GEORGIA AND GEORGE BUSH ON THE LEFT'S MIND
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
08-18-08
Last week, the left had Georgia on its mind, or what's left of it
-- Georgia and its mind.
Its bizarre but wholly predictable reaction to the worst Russian aggression since the end of the Cold War was to blame President George W. Bush for something Moscow has been doing since the days of the Romanovs
-- invading and dominating neighboring states.
But in the left's fevered imagination, Bush created the precedent for a move Putin has probably been planning (or at least contemplating) since he became president of Russia in 1999
-- 4 years before Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Here are a few
soil samples from the fever swamp:
Writing in "Salon.com," Juan Cole observed:
"Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow's actions
-- with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years." Do tell?
Cole continues:
"In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush officials repeated ad nauseam the mantra that Saddam Hussein killed his own people. Thus, they helped create a case for unilateral
'humanitarian intervention' of the sort Putin says he's now pursuing. Washington had failed to get a U.N. Security Council Resolution authorizing a war on Iraq, and Iraq had not attacked the United States, so no principle of self-defense was at
stake." (Apparently, trying to kill an ex-president and supporting international terrorism don't count.) If this was 1939, the fussy internationalists would insist that Britain and France get a League of Nations resolution before responding to the Nazi invasion of Poland.
In case anyone missed the point, Cole concludes,
"Indeed, Putin's invoking Bush's Iraq adventure points directly to the way in which Bush enabled other world powers to act impulsively." Like Moscow ever needed to be enabled to act like a bunch of Cossacks on liberty. Bush probably was also responsible for Russia's attacks on Turkey in the 18th and 19th centuries and Poland and Finland in the early 20th century, as well as its 50-year occupation of half of Europe.
Deeper into the swamp, writing in
"The Huffington Post", Omid Memarian took a broader approach. Blaming Bush first became blaming America first:
"Yet the United States accused Russia of something that it does on a regular basis.
'Regime change' is a very well known part of U.S. foreign policy. ... The fact
is that the United States ignores the role of international
organizations and pursues a systematic double-standard set of policies
in areas like human rights and democracy. Therefore, it can not preach
to other powers like Russia and China for committing the same offenses."
Hmm, let's see: The U.S. Marines were in Nicaragua and Haiti in the
1920s. Therefore, Roosevelt had no right preaching to Mussolini about
his invasion of Ethiopia or Japan regarding the Nanking massacre.
Writing in "The Nation," perennial paranoid Robert Scheer took the next logical step
-- speculating that McCain and his hawkish advisors engineered the conflict in the Caucuses. This particular delusion was headlined
"Georgia War: A Neocon Election Ploy?" Devious, those Republicans. They moved the
proverbial October surprise back two months.
Iraq and Georgia would be a great comparison, if:
Putin had spent 10 years preceding the invasion trying to enforce more than a dozen Security Council resolutions calling on Georgia to allow inspection of its weapons facilities.
Georgian President Saakashvilli had launched a war against one of his neighbors, resulting in over a million deaths.
Saakashvilli then invaded a small neighboring state and seized its oil resources, thus precipitating a war to oust him in which as many as 200,000 died.
Instead of a leader committed to democracy and free market reform, Saakashvilli was a blood-drenched tyrant who had butchered as many as 300,000 Georgians.
Saakishvilli had, in the past, stockpiled chemical and biological weapons -- which he also used at various times
-- and kept playing games with international inspectors charged with determining if Georgia was producing weapons of mass destruction for its next aggression.
Saakishvilli was operating terrorist training camps throughout Georgia aimed at destabilizing his enemies and also paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers who blew up civilians in Moscow and St. Petersburg. (Among other clients, Saddam sheltered the Palestine Liberation Front and Abu Nidal. He shelled out first $10,000, then $25,000, to the families of Palestinian bombers.)
Except for these minor details, the left's comparison of Putin and Bush is right on target.
Whether in power or pulling the strings of his puppet, President Dmitri Medvedev, it's Putin who's the brutal dictator and Saakashvili the reform-minded democrat.
Granted, Georgia made a tragic blunder with its military response to events in the breakaway province of South Ossetia.
But the Russians have been inciting separatists there, hoping for a showdown with Georgia. With a population of 90,000, South Ossetia is no more than a road sign on the way to Putin's end game
-- reconstructing the Soviet empire, minus the Soviets.
