Washington’s plan, a diplomatic blitzkrieg, was for some 100 countries, out of 192 UN members, to rapidly recognize so called the Republic of Kosovo. This, however, has not happened. As of this writing only 47 countries have recognized it and that includes countries difficult to find on the map such as Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Burkina Faso, Samoa and others. On the other hand some 50 countries have said that they were dead against it. 21 out of 27 EU countries have recognized the UDI. Some of those have been under huge pressure from the U.S. to the point that the Czech Republic president, Vaclav Klaus, publicly apologized to the Serbian people saying they did not do it out of sympathy for the Kosovo Albanians but because of the U.S. pressure. Shockingly for Washington thus far only six Muslim countries have recognized the UDI, some saying that Kosovo is an American rather than an Islamic creation. At this writing Saudi Arabia has been attempting to convince other Arab countries to go along with the U.S. wishes but other Arab countries led by Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Morocco opposed it. Richard Holbrooke has been putting the pressure on Macedonia and Montenegro to honor U.S. wishes. Macedonia has 25% Albanian population.

BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, constituting about half of the global population, have refused to recognize the UDI together with 6 EU countries: Spain, Portugal, Rumania, Slovakia, Greece, Cyprus, as well as many others including Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, South Africa, Angola, Iran, etc. Vatican has refused to recognize the Republic of Kosovo announcing that Kosovo belongs to the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The Serbs not only in Kosovo and Belgrade have been angered and vehemently protested the UDI, including the Serbs all over the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. I would like to address briefly the issue of the UDI timing.  It had to be squeezed on one hand after the presidential elections in Serbia, since Washington and Brussels wanted badly Serbian president Tadic to be reelected, but on the other hand before publication of Carla Del Ponte’s book. Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from August 1999 to January 2008, who has never concealed her dislike of Serbia and even Russia for that matter, in her autobiography The Hunt: Me and War Criminals, presumably easing her conscience, based on credible reports and witnesses belatedly revealed existence of Nazi style crimes committed by the current Kosovo Prime Minister (PM) Hashim Thaci and his Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) buddies. The Third Reich style crimes included harvesting of organs from abducted Serbs to sell for transplants on the black market. The abducted Serbs, plus innocent prostitutes from several Eastern European countries after being used up, were transported to Albania. There they were butchered, organs like kidneys extracted from their bodies and sold on the European black market. The last act was to slaughter and bury them in Albania.  These ghastly crimes, committed by the KLA thugs, have been covered up now for 9 years. So instead of serving long-term sentences in various European jails, these protégés of the Clinton and Bush administrations have become leading Kosovo politicians including the Prime Ministers: Hashim Thaci, Ramush Haradinaj and Agim Ceku.

If these crimes had been revealed before February 17, would Washington/Brussels have proceeded with the amputation of Serbia? The answer is probably not. Of course, the American people do not know anything about these ghastly crimes as the media on their part continues to cover them up. Michael Parenti, political scientist and author, said: “The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what the Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.” Personally, I have co-interviewed a Serbian lady, who by virtue of the circumstances knows all about these crimes and was willing to talk about it despite the fact that her life has been threatened. The interview will be published in due course. In addition to the Kosovo Albanian leaders, she Serbian lady has implicated the first UNMIK chief and now the French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and his wife, and the U.S. military who for a while kept the abducted Serbs within its military base Camp Bondsteel.

Connection between the Kosovo UDI and the conflict in Georgia has been made by hundreds of analysts and newspaper editorials worldwide. The Kosovo recognition opened up the Pandora Box for unilateral secessions such as that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Of course it may not stop here: e.g. Transdniestria with respect to Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh vis-à-vis Azerbaijan could be next. Russian president then and now the PM, Vladimir Putin, depleted his lungs warning, but his warnings were brushed aside by Washington and Brussels. In a recent CNN interview Putin said “When we tried to stop such a solution for Kosovo, nobody listened. We were saying: do not do it, you will put us in a terrible situation in the Caucasus. What will we be able to tell to the small nations of the Caucasus: why can Kosovo obtain its independence and they cannot? Nobody spoke of the international law except us.” By scraping the international law, the U.S. and the EU heavyweights have created what amounts to the rules of jungle. Each power can now act as it will.

