A tale of US expansion

THE outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US Vice-President Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Britain’s Gordon Brown, declared that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered”.

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied — along with Georgia, as luck would have it — the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives?You’d be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last week with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to “restore constitutional order” — in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia’s capital.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain’s minister for Europe, called a “small beautiful democracy”. Well it’s certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a ‘Rose revolution’.

Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96 per cent of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an “increasingly authoritarian” government.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia — as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia — is the inevitable consequence of the break-up of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border. Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia’s control of energy supplies and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration’s wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge.

Over the past decade, Nato’s relentless eastward expansion has brought the western military alliance hard up against Russia’s borders and deep into former Soviet territory. American military bases have spread across eastern Europe and central Asia, as the US has helped install one anti-Russian client government after another through a series of colour-coded revolutions. Now the Bush administration is preparing to site a missile defence system in eastern Europe transparently targeted at Russia.

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power. That a stronger Russia has now used the South Ossetian imbroglio to put a check on that expansion should hardly come as a surprise.

Despite Bush’s attempts to talk tough, the war has also exposed the limits of US power in the region. As long as Georgia proper’s independence is respected that should be no bad thing. Unipolar domination of the world has squeezed the space for genuine self-determination and the return of some counterweight has to be welcome. But the process of adjustment also brings huge dangers. If Georgia had been a member of Nato, the conflict would have risked a far sharper escalation.

Courtesy: The Guardian, London/By Seumas Milne