Even Paranoids Have Real Enemies  

Billmon is back again at Daily Kos with a look at the Georgia disaster - Anatomy of A(nother) Fiasco.

In February of last year, with the newly born Democratic Congress still waiving its little arms and spitting up mucus, Dick Lugar (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Joe Biden (the committee’s nominally Democratic chairman) introduced the "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act". Like its predecessors, the bill authorized the President to immediately begin treating the Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name – with weapons sales, military advisors, etc. Senate cosponsors included Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and, naturally, John McCain (R-POW).

Also like its predecessors, the bill was whisked through both houses of Congress with about as much deliberation as a resolution praising the Future Farmers of Benton County for their fine showing at the Iowa State Fair – with no hearings, no debate, no roll call votes. President Bush signed it into law on April 9, 2007. The White House put out an official statement marking the occasion. It was one sentence long.

And so, with an absolute minimum of democratic process, the United States of America committed its full prestige and power (if not, just yet, a legally binding guarantee) to the defense of the two former Soviet republics, even though the Russians have repeatedly stated that they regard NATO membership by either country as a direct threat to their own vital security interests. As others have already noted, this is as if China had unilaterally announced a military alliance with Mexico and Cuba. Actually it’s worse: Imagine the US reaction if China announced a military alliance with Mexico, after which the president of Mexico started dropping public hints about taking New Mexico back – by whatever means necessary. (And if that comparison seems unnecessarily paranoid, consider the history of Russia in the 20th century. Even paranoids have real enemies.)

A careful search of Nexus and Google reveals that the number of stories appearing in the pages of major US newspapers and magazines, or on the wires of major American news services, taking note of this fateful decision, equals exactly one: a brief item out of UPI’s Moscow bureau, warning of the Russian reaction. The Georgian and Ukranian press, on the other hand, gave the new law saturation coverage – encouraged by their respective governments, both of which issued official statements describing their future NATO admissions as, in effect, done deals.

The Russians also reacted. Just a few days after the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act was introduced in the Senate, President Putin gave a speech in Munich that was widely reported as his harshest attack to date on America for its allegedly aggressive and hegemonic designs. The New York Times and US government officials (which is a somewhat redundant expression) both professed shock over Putin’s language – without once mentioning the congressional provocation that triggered it.

But there was just one problem: NATO admission for the Ukraine and Georgia was most emphatically not a done deal. Despite all the pressure from the Cheney Administration (which, we now know, was being played hard by pro-Georgian lobbyists, including John McCain’s current campaign manager) the French and Germans stuck to their position in the run up to last April’s NATO summit in Bucharest.

This led to another flurry of activity by the congressional expansion lobby. In January of this year, another resolution was introduced, again demanding that NATO open its doors to the Ukraine and Georgia. This time the list of cosponsors included Biden, McCain and Joe Lieberman – as well as both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It was passed by unanimous consent. And when the NATO summit nonetheless elected to pass on the Ukrainian and Georgian applications (promising, vaguely, to revisit the issue at a later date) the Demopublicans quickly came back with yet another resolution blasting the Russians for a long list of alleged violations of Georgian sovereignty and praising the NATO summit for "stat[ing] that the Republic of Georgia will become a member of NATO" – when, in fact, the summit had made no such promise. Up is down. Black is white.

Blank Checks and Bounced Ones

Looking at this dreary legislative record (which reads like something out of the old Supreme Soviet) is it any surprise Georgia’s president felt he had a virtual carte blanche from America to challenge the Russians – up to an including the use of military force in a disastrous bid to reconquer South Ossetia? Why would he think otherwise – that is, until the moment when he discovered that America had written him a check it had no real intention of honoring?

There's not much more to say - except that it’s a pretty strange world where the sworn goal of US diplomacy is to put the country in a situation where it may have to go to war with another nuclear power (or back down ignominiously) to defend the sanctity of borders drawn by Josef Stalin and Nikita Krushchev. Leaving aside the raving hypocrisy (Kosovo, Iraq) it’s an alarming sign that the national security and foreign policy elites of this country – in both parties; and not just among the lunatic neocon fringe – are totally out of control. British analyst Anatol Levin (one of the more perceptive of the realists) describes it a case of "profound infantilism":

In the United States, the infantile illusion of omnipotence, whereby it doesn’t matter how many commitments the United States has made elsewhere—in the last resort, the United States can always do what it likes.

Personally, I see it more as a case of the bureaucratic imperative run amok: The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War – the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it’s simply an afterthought – a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.

And that, ultimately, is the most depressing thing about this story: Even after the fiasco in Iraq, the bloody failure in Lebanon, the downward spiral in Afghanistan and, now, the futile posturing in Georgia, there’s absolutely no evidence the US foreign policy elite is inclined to moderate its ambition to re-organize the world along American lines. Nor is there any sign the political class (including, unfortunately, Barack Obama) is rethinking its lockstep support for that agenda. The voters, meanwhile, don’t seem to care much one way or another – as long as gas doesn’t get too expensive and the military casualties aren’t too high (or can be kept off the TV). If anything, it looks like bashing the Russians is still good politics, if only for the nostalgia value.