Saakashvilli's military response to South Ossetia started on August 8. (Each side claims the other fired first.) Russia invaded Georgia within hours.
The Kremlin had been planning this war for months, waiting for an excuse. Its aggression was preceded by weeks of cyber warfare.
It began massing troops on its border with Georgia in late June. By the time it was ready to launch the attack, it had the equivalent of two heavily armed divisions with air support (over 100 Russian jets versus a grand total of 7 Georgian military planes).
The Georgian army was quickly routed. Russia now occupies a third of Georgia. Its armored columns are 25 miles from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Medvedev has agreed to a settlement to end the conflict. He says he's withdrawing troops. He doesn't say how far.
Moscow also refuses to say how long its remaining forces will remain in Georgia. Think Syria and Lebanon.
What's Putin up to?
Anyone who thinks Putin's invasion of Georgia was an expression of solidarity with the South Ossetians is as well-grounded in geo-politics as Nancy Pelosi. Hitler used the alleged mistreatment of the Sudetendeutsch as his excuse for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
For starters, the Stalin-wannabe wants to remove pro-Western Saakashvilli (Georgia has applied for membership in NATO) and install a leader who will intuitively know how high the Kremlin wants him to jump before the order is given. Charles Krauthammer calls it
"the Finlandization of Georgia."
Next, he wants to shut down
-- or control -- the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that brings Caspian Sea oil to Europe while bypassing Russia.
The pipeline currently delivers 1.2 million barrels a day, 7% of Europe's supply. Putin wants to control all of the oil-rich region's resources. As a side benefit, he gets to impoverish Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan (both U.S. allies) in the process.
Thus
-- in Putin's "humanitarian" efforts to aid the besieged Ossetians -- during its short war on Georgia, Russian planes launched over 50 missiles at a stretch of pipeline on the outskirts of Tbilisi. Perhaps Commissar Putin thought the pipeline would rise up and strike South Ossetia next.
Putin is sending a warning to the former Soviet republics and Moscow's one-time vassals in Eastern Europe: Fall in line, or you're next
-- or you may be next anyway.
Not for nothing (as the saying goes) did the Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states rush to show their support for Georgia.
At the same time, a top Russian general warned Poland that by allowing the installation of a U.S. antimissile system in its territory, it had
"100%" exposed itself to retaliation by Moscow.
Russian military spokesman, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn said such
a move
-- intended to protect Poland and neighboring states from Iran, not Russia -- "cannot go unpunished." That's the kind of gentle persuasion we were used to hearing from the Kremlin when Leonid Brezhnev was in residence.
Closer than Poland, there's the Ukraine, with another pro-Western, reformist leader, Viktor A. Yushchenko, at the helm. The Kremlin likes Yushchenko so much that it once tried to poison him. His disfigured face is mute testimony to Russian diplomacy.
On Friday, the Ukraine's Foreign Minister announced that his nation was prepared to give the West access to its missile-warning system. Like Georgia, the Ukraine is desperately banging on NATO's door. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
-- NATO members since 2004 -- are only somewhat less concerned.
Russia's population of 142 million is expected to drop to 115 million by midpoint in this century. Mother Russia is losing three-quarters of a million children a year.
Moscow casts covetous eyes at the Ukrainian population of 46 million. With 8 million ethnic Russians living among them, Moscow even has its built-in Sudeten Germans, when it's ready to move.
Putin is an ex-KGB thug who's taken Russia from the promise of democracy in the early 1990s back to a police state over the last nine years.
He encourages and abets the international goon squad -- Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il, Hugo Chavez and the Castro boys. There were two reasons America never got the elusive Security Council resolution to take military action against Saddam Hussein
-- Russia and China.
But after Putin invades and largely conquers Georgia, all the left can do is blame Bush and blame America -- like Putin needed our wholly justified action in Iraq to justify his unconscionable action in Georgia, as if the Kremlin ever cared about international law unless it could be twisted for its own purposes.
Just as
it couldn't see the enemy in Vietnam, during the Cold War, or in the current War on Terror, the left is congenitally incapable of perceiving reality
-- even when that reality crushes the innocent under tank treads, fires missiles at pipelines and threatens sovereign states with nuclear annihilation.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
