From today's Pravda:
Georgia, Ossetia and Public Opinion
If the people of the world are being asked to judge the actions of the Russian Federation through press reports based on the information that is presented to them, then it would be a good idea to begin from a viewpoint whereby the international media presents the truth and not some half-baked subjective attempt to package the story in a way that is hostile to Moscow.
The US is being hostile to Moscow, alright, and both McCain and Obama had harsh words for Russia today.
Why I think this is a very poor idea:
AP, Aug. 9, 2008. "Fighting raged in breakaway South Ossetia for a second day Saturday as Russia sent hundreds of troops into the separatist province, threatening to bomb more Georgian military bases to stop the bloodshed Moscow said has claimed 1,500 lives. Georgia, a staunch U.S. ally, launched a major offensive Friday to retake control of separatist South Ossetia. Russia, which has close ties to the province and posts peacekeepers there to protect citizens with
Russian citizenship, responded by sending in armed convoys."
From the AP today:
Both candidates said Europe and other nations must be united against Russia's widening assault against Georgia, U.S.'s closest ally among the democratizing former Soviet republics. And they said NATO should reconsider its decision to withhold a "membership action plan" for Georgia.
Reuters reports that Cheney says "Russian aggression must not go unanswered". "The vice president expressed the United States' solidarity with the Georgian people and their democratically elected government in the face of this threat to Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Cheney's office said in a statement.
2007 was the year of the US Eastern European Missile Defense provocation aimed at Russia. Under the disingenuous guise of a defense against the non-existent Iranian missile threat to the South, NATO is putting missile silos in Poland and radar stations in the Czech Republic, under the paws of the Russian bear. At the June G-8 meeting, when spoilsport Putin suggested a more logical location such as Azerbaijan, the idea was met with yawns. During this transitional period there was an attempt to conflate the "war on Terror" and "war on Russia" campaigns by pretending that Russia was the sponsor of Islamic terrorism.
On Feb. 1, 2007, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under the Carter administration, took the extraordinary step of warning Congress against a false-flag operation by the Bush cabal to provoke a war with Iran:
"The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity.... the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."
This highly unusual reference to false flag operations -- any government's most secret tool -- must be based on specific intelligence about neocon plans. Brzezinski had emphasized the quotes around "defensive," and the reporters were all over the outrageous insinuation. Certainly, the author of The Grand Chessboard was saying "Check" loud and clear to neocon plans to attack Iran. As if the Iraq Study Group report were not enough, and it was not, he warned again of the consequences of failure to pursue diplomacy.
In December 2007 the 17 agencies of the US intelligence community produced their National Intelligence Estimate, concluding that Iran has no nuclear weapons program -- flying directly in the face of Bush-Cheney- neocon-Israeli hysteria.
According to the NIE, Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, had not restarted it, and would not be able to produce a weapon before 2015. It found no grounds to assume Iran even wanted one. In 2002, the Bush war party had used an NIE to justify their aggression on Iraq. That NIE came under withering criticism from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004.
2008 finds the neocon Bush-Cheney axis out. The guard in DC has changed. The Committee of Principals (COP) of the National Security Council includes Robert Gates, Condi Rice, Treasury Sec'y Paulson and Admiral Mullen as key members. In late June Condi pushed through a deal with North Korea, the Neoconland North Pole of Evil Axis. The US backed down over nuclear fuel and the dead bodies of neocons Cheney and Richard Perle. The payoff: the COPs plan to win over North Korea as an eventual ally against China or Russia.
This harkens back to Brzezinski and his geopolitical goals. I diaried about my Brzezinski reservations earlier. I see his brand of American hegemony as being as worrisome as the neocon vision of American exceptionalism. As Obama's senior foreign policy advisor, whether or not he's on the masthead he's too important to ignore.
Is Brzezinski setting Obama up to do a replay of his old act of luring Russia into Afghanistan? Of letting Georgia, former pawn of the bear, lure the bear into an engagement that is bound to widen? I don't have the answer, and don't like some possibilities I envision.