SAAKASHVILI’S BLUNDER

On August 7 using the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing as a cover, Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who owes his position to U.S. interference in Georgian politics, attacked the South Ossetian capital Tkskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers. Hundreds of people were killed or badly wounded, thousands turned into refugees, towns and villages were turned into ruins. Gorbachev said: “Nothing can justify this loss of life and destruction.” The Georgian minister for reintegration of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Temur Yakobashvili said: “Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian troops.” He reported that a small group of Georgian soldiers had been able to wipe out an entire Russian military division, thanks to the Israeli training. “We killed 60 Russian soldiers yesterday alone” (Misha Glenny, “Superpower swoop,” New Statesman, August 14). On the 8th Saakashvili declared that South Ossetia was liberated! He made the TV announcement: “Georgian forces are controlling the entire territory of South Ossetia except Java. We are fully controlling Tskhinvali. In Tbilisi Georgians rejoiced in their president’s fulfillment of his electoral commitment to quell the “rebel province.” It was his blitzkrieg attempt resembling Croatian president Tudjman’s Operation Storm in August 1995, which resulted in a murder of some 2,000 Serbs and ethnic cleansing of about 250,000. Tudjman’s troops were trained by the American trainers and so were the Georgian troops (127 American trainers plus some 1,000 Israeli trainers). In addition there were 1,000 American troops in Georgia for joint training exercises. What were those troops training for? An invasion of South Ossetia? Thanks to the American military aid, Georgia’s 18,000-strong armed forces were best-trained and equipped force in the Caucasus. The aid included huge supplies of equipment, e.g. 206 tanks (175 from NATO countries), 186 APC’s (126 from NATO), 79 artillery weapons (67 from NATO), 25 helicopters (12 from NATO), 8 unmanned reconnaissance aircraft from Israel, etc.

Russia (nuclear, cash-rich and energy blessed) is not Serbia; Putin is not Milosevic or Yeltsin. Russia had to respond and called for the U.S./NATO bluff. After all most South Ossetians are Russian citizens and there were 500 Russian peacekeepers attacked by the Georgians. Their presence was established by Yeltsin not Putin, The roots of the problems lie in the decision of Georgia’s separatists in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian’s autonomy, impose Georgian as the principal language and ban political parties. A series of bloody clashes ensued in 1989-1992 timeframe with South Ossetia achieving de-facto independence from Georgia, which was an arbitrary edict that the Soviet government made under Stalin (a Georgian). A similar decision by Nikita Khrushchev (a Ukrainian) added the Russian-inhabited Crimea to Ukraine—another ethnic time bomb.

 During the celebrations in Tbilisi, a long column of Russian APC’s emerged from the Roki Tunnel and rolled towards Tskhinvali. Within 48 hrs the Georgian army was whipped back into Georgia. The attack was short, sharp, deadly and executed competently. The Russian forces were obviously ready and eager to teach Tbilisi a lesson. It appears that training of the Georgian army plus delivery of military hardware meant next to nothing as the Georgian soldiers did not want to fight and often threw away their weapons and ran. Russia took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, Stalin’s birthplace. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia sent its troops to fight beyond its borders. French statesman Talleyrand in the 19th-century said: It is worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” Perhaps these words sum up Saakashvili’s gamble. On August 26, Russia formally recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. The declaration of independence was based on the Kosovo model for which the U.S. claims to be a “sui generis” case. This claim cannot be sustained because in real world, every “sui generis” case is at the same time a precedent. The foreign ministers of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO); NATO counterpart re-born from the ashes of the Warsaw pact and consisting of Russia plus six of its neighboring countries, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; met in Moscow to express support for Russia. However, the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO); Russia, China and Central Asian republics, refused to give its endorsement as China vehemently opposes secessionism given own issues with Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Russians copied Washington’s Kosovo playbook: accusing Georgians of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, labeling Saakashvili a war criminal (like Milosevic was labeled), and claiming that Georgian actions had disqualified it from ruling over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the future. Moreover, Russian officials claimed that their intervention was based on “humanitarian” motives. FM Lavrov explicitly compared Russian military actions to NATO’s 1999 actions in Serbia. He made the point that “an able ground operation quickly achieved its very clear and legitimate objective” as opposed to NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia which degenerated into attacks on the Serbian infrastructure and caused an ecocide. It was the first aerial attack on a national capital since 1945. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International determined that many NATO attacks constituted attacks against illegitimate civilian targets.

