Ossetia-Russia-Georgia
By
Noam Chomsky
11/09/08 "ICH" -- - Aghast at the atrocities committed by US
forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights
about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany
crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability
to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object
of his frustration was the renowned General Funston. “No satire
of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because
Funston occupies that summit himself... [he is] satire
incarnated.”
It is a thought that often comes to mind, again in August 2008
during the Russia-Georgia-Ossetia war. George Bush, Condoleezza
Rica and other dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the
United Nations, warning that Russia could be excluded from
international institutions “by taking actions in Georgia that
are inconsistent with” their principles. The sovereignty and
territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously honored,
they intoned – “all nations,” that is, apart from those that the
US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of
others too long and familiar to mention.
The junior partner joined in as well. British foreign secretary
David Miliband accused Russia of engaging in “19th century forms
of diplomacy” by invading a sovereign state, something Britain
would never contemplate today. That “is simply not the way that
international relations can be run in the 21st century,” he
added, echoing the decider-in-chief, who said that invasion of
“a sovereign neighboring state…is unacceptable in the 21st
century.” Mexico and Canada therefore need not fear further
invasions and annexation of much of their territory, because the
US now only invades states that are not on its borders, though
no such constraint holds for its clients, as Lebanon learned
once again in 2006.
“The moral of this story is even more enlightening,” Serge
Halimi wrote in Le Monde diplomatique, “ when, to defend his
country's borders, the charming pro-American Saakashvili
repatriates some of the 2,000 soldiers he had sent to invade
Iraq,” one of the largest contingents apart from the two warrior
states.
Prominent analysts joined the chorus. Fareed Zakaria applauded
Bush’s observation that Russia’s behavior is unacceptable today,
unlike the 19th century, “when the Russian intervention would
have been standard operating procedure for a great power.” We
therefore must devise a strategy for bringing Russia “in line
with the civilized world,” where intervention is unthinkable.
There were, to be sure, some who shared Mark Twain’s despair.
One distinguished example is Chris Patten, former EU
commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British
Conservative Party, chancellor of Oxford University and a member
of the House of Lords. He wrote that the Western reaction “is
enough to make even the cynical shake their heads in disbelief”
– referring to Europe’s failure to respond vigorously to the
effrontery of Russian leaders, who, “like 19th-century tsars,
want a sphere of influence around their borders.”
Patten rightly distinguishes Russia from the global superpower,
which long ago passed the point where it demanded a sphere of
influence around its borders, and demands a sphere of influence
over the entire world. It also acts vigorously to enforce that
demand, in accord with the Clinton doctrine that Washington has
the right to use military force to defend vital interests such
as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies
and strategic resources” – and in the real world, far more.
Clinton was breaking no new ground, of course. His doctrine
derives from standard principles formulated by high-level
planners during World War II, which offered the prospect of
global dominance. In the postwar world, they determined, the US
should aim “to hold unquestioned power” while ensuring the
“limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might
interfere with its global designs. To secure these ends, “the
foremost requirement [is] the rapid fulfillment of a program of
complete rearmament,” a core element of “an integrated policy to
achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.”
The plans laid during the war were implemented in various ways
in the years that followed.
The goals are deeply rooted in stable institutional structures.
Hence they persist through changes in occupancy of the White
House, and are untroubled by the opportunity for “peace
dividends,” the disappearance of the major rival from the world
scene, or other marginal irrelevancies. Devising new challenges
is never beyond the reach of doctrinal managers, as when Ronald
Reagan strapped on his cowboy boots and declared a national
emergency because the Nicaraguan army was only two days from
Harlingen Texas, and might lead the hordes who are about to
“sweep over the United States and take what we have,” as Lyndon
Johnson lamented when he called for holding the line in Vietnam.
Most ominously, those holding the reins may actually believe
their own words.
Returning to the efforts to elevate Russia to the civilized
world, the seven charter members of the Group of Eight
industrialized countries issued a statement “condemning the
action of our fellow G8 member,” Russia, which has yet to
comprehend the Anglo-American commitment to non-intervention.
The European Union held a rare emergency meeting to condemn
Russia’s crime, its first meeting since the invasion of Iraq,
which elicited no condemnation.
Russia called for an emergency session of the Security Council,
but no consensus was reached because, according to Council
diplomats, the US, Britain, and some others rejected a phrase
that called on both sides “to renounce the use of force.”
