[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [Ufpj-disc] FW: [Bananas] Russia/Georgia war

[C. G. Estabrook]

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
 > Tune in to this youtube message of Escobar. . Scary, but rational. Worth
 > cogitiating about, if you haven't already. --mkb
 >

[Here's the text. The piece is indeed quite good.  Note the concusion: "McCain 
and Obama are on the same wavelengths. What the US establishment wants, no 
matter who was elected in November, is still full-spectrum dominance." --CGE]


PEPE ESCOBAR, SENIOR ANALYST: Whatever happened to the fight against al-Qaeda 
and radical Islam? That's so old news. Welcome to the new, new Cold War.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, FORMER USSR PRESIDENT (VOICEOVER TRANSLATION): I think the 
signs of a Cold War are present, but we still have time to prevent it.

ESCOBAR: These last few days, the Persian Gulf became a sideshow. Exit evil Iran 
and a phantom al-Qaeda; enter the remixed Evil Empire—Russia, a real-life 
superpower complete with nuclear weapons. The US establishment for years gloated 
about the end of the Cold War and treated Russia like Wiemar Germany. In 
February 1990, Bush Sr. and his secretary of state, James Baker, promised 
Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move eastward. This is what Gorbachev 
wrote after Clinton start pushing NATO eastward: "The issue is not just whether 
Czechs, Hungarians and Poles join NATO. The problem is more serious: the 
rejection of the strategy for a new, common European system agreed to by myself 
and all the Western leaders when we ended the Cold War. . . . I feel betrayed by 
the West. The opportunity we seized on behalf of peace has been lost. The whole 
idea of a new world order has been completely abandoned." (Mikhail Gorbachev, 
quoted by Hang Separately by Leon V. Sigal, 2000.) So, obviously, Gorbachev 
nailed what happened in Georgia, writing in the Washington Post that, "By 
declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American 
continent, a sphere of its 'national interest,' the United States made a serious 
blunder." Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former Soviet republics are now part 
of NATO. Bush, Cheney, and McCain badly want Ukraine and Georgia as part of 
NATO. Now, imagine if Moscow had annexed Western Europe to the Warsaw Pact, set 
up military bases in Mexico and in Central America, set up a missile defense 
system in Cuba, and built a pipeline with China to send Venezuelan and Mexican 
oil to a port in the Pacific and then to Asia, in all of this bypassing the US. 
That's exactly how the US treated Russia. And this, this is what the American 
establishment wants. John McCain's chief foreign policy advisor is neocon 
ultra-hawk Randy Scheunemann, until recently a lobbyist for Georgia, and also a 
key player in fabricating fake intelligence for the Iraq War. Robert Scheer of 
truthdig.com advanced the possibility that this latest war was started by 
Georgia to boost McCain's profile, as in fact it did. While McCain was virtually 
declaring war on Russia,—

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Today we are all Georgians.