Pat Buchanan wrote in Blowback from Bear-Baiting that Georgia’s invasion “must rank in  stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”

WHO GOT GEORGIA INTO THIS MESS?

I refuse to believe that Saakashvili acted on his own without a signal from Washington. Not only Putin but Gorbachev, Gerhard Schroeder and Lech Walesa supported my assertion. There are two prime suspects in Washington: John McCain and Dick Cheney. What Condi Rice (perceived by many as inept) told Saakashvili during her July 10 trip to Tbilisi is crucial but not known? Setting aside the issue if Saakashvili received an explicit signal from Washington, it is most certain that Bush could have prevented him into launching aggression. The UN Security Council met on August 8. The U.S., Britain and some others backed Georgia in rejecting to “renounce the use of force.” Zalmay Khalilzad, American UN ambassador, denounced Russian aggression against that paragon of democratic virtue, the Republic of Georgia! Yet another Washington fantasy. Saakashvili is an autocrat who jails political opponents and media critics and uses force to quash anti-government demonstrations.

Randy Scheunemann, who is speculated to be McCain’s choice for the National Security Adviser, has not only served as McCain’s top foreign policy advised but also served as a highly paid lobbyist for the Georgian government. Georgia paid him $290,000 in lobbying fees between 1/1/07 and 5/15/08. Since 2001 he got $730,000. Presumably Georgia got Scheunemann’s pledge to garner U.S. support for admission into NATO and for its claims to South Ossetia. Pat Buchanan wrote in a piece titled And None Dare Call it Treason: “He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man....Schenemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9/11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9/11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the ‘Committee to the liberation of Iraq, ‘a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war. Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp. The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.” Is this what McCain has to offer to the nation? Endless wars?  McCain has sponsored legislation supporting Georgia’s claims. The aggression enabled McCain to shift for a while the political debate from the state of the economy toward national security where he claimed overwhelming advantage over Obama.

Scheunemann and McCain aren’t, however, the only ones who irresponsibly encouraged Saakashvili. The Bush administration should share the blame as they singled out Georgia for the “best buddy in the Caucasus.” The PM Dick Cheney (yes, he is not just a VP but behaves like a PM due to Bush’s incompetence) in particular enjoys the reputation of a leading Russophobe in the administration as well as the most extreme neocon faction within the administration. Misha Glenny, writing in the Globe and Mail, also singled out Cheney. Together with the U.S. orchestration of Kosovo independence the Georgia debacle started in May 2006 with so called Vilnius speech delivered by Cheney, who threatened Russia with a new Cold War if Russia did not capitulate to American demands of cheap oil for Russia’s pro-American neighbors. He said: “Russia has a choice.” President Bush said in 2007: “Iran has a choice.” Has a nation ever talked to another nation in this manner since the fall of Nazism and Communism and in particular to the nation armed with over 5,000 nuclear warheads? It is the language of omnipotence designed to disregard diplomacy. Russia must yield to U.S. wishes or else will suffer retaliatory actions! In other words Russia’s sovereignty is trampled on almost liked Serbia’s with no nukes.

Cheney’s speech was read carefully by Putin as reported in December 31, 2007 Time magazine interview for “person of the year,” Putin said:” Why would you decide that your civilization is the best? There are much more ancient civilizations in this world. Secondly, they tell us we are prepared to accept you but our family is a patriarchal family and we are the patriarchs here. In the modern world there may no longer be such relationships. The bloc system of relations must be replaced by an altogether different system based on common rules that are called international law. “ It was a violation of UN Resolution #1244, assuring the territorial integrity of Serbia, which prompted Putin to say “The precedent of Kosovo is a terrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations, developed not over decades, but over centuries....They have not thought through the results of what they are doing. At the end of the day it is a two-ended stick and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.” The second end is the separation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia.

