August 12, 2008
It’s touching how American neoconservatives who have no regard for international law when they want to invade some troublesome country have developed a sudden reverence for national sovereignty.
Apparently, context is everything. So, the United States attacking Grenada or Nicaragua or Panama or Iraq or Serbia is justified even if the reasons sometimes don’t hold water or don’t hold up before the United Nations, The Hague or other institutions of international law.
9 comments:
It would be funny if weren't so pathetic.
And it's all true but you'll only read it hear. The MSM will politely pretend their so-called foreign policy "experts" never contradicted themselves just like they never find a McCain flip-flop worthy of their reporting. Or they'll tell us we're engaging in revisionist history or that we're simple-minded idealists who should leave this serious business of to the big boys; the "adults", as it were.
Is it over but for the shouting, Imperial America?
PS - the article has a very Chomskian tone.
That's here; you'll only read it here...
Similarly, during the ongoing Olympics, we have to listen to announcers and 'local color' standup pieces continually pointing out China's political problems, especially Tibetan independence, with barely concealed condemnatory tones. But there's nary a hint that the US literally went to the other side of the earth to attack/invade a non-threatening country who we had already bombed/embargoed for a decade. I'm just always amazed that these pundits/announcers/narrator's heads don't explode from the cognitive dissonance...
The background to the Georgian offensive against South Ossetia is, of course, not known in detail (presumably, in 30 year's time, if our «civilisations» persist, those left alive will have a pretty good idea), but the alternatives seem to boil down to the following two :
1) Mr Saakashvili, known widely as somewhat rash and impetuous («hothead» is one of the kinder terms frequently employed), decided that with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, the time had come to «reintegrate» (by means of murder and ethnic cleansing) South Ossetia into the Georgian «motherland», and that his CIA handlers were unable to dissuade him.
2) On the contrary, these handlers encouraged the hapless Saakashvili to launch the adventure, in the hope that they could pull a Brzeziński and sucker the Russians into an intervention which would result in an occupation of Georgia, casting that country into a military and politcal morass (remember Afghanistan ?). If the Russians didn't take the bait, it would be Saakashvili, not they, who would take the consequences.
Note that in neither of these alternatives did the thousands of lives that would be sacrificed as a result of such an adventure enter into the calculations.
While still too early to tell, from the latest new reports the Russian leadership failed to take the bait - Putin/Medvedev, after all is not quite the same constellation as an aging Brezhev - and the venture has failed. Nothing can bring back the lives lost, but it would nice if Mr Saakashvili could be persuaded to put in a command performance before a tribunal in Den Haag....
All of this is old stuff - the playing of the Great Game that has been going on for a couple of centuries. What is frightening in what Robbery Parry reports is that our dear old friend Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke is - along with Marie Jana Korbelová (aka Madeleine Korbel Albright) - one of Barack Hussein Obama's foreign policy advisors. Change we can believe in ?...
Henri
A parallel aspect of this whole mini-war that should not go without mention is that George W and the neo-con ideologues who have been running US foreign policy for the last seven years have a long history of overtly and covertly antagonizing the Kremlin, as if the Cold War should never be laid to rest.
Bill Clinton assured Boris Yeltsin that there would be no expansion of NATO offering NATO membership to former Warsaw pact nations in eastern Europe, nor to regions that were once part of the USSR itself. Little George scrapped this perfectly sensible restraint upon the US military profile along Russia's borders, announcing instead brave, new plans eventually to integrate both Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO.
Similarly, Putin squarely told Bush that if the US recognized a right on the part of Kosovo to become independent of Serbia (an ancient Russian regional ally), then the Russians would likely respond to such a provocation by supporting similar popular movements in south Ossetia and other regions in the Caucasus, where there is longstanding grassroots sentiment to secede and become independent from Georgia. The United States ignored this red flag too, and openly supported Kosovo's independence.
Last week, Russia made good on its threats to retaliate, asserting it would play the post-Cold War game of balkanization and self determination, if that was what Uncle Sam really wanted to do. The scope of the role of the CIA, and the role of the hundreds of US military advisors stationed in Georgia assisting in its NATO-compatible military reorganization project remains unclear and highly classified, of course.
More neo-con chickens flocking home to roost right before the barn door closes, just as the cleaning crew is showing up.
Bill from Saginaw
Well, it seems that the Great Satan was quite successful in the raping of Kosovo from Serbia so as to build its all important oil/gas pipleline to bring Azerbaijani oil and gas to the EU.
Now, they try it in Ossetia and the US/CIA/NATO/Israel conspirators get their teeth kicked in by the Russian military while trying to pull their Kosovo caca on the 96% Russian occupied Ossetia.
Ole Putin, tis time the Great Satan was put on notice that while it can savage Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala and massacre hundred's of thousands in the name of US imperialism with impunity - that, this 'caca' is not acceptable in the old Soviet Unions back yard.
International Law?! What's that? The US and Israel have never shown much respect fot it nor practiced it in their savaging of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon where they have murdered some 1,250,000 innocents while trying to introduce them to V5.0 democracy and Jewish V.2.0 apartheid - and a little oil thievery by the West.
Hold firm Putin, the bastards are learning - 'real' fast!
TheAZCowBoy
Tombstone, AZ.
dba: IDidntVote4TheBassTerd@msn.com
Alas, Bill, given that such cold warriors as Zbigniew Brzeziński, Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke, and not least, Marie Jana Korbelová (aka Madeleine Korbel Albright) all seem to have become foreign policy advisors to Barack Hussein Obama, the likelihood of the barn becoming much cleaner under the new management is small. Ziggy, for example, has been bragging these last three decades about how he suckered the Soviets into invading Afghanistan - how well is he going to adjust to a multi-polar world in which the US no longer gets to call all the shots as a God-given right ? What the next administration needs is someone who can help the US find its place in a new world - but Obama's advisors seem to have entirely different tasks in mind. I fear it's going to be a rocky road ahead for us all....
Henri
It's unfortunate that Mr. Parry chose to include Serbia among the victims of US military intervention. Serbia earned the belated NATO attack by its vicious slaughter of Bosnian Muslims and Kosovars, the premeditated mass murders at Sarajevo and Srbenica, and the unspeakable atrocities it committed in its death camps. By continuing to shelter the criminal Mladic, Serbia remains an outlaw nation quite unlike the real victims of American neocolonial violence. Those victims include, of course, the hapless men and women of the US armed forces, whose lives, limbs and heroism have been cynically maldeployed by the cowardly chicken hawks Bush, Cheney and the gutless neocon war promoters, always ready to send other people's children off to kill and be killed.
Manichaeism - which divides the world into the forces of light on the one hand, and those of darkness on the other - may make for an intriguing storyline and effective propaganda, but tends to lead to disastrous policy choices. The demonisation of the Serbs and Serbia was a convenient tool for the US and NATO in the destruction of Jugoslavia, but this portrait corresponds as little to reality as does the attempt to demonise Russia in the ongoing conflict in the Caucasus. The case of Serbia is a most pertinent example of the hypocrisy - not merely of the so-called «neocons», but the of the Empire's establishment as a whole, and in particular, its corporate media. Mr Parry was quite right to cite it....
Henri
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