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Title: Ossetia-Russia-Georgia Author: Noam Chomsky Date: September 9, 2008 Language: en Topics: Russia, Georgia, war Source: Retrieved on 19th February 2022 from https://chomsky.info/200809__2/
Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the
Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble
intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his
hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The
immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston.
“No satire of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because
Funston occupies that summit himself… [he is] satire incarnated.”
It is a thought that often comes to mind, again in August 2008 during
the Russia-Georgia-Ossetia war. George Bush, Condoleezza Rica and other
dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the United Nations, warning
that Russia could be excluded from international institutions “by taking
actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with” their principles. The
sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously
honored, they intoned – “all nations,” that is, apart from those that
the US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of
others too long and familiar to mention.
The junior partner joined in as well. British foreign secretary David
Miliband accused Russia of engaging in “19^(th) century forms of
diplomacy” by invading a sovereign state, something Britain would never
contemplate today. That “is simply not the way that international
relations can be run in the 21^(st) century,” he added, echoing the
decider-in-chief, who said that invasion of “a sovereign neighboring
state…is unacceptable in the 21^(st) century.” Mexico and Canada
therefore need not fear further invasions and annexation of much of
their territory, because the US now only invades states that are not on
its borders, though no such constraint holds for its clients, as Lebanon
learned once again in 2006.
“The moral of this story is even more enlightening,” Serge Halimi wrote
in Le Monde diplomatique, “ when, to defend his country’s borders, the
charming pro-American Saakashvili repatriates some of the 2,000 soldiers
he had sent to invade Iraq,” one of the largest contingents apart from
the two warrior states.
Prominent analysts joined the chorus. Fareed Zakaria applauded Bush’s
observation that Russia’s behavior is unacceptable today, unlike the
19^(th) century, “when the Russian intervention would have been standard
operating procedure for a great power.” We therefore must devise a
strategy for bringing Russia “in line with the civilized world,” where
intervention is unthinkable.
There were, to be sure, some who shared Mark Twain’s despair. One
distinguished example is Chris Patten, former EU commissioner for
external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party,
chancellor of Oxford University and a member of the House of Lords. He
wrote that the Western reaction “is enough to make even the cynical
shake their heads in disbelief” – referring to Europe’s failure to
respond vigorously to the effrontery of Russian leaders, who, “like
19^(th)-century tsars, want a sphere of influence around their borders.”
Patten rightly distinguishes Russia from the global superpower, which
long ago passed the point where it demanded a sphere of influence around
its borders, and demands a sphere of influence over the entire world. It
also acts vigorously to enforce that demand, in accord with the Clinton
doctrine that Washington has the right to use military force to defend
vital interests such as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets,
energy supplies and strategic resources” – and in the real world, far
more.
Clinton was breaking no new ground, of course. His doctrine derives from
standard principles formulated by high-level planners during World War
II, which offered the prospect of global dominance. In the postwar
world, they determined, the US should aim “to hold unquestioned power”
while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states
that might interfere with its global designs. To secure these ends, “the
foremost requirement [is] the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete
rearmament,” a core element of “an integrated policy to achieve military
and economic supremacy for the United States.” The plans laid during the
war were implemented in various ways in the years that followed.
The goals are deeply rooted in stable institutional structures. Hence
they persist through changes in occupancy of the White House, and are
untroubled by the opportunity for “peace dividends,” the disappearance
of the major rival from the world scene, or other marginal
irrelevancies. Devising new challenges is never beyond the reach of
doctrinal managers, as when Ronald Reagan strapped on his cowboy boots
and declared a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army was only
two days from Harlingen Texas, and might lead the hordes who are about
to “sweep over the United States and take what we have,” as Lyndon
Johnson lamented when he called for holding the line in Vietnam. Most
ominously, those holding the reins may actually believe their own words.
Returning to the efforts to elevate Russia to the civilized world, the
seven charter members of the Group of Eight industrialized countries
issued a statement “condemning the action of our fellow G8 member,”
Russia, which has yet to comprehend the Anglo-American commitment to
non-intervention. The European Union held a rare emergency meeting to
condemn Russia’s crime, its first meeting since the invasion of Iraq,
which elicited no condemnation.
Russia called for an emergency session of the Security Council, but no
consensus was reached because, according to Council diplomats, the US,
Britain, and some others rejected a phrase that called on both sides “to
renounce the use of force.”
