[Peace-discuss] Georgia

[David Green]

I'll have to admit that I nodded off for a few minutes at some point, as well as switiching back and forth to the Cubs. It's remarkable how doctine must hide itself in fake-complicated strategic technospeak jargon, barely mentioning oil, which made the affair as boring as outrageous. These people are amazingly impressed with themselves (I'll exlcude Olcott), as was the all-white audience. Is Talbott already on the Obama team? I don't want to know.

"C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:  David--

You're made of sterner stuff than I -- I was only able to watch part of it -- 
but you've summarized it precisely.

Talbott is a particularly distasteful case. A principal Clintonoid, he knows 
he's lying about Kosovo here. And the nature of the lie reveals the vicious 
foreign policy he represents:

During the Clinton administration Talbott was said to be in charge of "managing 
the consequences of the Soviet breakup" -- i.e., reducing Russia to a the state 
of a Third-World country by producing a depression roughly three times worse 
that the Great Depression in the US -- as Ambassador-at-Large and Special 
Adviser to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States.

When Clinton attacked the former Yugoslavia in 1999, Talbott ran the 
Pentagon/State Department joint intelligence committee. He wrote the forward to 
the 2005 book "Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo" by John Norris, his 
Director of Communications, which he recommends as an authoritative account of 
the what the Clinton administration thought about that war. In fact, Norris 
points out that the real purpose of the war had nothing to do with concern for 
Kosovar Albanians. The US attacked Serbia because it was not carrying out social 
and economic "reforms" -- i.e., it was the only part of Europe that had not 
subordinated itself to the US-run neoliberal programs.

And, unlike the Russian intervention, which put an end to attacks on civilians 
in Tskhinvali, the US bombing only made matters worse in Kosovo -- the real 
Serbian assaults only began after the bombing started, and as a consequence. But 
as Talbott's man admits, stopping that wasn't the purpose.

Talbott's right here only in that there's not much difference between McCain and 
Obama -- on this as on other issues. --CGE


David Green wrote:
> 
> I endured a Brookings panel on C-Span this evening, and beyond Robert Kagan's
> bellicosity, here is an excerpt from Strobe Talbott, of the Clinton State
> Department (and President of Brookings), stressing the consensus on these
> issues. This panel was an amazing example of the assertion of doctrine and
> denial of basic facts (such as who fired first, and how destructively),
> although a woman named Martha Olcott seemed at least to be able to represent
> Russian concerns.
> 
> Talbott also asserted that this is the "exact opposite" of Kosovo, where the
> Serbs committed ethnic cleansing and genocide against their own citizens. In
> Georgia, he asserted, the government has just been trying to work out an
> arrangement with groups whose status as Georgian citizens is problematic. He
> didn't explain how they came to work it out by killing 2000 innocent people.
> 
> 
> http://www.brookings.edu/events/2008/0814_georgia.aspx
> 
> 
> But this is beyond personal. The real motivation here from the Russian
> standpoint is that they regard it as inherently and unacceptably anti-Russian
> for an independent state –- and by the way, what does CIS stand for?
> Commonwealth of Independent States. They regard it as unacceptable for an
> independent state on their borders to want to integrate with Western European
> international institutions including NATO, including the E.U.
> 
> Now that, I would suggest, is highly problematic and certainly not something
> that any other country should accept, but moreover it calls into question the
> premise of U.S. policy towards Russia going back at least three
> administrations: George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton and the current
> President. There are more than nuances of differences among all three of
> those administration and all three of those Presidents, but all three of them
> have been committed to the proposition that it is in Russia’s interest and it
> is in the world’s interest for Russia to rejoin Europe, to join international
> institutions and, by the way, to partner and maybe someday even be more than
> just a partner with NATO.
> 
> And, if Russia is going to take the position that not only is it not 
> interested in integrating in that fashion, but it’s not going to allow its 
> supposedly sovereign and independent neighbors to do so, that calls into 
> doubt the entire premise of U.S., European and Western international 
> relations with Russia and will need to be taken into account by the next 
> President of the United States.
> 
> While the two candidates for that office are exaggerating the differences
> between them and while the press is exaggerating the differences between them
> for perfectly legitimate and understandable reasons, I don’t think there is
> that much difference between them on this question, and it’s going to be a
> huge challenge for the next administration.



       
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