U.S. HYPOCRISY REACHED CRESCENDO

Hypocrisy has been an integral component of the U.S. foreign policies for years. The U.S. espouses standards that it routinely violates. It invades, bombs, occupies, contaminates with radioactivity and interferes in the internal affairs of other countries more so than any other country on the planet. In its own neighborhood since the WWII end, the U.S. has invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama and Haiti, orchestrated a successful coup in Guatemala and tried the ones against Fidel Castro in Cuba and Sandinista in Nicaragua. However, here we have the case when hypocrisy reached an absolute crescendo. President Bush and Secretary Rice condemned Russia and supported Georgia without a single word acknowledging butchery of Georgian forces against Russians and Ossetians, which started this sorry affair. Not one word about Georgia’s obligation under the Soviet Constitution to hold referenda in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. South Ossetia and Abkhazia were part of the Soviet Georgia and not the Republic of Georgia. Not one word that Saakashvili broke a 2005 agreement not to use force in the provinces. They had audacity to condemn Russia for violating Georgia’s integrity when they invaded Iraq, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military and civilians, masterminded a kangaroo court to hang Saddam Hussein, and radioactively contaminated the birthplace of the civilization. What about violation of the integrity of Serbia in violation of the UN Resolution #1244 and Helsinki Accords? Incidentally, Kosovo’s status as part of Serbia is beyond dispute.

On August 19 Condoleezza Rice stated: “Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that’s its military power. That’s not the way to deal in the 21st century.” Both outside and inside (to a lesser degree) the U.S. these utterances were greeted with laughter, “for they betoken a hypocrisy so ingrained it suggests insanity. The Unites States looks in the mirror and what do they see? Russia. And what do we say? ‘That is no way to do things in the 21st century!’” (David Bromwich in Huffington Post). How can Condi say this with a straight face? On her watch the U.S. bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq killing numerous civilians, bombed Somalia, threatened Iran and Syria and fed bombs to Israel to invade Lebanon. Was this an attempt to reach Goebbels’ heights? If so, she might have surpassed him! VP Dick Cheney also harshly criticized Russia’s behavior calling the action “an affront to civilized standards” and announcing that the Russian invasion cannot go “unanswered.” He has been gearing up for a fight with Russians for couple of years. He and his neocon buddies have seized upon Georgia’s and Ukraine’s quest to join NATO as a way of riling Moscow. Cheney visited Georgia and promised $1 billion in relief.

Leading Russophobes in Washington compared Putin with Hitler. A neocon champion, Robert Kagan (McCain’s adviser), compared the Russian attack on Georgia with Munich 1938 (Nazi grab of the Sudetenland), Zbigniew Brzezinski (real power behind an Obama throne per Eric Walberg of ONLINE JOURNAL) said that Putin was following a course “that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s.” John McCain said: We’ve seen this before, in Prague and Budapest....today we are all Georgians.” Vice Presidential candidate on the Democratic side, Joe Biden rushed to Georgia and produced all sorts of bluster towards Russia, e.g. “Russia’s actions in Georgia will have consequences.” Echoing Dick Cheney promise, Biden requested that $1 billion of U.S. taxpayer’s money be given to Georgia at the time of Wall Street meltdown. So the U.S. would have to borrow from the Chinese banks another billion (good money after bad money) to finance its runaway foreign policies instead of investing $1 billion in, say, Ohio/ Pennsylvania to help American unemployed people! McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, a neophyte in foreign affairs, after heavy indoctrination from the McCain campaign top advisors in an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, talked tough on Russia and even called the Russian incursion into Georgia “unprovoked.” Prior to the interview she claimed that Alaska’s proximity to Russia lent her some expertise on that nation. She explained: “They’re our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” However, she forgot the fact that Russia owned Alaska not all that long ago.

MEDIA FRENZY

The mainstream media (MSM) coverage has been predictably monolithic, biased, shallow and excelled in demonization of the Russians. The MSM reacted as if though Russia invaded the American state of Georgia and not the Republic of Georgia. Saakashvili was glorified and described as a great friend of America (provided the third largest contingent of Coalition troops in Iraq). Professor Gary Leupp, summarizing the MSM spin, wrote: “His commitment to democracy and Georgian independence have annoyed Moscow, which still retains aspects of Soviet-era authoritarianism, still cherishes ambitions to dominate border states once part of the USSR, and is (for unexplained reasons) suspicious of U.S. hopes to integrate Georgia into NATO....Russia used this as an excuse to flex its muscle, invading a country for the first time since the USSR invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It not only drove Georgian troops from South Ossetia but along with allies in the separatist Abkhazia region attacked targets throughout Georgia. It’s clear case of unwarranted aggression.”