The typical reactions recall Orwell’s observations on the “indifference
to reality” of the “nationalist,” who “not only does not disapprove of
atrocities committed by his own side, but … has a remarkable capacity
for not even hearing about them.”
The basic facts are not seriously in dispute. South Ossetia, along with
the much more significant region of Abkhazia, were assigned by Stalin to
his native Georgia. Western leaders sternly admonish that Stalin’s
directives must be respected, despite the strong opposition of Ossetians
and Abkhazians. The provinces enjoyed relative autonomy until the
collapse of the USSR. In 1990, Georgia’s ultranationalist president
Zviad Gamsakhurdia abolished autonomous regions and invaded South
Ossetia. The bitter war that followed left 1000 dead and tens of
thousands of refugees, with the capital city of Tskhinvali “battered and
depopulated” (New York Times).
A small Russian force then supervised an uneasy truce, broken decisively
on 7 August 2008 when Georgian president Saakashvili’s ordered his
forces to invade. According to “an extensive set of witnesses,” the
Times reports, Georgia’s military at once “began pounding civilian
sections of the city of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping
base there, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.” The
predictable Russian response drove Georgian forces out of South Ossetia,
and Russia went on to conquer parts of Georgia, then partially
withdrawing to the vicinity of South Ossetia. There were many casualties
and atrocities. As is normal, the innocent suffered severely.
Russia reported at first that ten Russian peacekeepers were killed by
Georgian shelling. The West took little notice. That too is normal.
There was, for example, no reaction when Aviation Week reported that 200
Russians were killed in an Israeli air raid in Lebanon in 1982 during a
US-backed invasion that left some 15–20,000 dead, with no credible
pretext beyond strengthening Israeli control over the occupied West
Bank.
Among Ossetians who fled north, the “prevailing view,” according to the
London Financial Times, “is that Georgia’s pro-western leader, Mikheil
Saakashvili, tried to wipe out their breakaway enclave.” Ossetian
militias, under Russian eyes, then brutally drove out Georgians, in
areas beyond Ossetia as well. “Georgia said its attack had been
necessary to stop a Russian attack that already had been under way,” the
New York Times reports, but weeks later “there has been no independent
evidence, beyond Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that
Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages.”
In Russia, the Wall Street Journal reports, “legislators, officials and
local analysts have embraced the theory that the Bush administration
encouraged Georgia, its ally, to start the war in order to precipitate
an international crisis that would play up the national-security
experience of Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.”
In contrast, French author Bernard-Henri Levy, writing in the New
Republic, proclaims that “no one can ignore the fact that President
Saakashvili only decided to act when he no longer had a choice, and war
had already come. In spite of this accumulation of facts that should
have been blindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers,
many in the media rushed as one man toward the thesis of the Georgians
as instigators, as irresponsible provocateurs of the war.”
The Russian propaganda system made the mistake of presenting evidence,
which was easily refuted. Its Western counterparts, more wisely, keep to
authoritative pronouncements, like Levy’s denunciation of the major
Western media for ignoring what is “blindingly obvious to all
scrupulous, good-faith observers” for whom loyalty to the state suffices
to establish The Truth – which, perhaps, is even true, serious analysts
might conclude.
The Russians are losing the “propaganda war,” BBC reported, as
Washington and its allies have succeeded in “presenting the Russian
actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian attack into South
Ossetia on 7 August, which triggered the Russian operation,” though “the
evidence from South Ossetia about that attack indicates that it was
extensive and damaging.” Russia has “not yet learned how to play the
media game,” the BBC observes. That is natural. Propaganda has typically
become more sophisticated as countries become more free and the state
loses the ability to control the population by force.
The Russian failure to provide credible evidence was partially overcome
by the Financial Times, which discovered that the Pentagon had provided
combat training to Georgian special forces commandos shortly before the
Georgian attack on August 7, revelations that “could add fuel to
accusations by Vladimir Putin, Russian prime minister, last month that
the US had ‘orchestrated’ the war in the Georgian enclave.” The training
was in part carried out by former US special forces recruited by private
military contractors, including MPRI, which, as the journal notes, “was
hired by the Pentagon in 1995 to train the Croatian military prior to
their invasion of the ethnically-Serbian Krajina region, which led to
the displacement of 200,000 refugees and was one of the worst incidents
of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars.” The US-backed Krajina expulsion
(generally estimated at 250,000, with many killed) was possibly the
worst case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Its fate in
approved history is rather like that of photographs of Trotsky in
Stalinist Russia, for simple and sufficient reasons: it does not accord
with the required image of US nobility confronting Serbian evil.