The typical reactions recall Orwell’s observations on the
“indifference to reality” of the “nationalist,” who “not only
does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but
... has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
The basic facts are not seriously in dispute. South Ossetia,
along with the much more significant region of Abkhazia, were
assigned by Stalin to his native Georgia. Western leaders
sternly admonish that Stalin’s directives must be respected,
despite the strong opposition of Ossetians and Abkhazians. The
provinces enjoyed relative autonomy until the collapse of the
USSR. In 1990, Georgia’s ultranationalist president Zviad
Gamsakhurdia abolished autonomous regions and invaded South
Ossetia. The bitter war that followed left 1000 dead and tens of
thousands of refugees, with the capital city of Tskhinvali
“battered and depopulated” (New York Times).
A small Russian force then supervised an uneasy truce, broken
decisively on 7 August 2008 when Georgian president
Saakashvili’s ordered his forces to invade. According to “an
extensive set of witnesses,” the Times reports, Georgia’s
military at once “began pounding civilian sections of the city
of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping base there,
with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.” The
predictable Russian response drove Georgian forces out of South
Ossetia, and Russia went on to conquer parts of Georgia, then
partially withdrawing to the vicinity of South Ossetia. There
were many casualties and atrocities. As is normal, the innocent
suffered severely.
Russia reported at first that ten Russian peacekeepers were
killed by Georgian shelling. The West took little notice. That
too is normal. There was, for example, no reaction when Aviation
Week reported that 200 Russians were killed in an Israeli air
raid in Lebanon in 1982 during a US-backed invasion that left
some 15-20,000 dead, with no credible pretext beyond
strengthening Israeli control over the occupied West Bank.
Among Ossetians who fled north, the “prevailing view,” according
to the London Financial Times, “is that Georgia’s pro-western
leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to wipe out their breakaway
enclave.” Ossetian militias, under Russian eyes, then brutally
drove out Georgians, in areas beyond Ossetia as well. “Georgia
said its attack had been necessary to stop a Russian attack that
already had been under way,” the New York Times reports, but
weeks later “there has been no independent evidence, beyond
Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that Russian
forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages.”
In Russia, the Wall Street Journal reports, “legislators,
officials and local analysts have embraced the theory that the
Bush administration encouraged Georgia, its ally, to start the
war in order to precipitate an international crisis that would
play up the national-security experience of Sen. John McCain,
the Republican presidential candidate.” In contrast, French
author Bernard-Henri Levy, writing in the New Republic,
proclaims that “no one can ignore the fact that President
Saakashvili only decided to act when he no longer had a choice,
and war had already come. In spite of this accumulation of facts
that should have been blindingly obvious to all scrupulous,
good-faith observers, many in the media rushed as one man toward
the thesis of the Georgians as instigators, as irresponsible
provocateurs of the war.”
The Russian propaganda system made the mistake of presenting
evidence, which was easily refuted. Its Western counterparts,
more wisely, keep to authoritative pronouncements, like Levy’s
denunciation of the major Western media for ignoring what is
“blindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers” for
whom loyalty to the state suffices to establish The Truth –
which, perhaps, is even true, serious analysts might conclude.
The Russians are losing the “propaganda war,” BBC reported, as
Washington and its allies have succeeded in “presenting the
Russian actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian
attack into South Ossetia on 7 August, which triggered the
Russian operation,” though “the evidence from South Ossetia
about that attack indicates that it was extensive and damaging.”
Russia has “not yet learned how to play the media game,” the BBC
observes. That is natural. Propaganda has typically become more
sophisticated as countries become more free and the state loses
the ability to control the population by force.
The Russian failure to provide credible evidence was partially
overcome by the Financial Times, which discovered that the
Pentagon had provided combat training to Georgian special forces
commandos shortly before the Georgian attack on August 7,
revelations that “could add fuel to accusations by Vladimir
Putin, Russian prime minister, last month that the US had
`orchestrated’ the war in the Georgian enclave.” The training
was in part carried out by former US special forces recruited by
private military contractors, including MPRI, which, as the
journal notes, “was hired by the Pentagon in 1995 to train the
Croatian military prior to their invasion of the
ethnically-Serbian Krajina region, which led to the displacement
of 200,000 refugees and was one of the worst incidents of ethnic
cleansing in the Balkan wars.” The US-backed Krajina expulsion
(generally estimated at 250,000, with many killed) was possibly
the worst case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II.