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Saakashvili. Where was a Russian response? The Investors’ Business Daily (August 15) titled Russia’s Big Lie stated: “After hearing the hard, cold facts of Russia’s brutal occupation of Georgia, the West has no choice but to respond harshly to Vladimir Putin’s regime. Failure to do would only invite further attacks.” The article used Robert Kagan’s comparison with Hitler and the Sudetenland and blamed the Europeans for balking at letting Georgia join NATO last spring. It proceeds with: “Russia planned for months, watching and learning from our responses to Iran. The West told Iran to halt the enrichment of uranium and its nuclear weapons program. It hasn’t, and we have done nothing. Now, our lack of resolve has come back to haunt us...Our weakness invited the attack---and will invite more if we don’t respond now.” In concludes with a big threat to Russia: drilling for more oil ourselves! Do they know that it would take a decade or so of drilling before significant quantities of oil would be discovered?

The British press (e.g. Telegraph of August 31) was full of allusions to the Crimean War of 1854-56 (Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and Kingdom of Sardinia against Russia and some 4,000 Bulgarian volunteers) in particular in view of Foreign Secretary David Milliband’s trip to Kiev where he, “attempting to ape Winston Churchill, called for a world coalition against Russian aggression. Attempts to turn the Black Sea into NATO’s mare nostrum and to ‘defend’ Ukraine have the same intent as the Crimean War did: To drive Russia out of the Black Sea, prevent it from entering the Mediterranean, and deny its navy any warm water ports. This is what in the Anglo-Saxon universe is called ‘confronting the new Ivan the Terrible.’”

Malcolm Rifkind, foreign and defense secretary 1992-97, writing in the August 31 issue of the Sunday Telegraph said: “Russian-speakers in Crimea are now citizens of Ukraine, and Moscow has no right to control its so called ‘near abroad...’NATO is able to intervene with military force if it wishes to do so, even on behalf of non-members. This is what it did, rightly or wrongly, in Kosovo...Putin---who remains the real power in the country---is no new Lenin waging ideological war. He is more like a 19th-century tsar trying to extend Russian power, like all tsars since Ivan the Terrible.” There is a big flaw in Sir Malcolm’s argument. There was an anti-Russian bloc within the EU (UK, Baltic States, Poland and the Czech Republic) but others led by France wanted an accommodation with Russia. To that effect French president Sarkozy successfully negotiated a deal the Russian president Medvedev. At this writing, details regarding the role of EU monitors remain unclear. Secondly, Ukraine is divided on Russia. President Viktor Yushchenko flew to Georgia in a show of solidarity against Russia, but the PM Yulia Tymoshenko sent humanitarian aid but did not condemn Russia. Then there is Russia-friendly Party of Regions headed by Viktor Yanukovich, former PM who is the third contender in the forthcoming presidential election. Thirdly, Turkey took a neutral position and did not condemn Russia.

CONSTRUCTIVE RESPONSES

In addition to Soviet era type of responses discussed above, constructive and rational  responses, commentaries and analyses became available but of course not on the MSM outlets. Fortunately there were those outside the Washington foreign policy elite who didn’t want to be Georgians. Fortunately we still have internet. Srdja Trifkovic, in Georgia: The Score, has conducted a survey singling out contributions from Princeton’s Richard Falk, published in Turkey’s English language Today’s Zaman (August 26); Tufts history professor Gary Leupp, published in Dissident Voice (August 19); Gail Stokes of Rice University, writhing in the Houston Chronicle (August 24), and Dallas Darling, the author of The Other Side of Christianity, writing in The Middle East Online (August 20); Lorne Gunter editorial in the Edmonton Journal (August 15); and George Freedman’s analysis published by Stratfor (August 25) . On my part, in addition to columns by Buchanan referenced above, I would like to single out contributions by Doug Bandow, Ted Galen Carpenter and Paul Craig Roberts.