The toll of the August 2008 Caucasus war is subject to varying
estimates. A month afterwards, the Financial Times cited Russian reports
that “at least 133 civilians died in the attack, as well as 59 of its
own peacekeepers,” while in the ensuing Russian mass invasion and aerial
bombardment of Georgia, according to the FT, 215 Georgians died,
including 146 soldiers and 69 civilians. Further revelations are likely
to follow.
In the background lie two crucial issues. One is control over pipelines
to Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Georgia was chosen as a corridor by
Clinton to bypass Russia and Iran, and was also heavily militarized for
the purpose. Hence Georgia is “a very major and strategic asset to us,”
Zbigniew Brzezinski observes.
It is noteworthy that analysts are becoming less reticent in explaining
real US motives in the region as pretexts of dire threats and liberation
fade and it becomes more difficult to deflect Iraqi demands for
withdrawal of the occupying army. Thus the editors of the Washington
Post admonished Barack Obama for regarding Afghanistan as “the central
front” for the United States, reminding him that Iraq “lies at the
geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s
largest oil reserves,” and Afghanistan’s “strategic importance pales
beside that of Iraq.” A welcome, if belated, recognition of reality
about the US invasion.
The second issue is expansion of NATO to the East, described by George
Kennan in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American policy in the
entire post-cold-war era, [which] may be expected to inflame the
nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian
opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian
democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West
relations.”
As the USSR collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev made a concession that was
astonishing in the light of recent history and strategic realities: he
agreed to allow a united Germany to join a hostile military alliance.
This “stunning concession” was hailed by Western media, NATO, and
President Bush I, who called it a demonstration of “statesmanship … in
the best interests of all countries of Europe, including the Soviet
Union.”
Gorbachev agreed to the stunning concession on the basis of “assurances
that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the east, ‘not one inch’
in [Secretary of State] Jim Baker’s exact words.” This reminder by Jack
Matlock, the leading Soviet expert of the Foreign Service and US
ambassador to Russia in the crucial years 1987 to 1991, is confirmed by
Strobe Talbott, the highest official in charge of Eastern Europe in the
Clinton administration. On the basis of a full review of the diplomatic
record, Talbott reports that “Secretary of State Baker did say to then
Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in the context of the
Soviet Union’s reluctant willingness to let a unified Germany remain
part of NATO, that NATO would not move to the east.”
Clinton quickly reneged on that commitment, also dismissing Gorbachev’s
effort to end the Cold War with cooperation among partners. NATO also
rejected a Russian proposal for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone from the
Arctic to the Black Sea, which would have “interfered with plans to
extend NATO,” strategic analyst and former NATO planner Michael MccGwire
observes.
Rejecting these possibilities, the US took a triumphalist stand that
threatened Russian security and also played a major role in driving
Russia to severe economic and social collapse, with millions of deaths.
The process was sharply escalated by Bush’s further expansion of NATO,
dismantling of crucial disarmament agreements, and aggressive
militarism. Matlock writes that Russia might have tolerated
incorporation of former Russian satellites into NATO if it “had not
bombed Serbia and continued expanding. But, in the final analysis, ABM
missiles in Poland, and the drive for Georgia and Ukraine in NATO
crossed absolute red lines. The insistence on recognizing Kosovo
independence was sort of the very last straw. Putin had learned that
concessions to the U.S. were not reciprocated, but used to promote U.S.
dominance in the world. Once he had the strength to resist, he did so,”
in Georgia.
Clinton officials argue that expansion of NATO posed no military threat,
and was no more than a benign move to allow former Russian satellites to
join the EU (Talbott). That is hardly persuasive. Austria, Sweden and
Finland are in the EU but not NATO. If the Warsaw Pact had survived and
was incorporating Latin American countries – let alone Canada and Mexico
– the US would not easily be persuaded that the Pact is just a Quaker
meeting. There should be no need to review the record of US violence to
block mostly fanciful ties to Moscow in “our little region over here,”
the Western hemisphere, to quote Secretary of War Henry Stimson when he
explained that all regional systems must be dismantled after World II,
apart from our own, which are to be extended.
