foreign policy matters, which -- again supposedly -- means
something in this world. McCain consistently leads Obama in the
opinion polls on "readiness to be commander-in-chief", or
similar nonsense. The Georgia-Russia hostilities raise -- in the
mass media and the mass mind -- the issue of the United States
needing an experienced foreign policy person to handle such a
"crisis", and, standard in every crisis -- an enemy bad guy.
Typical of the media was the Chicago Tribune praising McCain for
his statesmanlike views on Iraq and stating: "What Russia's
invasion of Georgia showed was that the world is still a very
dangerous place," and Russia is a "looming threat". In addition
to using the expression "Russia's invasion of Georgia", the
Tribune article also referred to "Russia's invasion of South
Ossetia". No mention of Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia
which began the warfare.[3] In a feature story in the Washington
Post on the Georgia events the second sentence was: "The war had
started, Russian jets had just bombed the outskirts of Tbilisi
[Georgian capital]." The article then speaks of "the horror" of
"the Russian invasion". Not the slightest hint of any Georgian
military action can be found in the story.[4] One of course can
find a media report here or there that mentions or at least
implies in passing that an invasion from Georgia is what
instigated the mayhem. But I've yet to come upon one report in
the American mass media that actually emphasizes this point, and
certainly none that put it in the headline. The result is that
if a poll were taken amongst Americans today, I'm sure the
majority of those who have any opinion would be convinced that
the nasty Russians began it all.[5]
What we have here in the American media is simply standard
operating procedure for an ODE (Officially Designated Enemy).
Almost as soon as the fighting began, Dick Cheney announced:
"Russian aggression must not go unanswered."[6] The media needed
no further instructions. Yes, that's actually the way it works.
(See Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, etc., etc.)
The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, is an American
poodle to an extent that would embarrass Tony Blair. Until their
2,000 troops were called home for this emergency, the Georgian
contingent in Iraq was the largest after the US and UK. The
Georgian president prattles on about freedom and democracy and
the Cold War like George W., declaring that the current conflict
"is not about Georgia anymore. It is about America, its
values,".[7] (I must confess that until Saakashvili pointed it
out I hadn't realized that "American values" were involved in
the fighting.) His government recently ran a full-page ad in the
Washington Post. The entire text, written vertically, was:
"Lenin ... Stalin ... Putin ... Give in? Enough is enough.
Support Georgia. ... sosgeorgia.org"[8]
UK prime minister Gordon Brown asserted that Russia's
recognition of the independence of Georgia's two breakaway
regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was "dangerous and
unacceptable."[9] Earlier this year when Kosovo unilaterally
declared its independence from Serbia, the UK, along with the US
and other allied countries quickly recognized it despite
widespread warnings that legitimating the Kosovo action might
lead to a number of other regions in the world declaring their
independence.
Brown's hypocrisy appears as merely the routine stuff of
politicians compared to that of John McCain and George W. re the
Georgia fighting: "I'm interested in good relations between the
United States and Russia, but in the 21st century, nations don't
invade other nations," said McCain [10], the staunch supporter
of US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and leading champion of
an invasion of Iran.
And here is Mahatma Gandhi Bush meditating on the subject:
"Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct
foreign policy in the 21st century."[11]
Hypocrisy of this magnitude has to be respected. It compares
favorably with the motto on automobile license plates of the
state of New Hampshire made by prisoners: "Live Free or Die".
Our beloved president was also moved to affirm that the Russian
recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia:
was an "irresponsible decision". "Russia's action only
exacerbates tensions and complicates diplomatic negotiations,"
he said.{12] Belgrade, are you listening?
It should be noted that linguistically and historically-
distinct South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been autonomous
Russian/Soviet protectorates or regions from early in the 19th
century to 1991, when the Georgian government abolished their
autonomy.
So what then was the purpose of the Georgian invasion of Ossetia
if not to serve the electoral campaign of John McCain, a man who
might be the next US president and be thus very obligated to the
Georgian president? Saakashvili could have wanted to overthrow
the Ossetian government to incorporate it back into Georgia, at
the same time hopefully advancing the cause of Georgia's
petition to become a member of NATO, which looks askance upon
new members with territories in dispute or with military
facilities belonging to a nonmember state such as Russia. But
the nature of the Georgian invasion does not fit this thesis.
The Georgians did none of the things that those staging a coup
have traditionally found indispensable. They did not take over a
TV or radio station, or the airport, or important government
buildings, or military or police installations. They didn't take
into custody key members of the government. All the
US/Israeli-armed and trained Georgia military did was bomb and
kill, civilians and Russian peacekeeper soldiers, the latter
legally there for 16 years under an international agreement. For
what purpose all this if not to incite a Russian intervention?
The only reason the United States did not itself strongly attack
the Russian forces is that it's a pre-eminent principle of
American military interventions to not pick on anyone capable of
really defending themselves.
Unreconstructed cold warriors now fret about Russian
expansionism, warning that Ukraine might be next. But of the
numerous myths surrounding the Cold War, "communist
expansionism" was certainly one of the biggest. We have to
remember that within the space of 25 years, Western powers
invaded Russia three times -- World War I, the "intervention" of
1918-20, and World War II, inflicting some 40 million casualties
in the two world wars alone. (The Soviet Union lost considerably
more people to international warfare on its own land than it did
abroad. There are not too many great powers who can say that.)
To carry out these invasions, the West used Eastern Europe as a
highway. Should it be any cause for wonder that after World War
II the Soviets were determined to close down this highway? Minus
the Cold War atmosphere and indoctrination, most people would
have no problem in seeing the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe
as an act of self defense. Neither does the case of Afghanistan
support the idea of "expansionism". Afghanistan lived alongside
the Soviet Union for more than 60 years with no Soviet military
intrusion. It's only when the United States intervened in
Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one
militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle
with the US-supported Islamic jihadists.
During the Cold War, before undertaking a new military
intervention, American officials usually had to consider how the
Soviet Union would react. That restraint was removed with the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. We may now,
however, be witnessing the beginning of a new kind of
polarization in the world. An increasing number of countries in
the Third World -- with Latin America as a prime example -- have
more fraternal relations with Moscow and/or Beijing than with
Washington. Singapore's former UN ambassador observed: "Most of
the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia" ... While
the western view is that the world "should support the underdog,
Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the
bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the
rest of the world could not be clearer."[13] And the Washington
Post reported: "Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Libyan leader Moammar
Gaddafi's influential son, echoed the delight expressed in much
of the Arab news media. 'What happened in Georgia is a good
sign, one that means America is no longer the sole world power
setting the rules of the game ... there is a balance in the
world now. Russia is resurging, which is good for us, for the
entire Middle East'."[14]
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