[Peace-discuss] Obama adviser compares Putin to Hitler

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From the man who brought us Osama bin Laden. --CGE]

	Obama adviser compares Putin to Hitler
	Kate Connolly in Berlin
	Tuesday August 12 2008
	guardian.co.uk

The foreign policy adviser of US presidential candidate Barack Obama
has called on the world community to isolate Russia in protest over
its campaign in the Caucasus, likening its tactics to those of
"Hitler or Stalin".

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the national security adviser under
President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, and is now advising the
Democratic candidate, said the Russian prime minister, Vladimir
Putin, was "following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that
taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s".

He said that Putin's "justification" for splitting up Georgia -
because of the Russian citizens living in South Ossetia - could be
compared to when Hitler used the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans
in the Sudetenland as a pretext for annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938.

In an interview with the conservative German daily Die Welt, he said
even more striking were the parallels between Putin's strategy
against Georgia and Stalin's invasion of Finland in 1939, describing
both as "the undermining of the sovereignty of a small, democratic
neighbouring state through the use of violence". He added: "Georgia
is to an extent the Finland of today, both morally and strategically."

Polish-born Brezinski, 80, who earned a reputation as a hardliner due
to his anti-Soviet politics, said the world was now being confronted
with the question as to how it should react to Russia and what he saw
as its efforts to "reincorporate old Soviet areas into the Kremlin's
sphere of control". He said at the heart of the issue was access to
oil and specifically who controlled the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
which runs through Georgia.

"If Georgia no longer has its sovereignty it means not only that the
west is cut off from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, but we can
also assume that Putin will exercise a similar strategy against
Ukraine if he faces resistance. He's already publicly voiced threats
against Ukraine."

"If Russia continues on this path it has to be isolated by the
international community," he said, including economic sanctions on
which all alliances from the European Union to Nato would have to
take a joint stand.

He added that Russia's invasion of Georgia was proof of the failure
of the White House during George Bush's eight year tenure, to
recognise the "Putin regime" for what it really was.

"Two episodes illustrate this better than any others," he said.
"First, when Bush met Putin for the first time and said he had looked
into his soul and could trust him. Secondly, when Condi Rice, not so
long ago, said that the American-Russian relations had never been
better than they are today." He said the White House had deceived
itself.

Asked why it was that he only spoke of Putin and not of the Russian
president, Dmitri Medvedev, Brzezinski said: "He [Medvedev] has about
as much influence over the current situation as the official head of
state in the Soviet Union of the 1950s had over the Soviet Union.
Nobody can even remember his name."

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