thoughts on the south ossetia mess…
i’m having a hard time getting a handle on exactly what happened and what it all means: who invaded who, who ethnically cleansed who, whose sovereignty got violated first, etc. on the one hand, there’s something suspicious about bush/rice/mccain’s immediate and full-throated defense of poor, beleaguered little georgia, which — did we mention? — has a major pipeline, wants into NATO, and is run by one of america’s favorite pet dictators. on the other hand, if there’s a serious contender for more-evil-than-dick-cheney out there, it’s got to be vladimir putin. that motherfucker is cold.
regional politics and human tragedy aside, though, here’s what i take away from the whole incident: this is putin making his move. not just his first big move in the final scramble for control of the world’s remaining oil (already underway), though: he’s taking a transparent and somewhat gratuitous poke at american hegemony, just to see if he can get away with it.
would russia be up to these shenanigans if we weren’t already ass-deep in two intractable foreign wars and warming up for a third? doubtful. putin sees how thinly we’re spread, and how we’ve squandered the global influence and goodwill we once enjoyed, and — what with china and the EU nipping at our economic heels and all — reckons we’re too weak to maintain sole-superpower status for another generation. why else would they pick this week to make a big public stink over our ominous missile defense deal with poland? condi rice says it’s supposed to protect us from iran (ha!), but russia calls bullshit. why make such a big point of contradicting the washington story unless your point is to tell the world that washington is afraid of you?
as for that missile-shield dealie, it gets creepier:
[A] senior Russian defense official, Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, suggested that Poland was making itself a target by agreeing to host the anti-missile system. Such an action “cannot go unpunished,” he said.
…
Those fears were codified to some degree in what Polish and American officials characterized as unusual aspects of the final deal: that at least temporarily American soldiers would staff air defense sites in Poland oriented toward Russia, and that the United States would be obliged to defend Poland in case of an attack with greater speed than required under NATO, of which Poland is a member.
…and as we all remember from high school history, ramping up your mutual-defense agreements in the middle of a nationalist struggle for regional dominance in the balkans and eastern europe is a surefire recipe for good times.
by the way, if you still think of john mccain as a harmless old coot, consider his recent campaign-trail bravado in calling out the russians, which would be alarming if it weren’t so pathetic (this from the campaign that only two weeks ago was attacking obama for his presumptuously pre-presidential european tour).
we mock mccain for being a relic of the 20th century, but even in the 20th century the name of the foreign policy game was “keep us out of all-out war with russia.” three generations of american presidents sweated out their administrations under the very real threat of nuclear war, consequently devoting their greatest energies to an aggressive and mind-bogglingly complex fifty-year campaign of hardball diplomacy, espionage, counterintelligence, propaganda and proxy warfare, all in the name of keeping the soviets contained while forestalling any direct exchange of hostilities. but mccain — no coldwar CIC, he — isn’t content with merely 100 more years of turning-the-corner in iraq and bomb-bombing iran. he also wants to take a poke at the bear.
maybe i’m being unfair to mccain here. he is running for president, after all; just because likes to throw the meshbacks a little red meat every now and then doesn’t mean he’d actually fuck around with russia if he were the actual president. i’m willing to give the man credit for not being completely stupid. but then again, that would mean he’s the kind of guy who’s willing to pour gasoline on a burning car parked outside of a dynamite factory, just to score political points and get his homies’ backs — this despite not having any executive authority to do so, or even a lead in the polls for that matter.
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