Its fate in approved history is rather like that of photographs
of Trotsky in Stalinist Russia, for simple and sufficient
reasons: it does not accord with the required image of US
nobility confronting Serbian evil.
The toll of the August 2008 Caucasus war is subject to varying
estimates. A month afterwards, the Financial Times cited Russian
reports that “at least 133 civilians died in the attack, as well
as 59 of its own peacekeepers,” while in the ensuing Russian
mass invasion and aerial bombardment of Georgia, according to
the FT, 215 Georgians died, including 146 soldiers and 69
civilians. Further revelations are likely to follow.
In the background lie two crucial issues. One is control over
pipelines to Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Georgia was chosen as
a corridor by Clinton to bypass Russia and Iran, and was also
heavily militarized for the purpose. Hence Georgia is “a very
major and strategic asset to us,” Zbigniew Brzezinski observes.
It is noteworthy that analysts are becoming less reticent in
explaining real US motives in the region as pretexts of dire
threats and liberation fade and it becomes more difficult to
deflect Iraqi demands for withdrawal of the occupying army. Thus
the editors of the Washington Post admonished Barack Obama for
regarding Afghanistan as “the central front” for the United
States, reminding him that Iraq “lies at the geopolitical center
of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil
reserves,” and Afghanistan’s “strategic importance pales beside
that of Iraq.” A welcome, if belated, recognition of reality
about the US invasion.
The second issue is expansion of NATO to the East, described by
George Kennan in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American
policy in the entire post-cold-war era, [which] may be expected
to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic
tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the
development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of
the cold war to East-West relations.”
As the USSR collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev made a concession that
was astonishing in the light of recent history and strategic
realities: he agreed to allow a united Germany to join a hostile
military alliance. This “stunning concession” was hailed by
Western media, NATO, and President Bush I, who called it a
demonstration of “statesmanship ... in the best interests of all
countries of Europe, including the Soviet Union.”
Gorbachev agreed to the stunning concession on the basis of
“assurances that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the
east, `not one inch’ in [Secretary of State] Jim Baker's exact
words.” This reminder by Jack Matlock, the leading Soviet expert
of the Foreign Service and US ambassador to Russia in the
crucial years 1987 to 1991, is confirmed by Strobe Talbott, the
highest official in charge of Eastern Europe in the Clinton
administration. On the basis of a full review of the diplomatic
record, Talbott reports that “Secretary of State Baker did say
to then Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in the
context of the Soviet Union's reluctant willingness to let a
unified Germany remain part of NATO, that NATO would not move to
the east.”
Clinton quickly reneged on that commitment, also dismissing
Gorbachev’s effort to end the Cold War with cooperation among
partners. NATO also rejected a Russian proposal for a
nuclear-weapons-free-zone from the Arctic to the Black Sea,
which would have “interfered with plans to extend NATO,”
strategic analyst and former NATO planner Michael MccGwire
observes.
Rejecting these possibilities, the US took a triumphalist stand
that threatened Russian security and also played a major role in
driving Russia to severe economic and social collapse, with
millions of deaths. The process was sharply escalated by Bush’s
further expansion of NATO, dismantling of crucial disarmament
agreements, and aggressive militarism. Matlock writes that
Russia might have tolerated incorporation of former Russian
satellites into NATO if it “had not bombed Serbia and continued
expanding. But, in the final analysis, ABM missiles in Poland,
and the drive for Georgia and Ukraine in NATO crossed absolute
red lines. The insistence on recognizing Kosovo independence was
sort of the very last straw. Putin had learned that concessions
to the U.S. were not reciprocated, but used to promote U.S.
dominance in the world. Once he had the strength to resist, he
did so,” in Georgia.
Clinton officials argue that expansion of NATO posed no military
threat, and was no more than a benign move to allow former
Russian satellites to join the EU (Talbott). That is hardly
persuasive. Austria, Sweden and Finland are in the EU but not
NATO. If the Warsaw Pact had survived and was incorporating
Latin American countries – let alone Canada and Mexico – the US
would not easily be persuaded that the Pact is just a Quaker
meeting. There should be no need to review the record of US
violence to block mostly fanciful ties to Moscow in “our little
region over here,” the Western hemisphere, to quote Secretary of
War Henry Stimson when he explained that all regional systems
must be dismantled after World II, apart from our own, which are
to be extended.
