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PATRICK BUCHANAN: Blowback from Bear Baiting

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20522.htm
15/08/08 "ICH " -- -

Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the
opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia's
invasion of its breakaway province of South
Ossetia 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.

After shelling and attacking what
he claims is his own country,
killing scores of his own
Ossetian citizens and sending
tens of thousands fleeing into Russia,
Saakashvili's army was whipped back
into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity
to kick the Georgian army out of
Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi
and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.

Reveling in his status as
an intimate of George Bush,
Dick Cheney and John McCain,
and America's lone democratic
ally in the Caucasus,

Saakashvili thought he could get away
with a lightning coup and present the
world with a fait accompli.

Mikheil did not reckon on the
rage or resolve of the Bear.

American charges of Russian
aggression ring hollow.

Georgia started this fight --
Russia finished it.

People who start wars don't get
to decide how and when they end.

Russia's response was

"disproportionate" and
"brutal," wailed Bush.

True.

But did we not authorize Israel
to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in
response to a border skirmish
where several Israel soldiers
were killed and two captured?

Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush.

But did not the United States
bomb Serbia for 78 days and
invade to force it to surrender
a province, Kosovo,

to which Serbia had a far greater
historic claim than Georgia had to
Abkhazia or South Ossetia,

both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?

When the Soviet Union broke into 15 nations,
we celebrated. When Slovenia, Croatia,
Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and
Kosovo broke from Serbia, we rejoiced.

Why, then,
the indignation when two provinces,
whose peoples are ethnically separate
from Georgians and who fought for their
independence, should succeed in breaking away?

Are secessions and the dissolution of
nations laudable only when they advance
the agenda of the neocons, many of who
viscerally detest Russia?

That Putin took the occasion of Saakashvili's
provocative and stupid stunt to administer an
extra dose of punishment is undeniable.

But is not Russian anger understandable?

For years the West has rubbed Russia's
nose in her Cold War defeat and treated
her like Weimar Germany.

When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe,
closed its bases in Cuba, dissolved the evil
empire, let the Soviet Union break up into 15 states,
and sought friendship and alliance with the United States,
what did we do?

American carpetbaggers colluded
with Muscovite Scalawags to loot
the Russian nation.

Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev,
we moved our military alliance into
Eastern Europe, then onto Russia's doorstep.

Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former
republics of the Soviet Union are now
NATO members.

Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to
bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.

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 United States unilaterally abrogated
the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty because
our technology was superior,

then planned to site anti-missile
defenses in Poland and the Czech
Republic to defend against Iranian
missiles,

though Iran has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs.

A Russian counter-offer to have us
together put an anti-missile system
in Azerbaijan was rejected out of hand.

We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
from Azerbaijan through Georgia to
Turkey to cut Russia out.

Then we helped dump over regimes
friendly to Moscow with democratic
"revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia,
and tried to repeat it in Belarus.

Americans have many fine qualities.

A capacity to see ourselves as
others see us is not high among them.

Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan,
where Europe had opted out of the Cold War
after Moscow installed those SS-20 missiles
east of the Elbe.

And Europe had abandoned NATO,
told us to go home and become
subservient to Moscow.

How would we have reacted if Moscow had
brought Western Europe into the Warsaw Pact,
established bases in Mexico and Panama,
put missile defense radars and rockets in Cuba,
and joined with China to build pipelines to
transfer Mexican and Venezuelan oil to
Pacific ports for shipment to Asia?

And cut us out?

If there were Russian and Chinese
advisers training Latin American armies,
the way we are in the former Soviet republics,
how would we react?

Would we look with bemusement on such Russian behavior?

For a decade, some of us have warned
about the folly of getting into Russia's
space and getting into Russia's face.

The chickens of democratic imperialism
have now come home to roost -- in Tbilisi.

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