To underscore the conclusion, in the midst of the current crisis in the
Caucasus, Washington professes concern that Russia might resume military
and intelligence cooperation with Cuba at a level not remotely
approaching US-Georgia relations, and not a further step towards a
significant security threat.
Missile defense too is presented here as benign, though leading US
strategic analysts have explained why Russian planners must regard the
systems and their chosen location as the basis for a potential threat to
the Russian deterrent, hence in effect a first-strike weapon. The
Russian invasion of Georgia was used as a pretext to conclude the
agreement to place these systems in Poland, thus “bolstering an argument
made repeatedly by Moscow and rejected by Washington: that the true
target of the system is Russia,” AP commentator Desmond Butler observed.
Matlock is not alone in regarding Kosovo as an important factor.
“Recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence was
justified on the principle of a mistreated minority’s right to secession
– the principle Bush had established for Kosovo,” the Boston Globe
editors comment.
But there are crucial differences. Strobe Talbott recognizes that
“there’s a degree of payback for what the U.S. and NATO did in Kosovo
nine years ago,” but insists that the “analogy is utterly and profoundly
false.” No one is a better position to know why it is profoundly false,
and he has lucidly explained the reasons, in his preface to a book on
NATO’s bombing of Serbia by his associate John Norris. Talbott writes
that those who want to know “how events looked and felt at the time to
those of us who were involved” in the war should turn to Norris’s
well-informed account. Norris concludes that “it was Yugoslavia’s
resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not
the plight of Kosovar Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war.”
That the motive for the NATO bombing could not have been “the plight of
Kosovar Albanians” was already clear from the rich Western documentary
record revealing that the atrocities were, overwhelmingly, the
anticipated consequence of the bombing, not its cause. But even before
the record was released, it should have been evident to all but the most
fervent loyalists that humanitarian concern could hardly have motivated
the US and Britain, which at the same time were lending decisive support
to atrocities well beyond what was reported from Kosovo, with a
background far more horrendous than anything that had happened in the
Balkans. But these are mere facts, hence of no moment to Orwell’s
“nationalists” – in this case, most of the Western intellectual
community, who had made an enormous investment in self-aggrandizement
and prevarication about the “noble phase” of US foreign policy and its
“saintly glow” as the millennium approached its end, with the bombing of
Serbia as the jewel in the crown.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear from the highest level that the
real reason for the bombing was that Serbia was a lone holdout in Europe
to the political and economic programs of the Clinton administration and
its allies, though it will be a long time before such annoyances are
allowed to enter the canon.
There are of course other differences between Kosovo and the regions of
Georgia that call for independence or union with Russia. Thus Russia is
not known to have a huge military base there named after a hero of the
invasion of Afghanistan, comparable to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, named
after a Vietnam war hero and presumably part of the vast US basing
system aimed at the Middle East energy-producing regions. And there are
many other differences.
There is much talk about a “new cold war” instigated by brutal Russian
behavior in Georgia. One cannot fail to be alarmed by signs of
confrontation, among them new US naval contingents in the Black Sea –
the counterpart would hardly be tolerated in the Caribbean. Efforts to
expand NATO to Ukraine, now contemplated, could become extremely
hazardous.
Nonetheless, a new cold war seems unlikely. To evaluate the prospect, we
should begin with clarity about the old cold war. Fevered rhetoric
aside, in practice the cold war was a tacit compact in which each of the
contestants was largely free to resort to violence and subversion to
control its own domains: for Russia, its Eastern neighbors; for the
global superpower, most of the world. Human society need not endure –
and might not survive – a resurrection of anything like that.
A sensible alternative is the Gorbachev vision rejected by Clinton and
undermined by Bush. Sane advice along these lines has recently been
given by former Israeli Foreign Minister and historian Shlomo ben-Ami,
writing in the Beirut Daily Star: “Russia must seek genuine strategic
partnership with the US, and the latter must understand that, when
excluded and despised, Russia can be a major global spoiler. Ignored and
humiliated by the US since the Cold War ended, Russia needs integration
into a new global order that respects its interests as a resurgent
power, not an anti-Western strategy of confrontation.”