[Peace-discuss] Paleocon critique

Fri Aug 15 12:03:43 CDT 2008

[Note the similarities to Bill Blum's account, which Mort recently posted.  --CGE]

	Blowback From Bear-Baiting
	by Patrick J. Buchanan
	Posted 08/15/2008 ET

Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover 
Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in 
stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to 
Israeli ships.

Nasser's blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili's blunder 
probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores 
of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, 
Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, 
as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.

Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and John 
McCain, and America's lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought 
he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli.

Mikheil did not reckon on the rage or resolve of the Bear.

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight 
-- Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when 
they end.

Russia's response was "disproportionate" and "brutal," wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to 
a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? 
Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United 
States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, 
Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to 
Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?

When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, we celebrated. When Slovenia, 
Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo broke from Serbia, we 
rejoiced. Why, then, the indignation when two provinces, whose peoples are 
ethnically separate from Georgians and who fought for their independence, should 
succeed in breaking away?

Are secessions and the dissolution of nations laudable only when they advance 
the agenda of the neocons, many of who viscerally detest Russia?

That Putin took the occasion of Saakashvili's provocative and stupid stunt to 
administer an extra dose of punishment is undeniable. But is not Russian anger 
understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia's nose in her Cold War 
defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany.

When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed its bases in Cuba, 
dissolved the evil empire, let the Soviet Union break up into 15 states, and 
sought friendship and alliance with the United States, what did we do?

American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags to loot the Russian 
nation. Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we moved our military alliance 
into Eastern Europe, then onto Russia's doorstep. Six Warsaw Pact nations and 
three former republics of the Soviet Union are now NATO members.

Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This 
would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin's 
birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, 
traditional home of Russia's Black Sea fleet.

When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia?

The United States unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty 
because our technology was superior, then planned to site anti-missile defenses 
in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against Iranian missiles, though Iran 
has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs. A Russian counter-offer to have us together 
put an anti-missile system in Azerbaijan was rejected out of hand.

We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to 
Turkey to cut Russia out. Then we helped dump over regimes friendly to Moscow 
with democratic "revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia, and tried to repeat it in 
Belarus.

Americans have many fine qualities. A capacity to see ourselves as others see us 
is not high among them.

Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan, where Europe had opted out of the 
Cold War after Moscow installed those SS-20 missiles east of the Elbe. And 
Europe had abandoned NATO, told us to go home and become subservient to Moscow.

How would we have reacted if Moscow had brought Western Europe into the Warsaw 
Pact, established bases in Mexico and Panama, put missile defense radars and 
rockets in Cuba, and joined with China to build pipelines to transfer Mexican 
and Venezuelan oil to Pacific ports for shipment to Asia? And cut us out? If 
there were Russian and Chinese advisers training Latin American armies, the way 
we are in the former Soviet republics, how would we react? Would we look with 
bemusement on such Russian behavior?

For a decade, some of us have warned about the folly of getting into Russia's 
space and getting into Russia's face. The chickens of democratic imperialism 
have now come home to roost -- in Tbilisi.

[Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, 
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost 
the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an 
Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."]