Doug Bandow, author and an official in the Reagan administration, finished his piece Washington’s Laughable Lack of Self-Awareness in Antiwar.com (August 15) with the following words: “Is the war in the Caucus tragic? Certainly. Should the U.S. encourage peaceful resolution of the Russia-Georgia-South Ossetia conflicts?  Surely. Should Washington promote the fantasy that Georgia is a democratic exemplar upholding its natural right to rule South Ossetia while holding off a dangerous revanchist Russia? No. And should U.S. government officials pretend that Moscow is the only aggressive, threatening, self-interested actor on the international stage? Not on your life. It’s time for Washington’s interventionist elite to take a good, hard look in the mirror.” Prior to that Bandow commented on Khalilzad’s remarks at the UN “so full of moral outrage and personal umbrage, are almost a perfect parody of statesmanship, representing what a hypocritical, self-important, morally blind, arrogant, even hubristic, government would say when another power follows its example. My god. Can you imagine! Aggression! Attacks on civilians! Humanitarian suffering! Violations of national sovereignty! Regime change. No one does that anymore. Except the U.S., of course.”

Ted Galen Carpenter, VP for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, wrote a piece titled Kosovo Precedent Prevails published by the National Interest (August 27). It opens with the statement by Condoleezza Rice who “blithely” insisted that the Kosovo situation was unique and set no international precedent whatsoever. Russian recognition of South Ossetia demonstrates the “arrogant folly of that position....It is difficult to imagine how Washington and its NATO allies could have more egregiously mishandled the Kosovo situation. Western policy has been a debacle from its beginnings in the early 1990s.” Carpenter suggests that “Washington should propose a mutual retreat to Moscow, in which the United States would rescind its recognition of Kosovo’s independence and urge Kosovars to accept Belgrade’s proposal for a negotiated status of ‘enhanced autonomy,” which comes close to de facto independence. Russia would be expected to adopt a similar policy with regard to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.” On August 16, Rogozin stated that integrity of Georgia is impossible without integrity of Serbia. Carpenter’s proposal makes a great deal of sense, but I very much doubt that it is implementable by existing Russophobic administration in Washington or a future one irrespective whether Obama or McCain prevail in November. In an interview with Belgrade’s Glas Javnosti, I advocated assembling Berlin Congress 2008, which would draw the new map of Europe like the Berlin Congress of 1878 did. There were no takers.

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, resigned from the Mont Pelerin Society (international organization, established in 1947, composed of economists, intellectuals, business leaders, and others who favor classical liberalism) with a following explanation: “I have come to the conclusion that the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) is no longer an effective force for freedom, becoming instead another tool in behalf of US hegemony, ringing Russia with US military bases and puppet governments in the name of democracy. As far as I am aware, the MPS has not addressed the Bush administration’s assault on US civil liberties or the disrespect the Bush administration has shown for the US Constitution and international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions. Nor has the society taken exception to US wars of aggression in behalf of undeclared agendas.”

It is interesting to note that, according to the Orange County Register, two U.S. congressman from Southern California defended Russia against Georgia: Rohrabacher and Sherman.

ENCIRCLEMENT AND DISMEMBERMENT OF RUSSIA

The U.S. policy since conclusion of the Cold War was to encircle Russia with military bases and puppet governments in the name of “spreading democracy” (neocon fantasies) to exercise hegemony over Russia with most likely the ultimate goal of dismemberment of Russia by taking Siberia (from Ural mountains to Vladivostok) away from Russia like Kosovo was taken away from Serbia. Siberia, two thirds of Russian territory covering over 12 million square kilometers with only 39 million people has huge strategic value for the future of Russia. On the other hand it has something the U.S. wants: oil in quantities that exceed those of the Middle East producing countries, natural gas, as well as plenty of platinum, nickel, cobalt, diamonds, silver, timber, hydropower, etc. These are presumably very attractive for cash strapped U.S. Former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, stated that it would be unfair for Russia to possess all of these huge natural resources on their own and that there should be a room for other countries. In response Putin said: “Thank God, Russia is not Iraq.”

Beyond this there is a Bush doctrine lifted from neocons, the PNAC. The U.S. wouldn’t tolerate a “peer competitor,” and if necessary would use military power to ensure it maintained monopoly on world power. On the other hand Russians, well founded in historical experience, are extremely sensitive regarding their borders. Their borders have been violated by the Mongol hordes, Napoleon, and by Germany in WWI and WWII. In WWII, the Russians lost 27 million people. It is not an issue of nostalgia for the Cold War-era influence in its near abroad as many history illiterate editorial writers have suggested.

