Marching Through Georgia V: U.S. Forces Moving Into Putin's Powderkeg
Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili, who has been pleading for
America to come and rescue him from the bloody hash he has made,
immediately seized on the announcement and proclaimed that the United
States would be taking military control of Georgia's ports and
airports.
Of course, Saakashvili, like his Kremlin
counterparts, has been given to outrageous exaggerations and falsehoods
throughout the crisis -- and for now, the Pentagon is denying any
intent to take over the facilities in Georgia. But in any case, the
introduction of American military forces into this extremely tense and
explosive situation seems a remarkably stupid move -- unless, of
course, one is trying foment conflict and tension in order to advance
one's long-held, openly-stated agenda of militarism and geopolitical
dominance.
Robert Scheer thinks that could well be in the case.
In an article at Truthdig, he zeroes in on John McCain's top foreign
policy adviser, lobbyist Randy Scheunemann. This hired mouthpiece was
pocketing fat checks directly from Saakashvili until March, while his
two-man firm went on raking in the Georgian dough until May, when
Scheunemann officially (and no doubt very temporarily) left the
lobbying shop. Scheunemann has long been guiding McCain toward the most
bellicose stances on behalf of his Georgian paymaster, and is obviously
crafting the clueless candidate's latest fierce belches against the
Russkies.
Scheer excavates some very interesting facts about
Scheunemann, including his key role with our old friends, the Project
for a New American Century -- you know, the Cheney-Rumsfeld outfit that
in September 2000 declared that only a "new Pearl Harbor" would allow
them to implement their plan for gargantuan increases in military
spending at home and aggressive expansion of America's military empire
abroad. And as we've noted here often, those lucky duckies got just
what they wanted a year later, on September 11, 2001.
Scheunemann,
a long-time McCain advisor (even while shilling for foreign powers) was
also instrumental in the rabid PR campaign to foment war fever for the
invasion of Iraq. Now Scheer sees the possibility of a similar attempt
to manipulate the United States into another conflict that would tap a
vast new seam of war profiteering while boosting the political fortunes
of his patrons. Scheer writes:
- "Is it possible that this time
the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of
brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the
Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
- "...Previously,
Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who
engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a
New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the
McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
- "There
are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia
flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former
employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an
invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that
clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is
inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous
escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he
trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back.
Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was
officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign.
- "...Scheunemann
is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate
the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the
run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a
foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of
Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly
to fit the bill.
- "Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the
most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in
matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the
candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander
plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with
the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs...
- What is at work
here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is
turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and
Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the
old Soviet Union."
Butt-Thumper's announcment is a strong
indication that the PNAC-neocon gambit -- if deliberate gambit it is --
might work, despite their local boy's slapdown. The military move into
Georgia is certainly consonant with the aggressive militarist agenda
advanced at every step by the Bush Administration, which has followed
the PNAC plan as if it were holy writ.
However, at this point,
it is still unlikely that Butt-Thumper and the gang will actually take
a pop at the Russians. But they don't have to, not right now. The
racheting up of tensions, the resurrection of the mega-profitable Cold
War tropes, and the convenient burial of the huge, fetid mountain of
Bush Regime crime -- torture, aggression, corruption, tyranny -- by a
juiced-up media with a new conflict to play with: all of these will
serve the militarists very nicely, thank you.
Of course, if it
does come to live fire, and the deaths of some of the American cannon
fodder that Bush is throwing into the Caucasus caldron -- well, so
what? As we noted here the other day, there is and always has been a
powerful faction within the American elite that longs -- with a deep,
strong, pyschosexual yearning -- to drop the Big One. And Russia has
always been their favorite target, because the Russians have long
represented the most powerful balk to their openly stated ambitions for
"unipolar domination" over world affairs. And it was not the Soviet
political system they objected to, anymore than they care what kind of
authoritarian regime Putin and his cronies impose in Russia. After all,
they avidly support regimes far more repressive than Putin's, or the
later Soviet Union for that matter, such as Saudi Arabia. It's the
competition that a strong Russia represents, and the lack of
kow-towing, that our unipolar dominationists can't stand.
None
of this should be taken as an endorsement of the Putin regime, or of
the Russian military action in Georgia...although it doubtless will,
because many people -- such as 97 percent of the American media and
political establishments, for example -- simply cannot, or will not,
accept anything but the starkest binary view of any situation. Somebody
must be the "good guy" (the one that the American government supports)
and somebody must be the "bad guy." And anyone who speaks ill of "our"
guy, or even tries to understand the viewpoint of the "bad" guy, is,
obviously, one of the "bad guys" too. This is one of the most durable,
and tedious, and corrosive dynamics in American political discourse.
Where's Barry?
McCain is clearly on board the War-Whoop Express. No surprise there. But what of Barack Obama?
The
candidate for Hope and Change interrupted his vacation long enough this
week to line up squarely with McCain, Butt-Thumper, Dick Cheney, Bill
Kristol and the whole war-whooping crew in declaring his support for
fast-tracking Georgia's entry into NATO. As many others have noted, if
Georgia had succeeded in its earlier Bush-backed attempts to join the
military alliance, NATO's other members would have been obliged by
treaty to wade in on Georgia's side in this week's war with Russia.
Thus the remarkably foolish decision by Saakashvili to launch a brutal
military assault on South Ossetia -- provoking a brutal Russian
response -- could have quickly led to World War III.
(No,
wait; it would have been World War V, right? Because the war-whoopers
tell us that the Cold War was World War III, and their Terror War is
World War IV. But is the War on Drugs in there somewhere? Then that
would make the next big thing World War VI, wouldn't it? It's so hard
to keep up.)
So Obama is now pledging to wage war on Russia
whenever a Georgian leader decides he needs to goose his poll numbers
by killing some Russians. With "progressives" like this, who needs PNAC?
