Cooperation
Meets with Provocation - (PART 6)
by Gary
Leupp
Still,
recall how two years later—after 9/11, 2001, when the U.S. invoking
the NATO charter called upon its NATO allies to engage in war in
Afghanistan—Putin offered to allow the alliance to transport war
material to Afghanistan through Russian territory. (In 2012 Foreign
Minister Lavrov offered NATO the use of a base in Ulyanovsk to
transport equipment out of Afghanistan.) This Afghan invasion was
only the third actual deployment of NATO forces in war, after Bosnia
and Serbia, and Moscow accepted it matter-of-factly. It even muted
its concerns when the U.S. established military bases in the former
Soviet Central Republics of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia.
But in 2004,
NATO expanded again—to include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all
of which had been part of the USSR itself and which border Russia. At
the same time Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia were admitted, along
with Slovakia, which had become separate from the Czech Republic.
Russians again asked, “Why?”
In 2007 the
U.S. began negotiating with the Poles to install a NATO missile
defense complex in Poland, with a radar system in the Czech Republic.
Supposedly this was to shoot down any Iranian missiles directed
towards Europe in the future! But Moscow was furious, accusing the
U.S. of wanting to launch another arms race. Due largely to
anti-militarist sentiment among the Poles and Czechs, these plans
were shelved in 2009. But they could be revived at any time.
In 2008,
then, the U.S. recognized its dependency Kosovo, now hosting the
largest U.S. Army base (Camp Bondsteel) outside the U.S., as an
independent country. Although the U.S. had insisted up to this point
that it recognized Kosovo as a province of Serbia (and perhaps even
understood its profound significance as the heartland of Serbian
Orthodoxy), it now (through Condoleezza Rice) proclaimed Kosovo a
“sui generis” (one of a kind) phenomenon. So forget about
international law; it just doesn’t apply.
In this same
year of 2008, NATO announced boldly that Georgia and Ukraine “will
become members of NATO.” There upon Georgia’s comical
President Mikheil Saakasvili bombarded Tskhinvali, capital of the
self-declared Republic of South Ossetia that had resisted integration
into the current Republic of Georgia since the break-up of the Soviet
Union in 1991. In this instance Russia defended South Ossetia,
invading Georgia. It then recognized the independence, both of South
Ossetia and of the Republic of Abkhazia, from Georgia. (This may be
seen as a tit-for-tat response to the U.S.’s decision to recognize
Kosovo’s independence from Serbia six months earlier.)
It was a
six-day war, resulting in about 280 military fatalities (including
100 on the South Ossetian-Russian side) and about 400 civilian
deaths. And there has been no Russian war since. Crimea was not
“invaded” last year but simply seized by Russian forces in place,
with general popular support. And there’s little evidence that the
regular Russian military is confronting Ukrainian state forces;
ethnic Russians are doing so, receiving no doubt support from cousins
across the historically changeable border. But the charge of a
“Russian invasion of Ukraine” is a State Department talking
point—propaganda automatically parroted by the official press
sock-puppet pundits, not a contemporary reality.
Georgia’s
Saakasvili perhaps expected the U.S. to have his back as he provoked
Moscow in August 2008. But while he received firm support from Sen.
John McCain, who declared “We are all Georgians now,” he
received little help from the George W. Bush State Department wary of
provoking World War III. Georgia was not yet a NATO member able to
cite the NATO charter’s mutual defense clause.
Saakasvili
left office in 2010 and is now under indictment by the Georgian
courts for abuses in office. After a brief stint at the Fletcher
School of International Law and Diplomacy in 2014, he acquired
Ukrainian citizenship—losing his Georgian citizenship as a
result—and (as one of many examples of how crazy the current Kiev
leadership including Yatsenyev and Poroshenko can be) was appointed
governor of Odessa last May!
Given the
debacle of 2008, countries such as Germany are unlikely to accept
Georgian admission any time soon. They do not see much benefit in
provoking Russia by endlessly expanding the Cold War “defensive”
alliance. Still, Croatia and Albania were added to NATO in 2009, in
the first year of the Obama administration—just in time to
participate in NATO’s fourth war, against Libya.
Again there
was no reason for a war. Colonel Gadhafy had been downright cordial
towards western regimes since 2003, and closely cooperated with the
CIA against Islamist terrorism. But when the “Arab Spring” swept
the region in 2011, some western leaders (headed by French president
Nicolas Sarkozy, but including the always hawkish Hillary Clinton)
convinced themselves that Gadhafy’s fall was imminent, and so it
would be best to assist the opposition in deposing him and thus get
into the good graces of any successors.
The UN
Security Council approved a resolution to establish a no-fly zone for
the protection of civilians from Gadhafy’s supposedly genocidal
troops. But what NATO unleashed was something quite different: a war
on Gadhafy, which led to his brutal murder and to the horrible chaos
that has reigned since in Libya, now a reliable base for al-Qaeda and
ISIL. Russia and China both protested, as the war was still underway,
that NATO had distorted the meaning of the UN resolution. It’s
unlikely that the two Security Council permanent members will be
fooled again into such cooperation.
We can
therefore add the failed state of Libya to the dysfunctional states
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan, to our list of NATO
achievements since 1991. To sum up: Since the collapse of the USSR,
the U.S. and some allies (usually in their capacity as NATO allies)
have waged war on Bosnian Serbs, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Libya, while striking targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and
elsewhere with impunity. Russia has gone to war precisely once: for
eight days in August 2008, against Georgia.
And yet
every pundit on mainstream TV news tells you with a straight face
that Putin’s the one who “invades countries.”
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