The Soviet president Gorbachev made a deal with the Bush-41 administration to allow reunification of Germany and continued German membership in NATO, providing the NATO would not expand eastward into former Soviet empire. Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed its bases in Cuba and dissolved its evil empire and sought friendship with the U.S. What did the U.S. do? Buchanan answered: “American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags to loot the Russian nation” (derogatory terms used in the aftermath of the American Civil War). Pledge to Gorbachev was violated. NATO was created to keep the Soviet Army out of Western Europe. Instead of being disbanded its membership has doubled. In 1998, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO. In 2004 not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe but also three Baltic states, former Soviet republics. All in all six Warsaw Pact countries and three former Soviet republics are now NATO members. Bush, Cheney, McCain, Biden and others are pushing to bring in Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Buchanan wrote: “This would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin’s birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia?”

The U.S. unilaterally abrogated East-West agreements such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) because the U.S. technology was deemed superior. The U.S. used Georgia as the corridor for a new Caspian pipeline to deliver oil from Azerbaijan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, cutting off Russia all the way. Georgia became thus one of five key components of Western encirclement of Russia and conceivably the most important one. How would the U.S. feel if the Russian troops were training in Mexico? The Baltic States represent the second most important component as St. Petersburg is now only 60 miles away from Estonia compared to 1200 miles away from the nearest NATO member in the past. Then the U.S. (CIA, Endowment for Democracy, Soros) engineered dumping of governments friendly to Russia with so called “democratic revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, and tried but failed in Belarus. Ukraine constitutes the third most important component of encirclement followed by Afghanistan/Pakistan and some former Soviet republics in Central Asia. The fifth is anti-missile shield with the radar in the Czech Republic and the anti-missile interceptors in Poland planned allegedly to defend against non-existent Iranian missiles. Russia’s ambassador to NATO Rogozin said: “There is no Iran in the north of Europe, but there is Russia there. The system from the beginning is aimed at the neutralization of Russian nuclear assets.” This missile shield would integrate the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational unit some 100 miles from the Russian border. In that respect it is no different from Khrushchev’s intentions to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s. Some analysts are already predicting that Russia will have no other option but to take out the Polish site. To make the point, the Russian military carried out a successful of a Topol RS-12M nuclear capable stealth rocket.

Following dismemberment of Yugoslavia by Germany, the U.S. copied Adolf Hitler’s Balkan model by siding with the Croats against the Serbs, Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians against the Serbs. With support from its NATO allies didn’t allow Bosnian Serbs to join Serbia, didn’t allow Croatian Serbs to have autonomy within Croatia and used force to rip Kosovo out of Serbia to hand it over to Albanian Muslim drug runners in exchange for the Camp Bondsteel military base. One of the objectives was to isolate and weaken Serbia as Serbia continued to be perceived as junior Russians or that Serbia represented an extended Russian arm in the Balkans. This also made Russia deeply angry and led to Putin’s rise to power. Hegemony on the Balkans was followed by hegemony in Central Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan) and the Middle East (Iraq). Hence, the encirclement of Russia started first on its peripheries.

IS NUCLEAR WAR A DISTINCT POSSIBILITY?

Had Georgia been admitted to NATO, as Bush wanted but failed due to opposition from France, Germany and some other countries, this war would have triggered Article 5 of the NATO Treaty requiring alliance members to use collective force against Russia. The truth is that NATO was given a gift in not having made Georgia as member, since evoking Article 5 would have effectively destroyed the organization. After all, who in the Western world wants to die in Tbilisi? On the other hand, if Article 5 was honored, a nuclear war would have been in the cards. Srdja Trifkovic wrote: “The crisis in relations between the United States and Russia over Georgia heralds a particularly dangerous period in world affairs: the era of asymmetrical multipolarity. A Major war between two or more major powers is more likely in this configuration than in any other model of global balance known in history.”