To underscore the conclusion, in the midst of the current crisis
in the Caucasus, Washington professes concern that Russia might
resume military and intelligence cooperation with Cuba at a
level not remotely approaching US-Georgia relations, and not a
further step towards a significant security threat.
Missile defense too is presented here as benign, though leading
US strategic analysts have explained why Russian planners must
regard the systems and their chosen location as the basis for a
potential threat to the Russian deterrent, hence in effect a
first-strike weapon. The Russian invasion of Georgia was used as
a pretext to conclude the agreement to place these systems in
Poland, thus “bolstering an argument made repeatedly by Moscow
and rejected by Washington: that the true target of the system
is Russia,” AP commentator Desmond Butler observed.
Matlock is not alone in regarding Kosovo as an important factor.
“Recognition of South Ossetia's and Abkhazia's independence was
justified on the principle of a mistreated minority's right to
secession - the principle Bush had established for Kosovo,” the
Boston Globe editors comment.
But there are crucial differences. Strobe Talbott recognizes
that “there's a degree of payback for what the U.S. and NATO did
in Kosovo nine years ago,” but insists that the “analogy is
utterly and profoundly false.” No one is a better position to
know why it is profoundly false, and he has lucidly explained
the reasons, in his preface to a book on NATO’s bombing of
Serbia by his associate John Norris. Talbott writes that those
who want to know “how events looked and felt at the time to
those of us who were involved” in the war should turn to
Norris’s well-informed account. Norris concludes that “it was
Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and
economic reform – not the plight of Kosovar Albanians – that
best explains NATO’s war.”
That the motive for the NATO bombing could not have been “the
plight of Kosovar Albanians” was already clear from the rich
Western documentary record revealing that the atrocities were,
overwhelmingly, the anticipated consequence of the bombing, not
its cause. But even before the record was released, it should
have been evident to all but the most fervent loyalists that
humanitarian concern could hardly have motivated the US and
Britain, which at the same time were lending decisive support to
atrocities well beyond what was reported from Kosovo, with a
background far more horrendous than anything that had happened
in the Balkans. But these are mere facts, hence of no moment to
Orwell’s “nationalists” – in this case, most of the Western
intellectual community, who had made an enormous investment in
self-aggrandizement and prevarication about the “noble phase” of
US foreign policy and its “saintly glow” as the millennium
approached its end, with the bombing of Serbia as the jewel in
the crown.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear from the highest level
that the real reason for the bombing was that Serbia was a lone
holdout in Europe to the political and economic programs of the
Clinton administration and its allies, though it will be a long
time before such annoyances are allowed to enter the canon.
There are of course other differences between Kosovo and the
regions of Georgia that call for independence or union with
Russia. Thus Russia is not known to have a huge military base
there named after a hero of the invasion of Afghanistan,
comparable to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, named after a Vietnam
war hero and presumably part of the vast US basing system aimed
at the Middle East energy-producing regions. And there are many
other differences.
There is much talk about a “new cold war” instigated by brutal
Russian behavior in Georgia. One cannot fail to be alarmed by
signs of confrontation, among them new US naval contingents in
the Black Sea – the counterpart would hardly be tolerated in the
Caribbean. Efforts to expand NATO to Ukraine, now contemplated,
could become extremely hazardous.
Nonetheless, a new cold war seems unlikely. To evaluate the
prospect, we should begin with clarity about the old cold war.
Fevered rhetoric aside, in practice the cold war was a tacit
compact in which each of the contestants was largely free to
resort to violence and subversion to control its own domains:
for Russia, its Eastern neighbors; for the global superpower,
most of the world. Human society need not endure – and might not
survive – a resurrection of anything like that.
A sensible alternative is the Gorbachev vision rejected by
Clinton and undermined by Bush. Sane advice along these lines
has recently been given by former Israeli Foreign Minister and
historian Shlomo ben-Ami, writing in the Beirut Daily Star:
“Russia must seek genuine strategic partnership with the US, and
the latter must understand that, when excluded and despised,
Russia can be a major global spoiler. Ignored and humiliated by
the US since the Cold War ended, Russia needs integration into a
new global order that respects its interests as a resurgent
power, not an anti-Western strategy of confrontation.”
Noam
Chomsky is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
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