If you caught Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyer’s show the other night, you may have noticed that his biggest complaint was not that US foreign policy is misguided and destructive (although he clearly thinks it's both) but that it is being conducted in a democratic vacuum -- despite all the florid rhetoric about promoting democracy. We may still go through the motions of a republican form of government, Bacevich says, but the fabric has gotten pretty thin: or, in the case of our national revival of the Great Game in the Caucasus, damned near invisible.

How long before it tears completely?

The Washington Post's "PostGlobal" edition has an opinion piece touching on the same issues Billmon does, and raising the "gas OPEC" subject again, which I haven't seen for a while - Russia Positions Itself As Global Economic Player.

This split was also evident at the last NATO summit in Bucharest a few months ago. The U.S. proposed that Georgia and Ukraine become members, but Europeans partners pointedly avoided an unnecessary ruckus with Russia and came back with a polite, lukewarm "definite maybe" postponement of the matter.

Simply put, the Europeans -- united with one foreign policy and a combined GDP greater than that of the U.S. -- are not in a mood to put up another Berlin Wall or Iron Curtain made of imported suspicions against Russia. The last was European, but this one is an American argument and Europe is best served by stepping aside. This generation of Europeans consider Russians distant, unfamiliar cousins and Russia as a land of opportunity. As such, they search for commonalities and a spirit of live and let live -- entente cordiale. No one wants to make enemies or engage in an unnecessary clash born of an imaginary picture as depicted by American politicians: some sort of dark or "evil," anti-freedom and anti-democratic force.

Concurrently, Americans are taking the Georgian issue to an unnecessary level. It either a lazy fallback to old methods instead of an effort to look reality in the eye, or alternatively it is fodder for elections in U.S.A. where retail mileage can be drawn from replicating the cold war. It can serve Senator McCain and his militarist background as an heir to President Bush and it serves the current occupants of the White House to divert genuine attention from hard economic realities, massive budget deficits, private debt and the mortgage fiasco at home. And it is not a surprise to know that Mr. Randy Scheunemann (of the lobbying firm Orion Strategies in Washington) is both the chief foreign policy advisor to Senator McCain and, according to filings of the U.S. Department of Commerce, a registered lobbyist for the government of Georgia. But the recent push for freedom fries in the Caucasus turned out to be a modern day version of the failed Bay of Pigs rescue with Georgians waiting for Americans to parachute in and rescue the lot. Alas Secretary Rice went to Tbilisi to push the Georgians to accept the cease fire that was an EU initiative (mediated by France as its the present rotating president).

President Bush has chosen abrasive bully tactics in the 21st century to lecture Russia about what is good for her. Summits and discussions at a table are cast aside in some sort of muscle flexing which fabricates a new dividing line and polarizes Russia against Bush's version of the "free world". Russia has seen the deck stacked against it: The planned missile defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic is a manifest affirmation of America's reassessment of its policy towards Russia and a relapse to pre-1990 years. Talk about stripping Russia's seat from the G-8 also plays to the tune of Senator McCain's pet project of kicking Russia out of the group of industrial economies.

What is clear is that neither Russia or China are going to fall into this trap laid by President Bush. They consider the false choice of "responsible nations" and "free" nations to be contradictory for a country that has long preferred friendships with dictators outside Europe. Russia has long contemplated a payback for the breakup of Yugoslavia, subsequent support for an independent Kosovo, the missile shield system in Poland and the Czech Republic and pesky setups in Georgia and Ukraine. America's opposition to letting the International Monetary Fund help Russia during her financial problems in the early 1990s and the go-it-alone Afghanistan episode of NATO's fight against global terrorism, which excluded Russia, all confirmed Russia's suspicions.

America has been busy with old-fashioned territory grabs and the eastward crawl of NATO towards Ukraine and Georgia, aiming for relatively modest oil reserves in the Caspian region. However, Russia has been nursing a modern global strategy that leaps over borders. Russia has cut landmark deals with former and potential American clients: weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Venezuela are the first of their kind. Sales of gas via a new trans-Siberia gas pipeline to northern China and talks of a "gas OPEC" with Iran, Algeria and others is another that towers over the pseudo-democratic ideas of Georgia. Border demarcation of the North Pole (with purported reserves of more than 90 billion barrels of oil-- twelve times the amount in the Caspian region), nuclear power deals with India and Iran and direct under-sea gas pipelines to Germany, Turkey and south-eastern Europe (bypassing the Ukrainian chokehold on Russian gas lines to Europe) are other moves on the multi-dimensional chess board -- all as Russia is simply keeping cool and amusing itself with the much hyped, but failed mission of Tony Blair as the chief negotiator of the Middle East Quartet, of which Russia is a member. From the Russian perspective, all options are on the table!

One interesting theory about the Georgian debacle is that it was engineered as part of the McCain election campaign - Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy ?.

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.