ESCOBAR: —Obama was bodyboarding in Hawaii. Scheunemann, the lobbyist who 
advised his close friend Saakashvili in Russia, then he advised McCain to 
demonize Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski's a neoliberal hawk, informal foreign 
policy advisor to Barack Obama. Henry Kissinger, another realist, by the way, he 
advises John McCain. It was Brzezinski, the Cold Warrior supreme—he's a Polish, 
fanatical rusophobe, was Jimmy Carter's foreign policy advisor—lured the 
Russians into Afghanistan in 1979. Brzezinski would have liked Georgia to be the 
new Afghanistan. The Brzezinski doctrine is all here in this book, The Grand 
Chessboard, published in 1997. His point is that Eurasia is the ultimate prize. 
To control Eurasia, one has to control the so-called Eurasian Balkans, and 
that's where Georgia is. On page 125 of his book, Brzezinski writes that ". . . 
the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic 
prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in 
the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold." But the clincher 
is in fact an introduction to Brzezinski book, where he says, "It's imperative 
that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of 
also challenging America." McCain, in his speeches, ties Georgia to 
Afghanistan—that's pure Brzezinski. But it was up to Brzezinski himself in an 
interview to a German daily to compare Putin with Hitler. Meanwhile, on the 
other side, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who migrated from Camp 
Clinton to Camp Obama, she was repeating the same message over and over.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: I think it is important to make 
clear to the Russians directly that this is unacceptable behavior.

~~~

Courtesy: NPR
August 14, 2008

ALBRIGHT: We have to let the Russians know directly that we think this is not 
acceptable behavior for the 21st century.

ESCOBAR: But wait—didn't John McCain say that?

MCCAIN: But in the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations.

ESCOBAR: Still on Camp Obama, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a key Clinton player 
in the fragmentation of the Balkans in the 1990s, was peddling false information.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE, US AMBASSADOR TO THE UN: The Russians were funding and 
supporting Ossetian separatists, who were in turn goading the Georgians. The 
Russians deliberately provoked this and timed it for the Olympics.

ESCOBAR: The realist conservative Put Buchanan, as well as the geopolitical 
website stratfor.com, they admitted that, in fact, the Georgians timed it for 
the Olympics.

TEXT ON SCREEN: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday 
night? . . . Georgia's move was deliberate. . . . It is very difficult to 
imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against US wishes.

ESCOBAR: In a few days later, while everyone was still watching the Olympics, 
the US and Poland signed an agreement to deploy US interceptor missiles in 
Poland—the worst nuclear red alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Would 
a President Obama end such US and NATO provocations? Not if he keeps doing what 
he's doing, listening to Brzezinski. And it runs in the family. His son, Ian 
Brzezinski, who is the current US deputy assistant secretary of defense for 
European and NATO affairs, Brzezinski's crystal ball even guessed what would 
happen in Georgia. Last June, in a hearing at the US Senate, Brzezinski said 
"that Russia was trying to destabilize Georgia to take control of the 
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, the BTC." He forgot to say that he personally sold 
BTC in Baku in 1995—that's his baby. But he did spell out the US strategy: 
pressing for the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia, via Afghanistan 
to the south, which will maximally expand world society's access to the Central 
Asian energy markets. So the neocon line "Russia should be punished" and the 
neoliberal realist line, which is also the State Department line, "Russia should 
be isolated, in Eurasia especially," somehow merge. For Brzezinski, Holbrooke, 
and Albright, the so-called realists, it's all about Brzezinski's full-spectrum 
dominance over Eurasia. And that's where McCain and Obama merge. There's no way 
this US plan of strategic encirclement of Russia would work. St. Petersberg is 
now only 60 miles away from NATO—Estonia is a NATO member. Putin's counterpunch 
is to reestablish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. 
Didn't anybody listen to his landmark speech in Munich last year? McCain was 
there. Robert Gates, the US defense secretary, ex-Kremlinologist, he was there. 
Putin said that Russia would not accept American hyper-power any longer. Putin 
said, "What is a unipolar world? It refers to one type of situation, one center 
of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. It is a world 
in which there is one master, one sovereign. This is pernicious . . . 
unacceptable . . . impossible." So is this a war of empires? Yes, it is. Russia 
has been a supra-ethnic empire for centuries. This is not about Georgia and 
South Ossetia; this is about the US pushing NATO and missile defense right up to 
Russia's borders—a supreme threat to its national security.

GORBACHEV: The United States should not think that the attempt to decide every 
issue militarily will work.

ESCOBAR: But will the US renounce Brzezinski's control of Eurasia, which is in 
fact the blueprint for the war on terror? Not likely. McCain and Obama are on 
the same wavelengths. What the US establishment wants, no matter who was elected 
in November, is still full-spectrum dominance.

Bio. Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and 
an analyst for The Real News Network. He's been a foreign correspondent since 
1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since 
the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to 
Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent 
visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: A 
Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge both published by Nimble Books in 2007.

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