Trifkovic asserts that the most stable system is bipolarity based on doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which was prevalent from the 1950s until the Cold War end. There was understanding that each side had a sphere of influence or vital interest that should not be infringed upon. Historically, the most stable model is that of balance of power in which no single power is able to seek hegemony. This model was prevalent from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to Napoleon (after 1789), from Waterloo until Kaiserreich (~ 1900), from Versailles (1918) to the Third Reich (1933). During Napoleonic France, Kaiserreich and the Third Reich, the challenge couldn’t be resolved without major wars.

The U.S. governments, being democratic or republican in a bi-partisan manner, have been acting in a manner strikingly similar to those three historic cases. Trifkovic wrote: “Having proclaimed itself the leader of an imaginary ‘international community,’ it goes further than any previous would-be hegemon in treating the entire world as the American sphere of interest.” This doctrine was codified in the National Strategy of September 2002 and is known as the Bush doctrine. It substantially differs from the Brezhnev doctrine, used in 1968 for the Soviet army to invade Czechoslovakia, which marked the end of the Prague Spring to build “socialism with a human face.” The Brezhnev doctrine was applied before in Berlin (1953) and Hungary (1956) but not explicitly defined as the obligation of the socialist countries to ensure that their freedom for advancing own brand of socialism must not endanger either socialism in own country or the fundamental interests of other socialist countries. This doctrine of limiter sovereignty applied to the Soviet satellites and the Warsaw Pact countries in particular. The Bush doctrine is essentially a synthesis of Brezhnev and Clinton legacies and applies to the whole globe in the form of permanent global interventionism.

Both U.S. presidential candidates have surrounded themselves with Russophobic advisers and thus are likely to continue the policies of encirclement and conceivably amputation of Russia. Beyond Georgia which kind of conflicts might be on the horizon? Taking out the Polish site is discussed above. Battle for Ukraine is another distinct possibility.

CONCLUSIONS

Irresponsible, arrogant and reckless amputation of the sovereign country of Serbia by the U.S. and the EU/NATO heavyweights opened up a Pandora’s Box. Repeated warnings by Serbia and Russia were falling on deaf ears. The first chickens of Kosovo independence are coming home to roost: unilateral secessions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia probably with more to come. Mutual retreat by Washington and Moscow, as recommended by Ted Carpenter, would be a responsible way to proceed. However, I do not expect that hot heads in Washington are capable of such a solution. This author proposed an equivalent of the 1878 Berlin Congress, which redrew the map of Europe and would deal not only with issues of Kosovossetia but beyond. The Washington history illiterates would even have the problem of comprehending this concept and not to mention acting on it.

The Bush administration continues to condemn Russia and is attempting to push Russia into isolation and irrelevance initially by denying access to the World Trade Organization (WTO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and suspending the nuclear agreement between the two countries. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev accused the U.S. and NATO of displaying “Cold War reflexes.” As Medvedev spoke, the Russian Parliament gave tentative approval for next year’s budget, including a 25% increase in defense spending. Hence, the world is currently on a trajectory of confrontation in which a possibility of nuclear war cannot be precluded. Avoiding a nuclear war means avoiding the policies that make war a possibility such as the U.S. policy of encircling Russia. Essentially what Russia wants is: (a) Pre-eminence in its own sphere of influence and (b) Treatment by the U.S./NATO as a major power whose wishes must be respected.

Unless some event prevents the present generation of Russophobes in the Bush administration, Obama and McCain camps, they will lead the country into a confrontation with Russia. That event might be the Crash of 2008 or the financial meltdown on the Wall Street causing massive government bailouts of some $700 billion. It marks the end of the imperial era and the onset of another era. Pat Buchanan wrote: “The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America, the ‘Omnipotent’ and ‘Indispensable Nation’ we heard about in all the hubris an braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history...The Party’ over...What we witnessing today is how empires end.” On the other hand, as Srdja Trifkovic has pointed out that one shouldn’t forget that USSR attacked Afghanistan when its economic performance was the weakest. Let us also hope that Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ views might prevail. Gates suggested that the U.S. has “overlearned the lessons of Munich, which had helped lead the nation into Vietnam, and urged the next U.S. administration would need a “pragmatic blend of resolve and restraint” in dealing with Moscow. He insisted that U.S. policy should remain to contain Russia aggression without resorting to military force. Unlike the Soviet Union of old, Russia was not pursuing an ideology-based effort to dominate the globe.” In addition there are sharp differences of opinion within NATO to the issue.