[PAA-Discuss] Bush Dispatches US military Forces to Georgia

[robert]

Bush Dispatches US military Forces to Georgia

By Barry Grey

14/04/08 " <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/bush-a14.shtml> WSW"
-- - In a major escalation of the conflict with Russia over Georgia,
President George W. Bush on Wednesday announced a "vigorous and ongoing"
deployment of US military forces to its key ally in the Caucasus. Bush
appeared in the White House Rose Garden for the second time in three days,
this time flanked by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, and announced the military buildup, casting it as a
humanitarian relief operation. 

Even as he spoke of a humanitarian mission, Bush made clear the military
dimensions of the measures he was announcing. He said he was directing
Pentagon chief Gates to lead the mission, which would be "headed by the
United States military." He announced that a C-17 military aircraft was
already on its way to Georgia and that "in the days ahead we will use US
aircraft, as well as naval forces, to deliver humanitarian and medical
supplies."

This is a formula for an injection of US military and naval forces into
Georgia of indeterminate scope and duration. It will certainly involve the
presence of hundreds if not thousands of uniformed US military personnel on
the ground, and a substantial number of warships in the region. The US is
introducing this military force into a situation that remains highly
unstable and combustible, raising the possibility of a direct military clash
between the United States and Russia.

Bush spoke less than a day after Russia and Georgia had agreed provisionally
to a cease-fire in their five-day war. The agreement had been brokered by
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, acting on behalf of the European Union.

Even as Bush spoke, Russia and Georgia were trading accusations of truce
violations, and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was objecting to
provisions of the agreement which, he claimed, failed to prevent the
pro-Russian break-away republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from seceding
from Georgia.

In his remarks, Bush issued an implicit threat against any attempt by Russia
to interfere with Washington's "humanitarian" operation. "We expect Russia
to honor its commitment," he said, "to let in all forms of humanitarian
assistance. We expect Russia to ensure that all lines of communications and
transport, including seaports, airports, roads and airspace, remain open for
the delivery of humanitarian assistance and for civilian transit."

The US will pour military resources into Georgia to strengthen its hand
against Russia, and denounce any objections by Moscow as an attack on
humanitarian aid and a violation of the cease-fire agreement.

Within minutes of Bush's Rose Garden statement, Saakashvili spelled out its
essential meaning in a televised address from Tbilisi. "You have heard the
statement by the US president that the United States is starting a
military-humanitarian operation in Georgia," he said. "It means that
Georgian ports and airports will be taken under the control of the US
defense ministry..."

He went on to call Bush's "relief" mission a "turning point," and
characterized its import as "definitely an American military presence."

Bush also announced that Rice would immediately travel to France to meet
with Sarkozy and then go to Georgia. Employing the rhetoric of the Cold War,
he said Rice would meet with Saakashvili and "continue our efforts to rally
the free world in defense of a free Georgia."

He further threatened Russia with diplomatic and political sanctions,
suggesting it might be excluded from the G-8 group of industrialized nations
and prevented from joining the World Trade Organization.

Hypocrisy

Bush's remarks were drenched with hypocrisy. He reiterated Washington's
support for Georgian control of the disputed territories of South Ossetia
and Abkhazia, invoking once again the "sovereignty and territorial integrity
of Georgia." Neither he nor any other American spokesperson has explained
why Georgia's use of murderous violence against South Ossetia in its
indiscriminate shelling of the region's capital city was a legitimate
defense of "territorial integrity," while Serbia's use of force against
Kosovan secessionists was a war crime.

The US seized on Serbia's moves against CIA-backed separatists in Kosovo to
carry out a ten-week air war, under the auspices of NATO, in 1999. While
Washington decries Russia's "disproportionate" use of force against Georgian
troops which attacked South Ossetia and condemns Moscow for military action
beyond the borders of the breakaway republic, the US and NATO rained bombs
and missiles on virtually all parts of Serbia, demolishing bridges, water
pumping stations, electricity grids, government buildings, housing
developments, schools and hospitals in the capital city of Belgrade. The US
and NATO killed far more civilians in its campaign to crush Serbia, a
traditional ally of Russia, than have been killed by both sides in the
current fighting in the Caucasus.

The US has absolutely no political or moral standing to denounce Russia or
anyone else for deploying military force. Washington asserts an unlimited
and unilateral right to mobilize its massive apparatus of military violence
wherever and whenever it wishes, spreading death and destruction from the
Persian Gulf to Central Asia and threatening even more bloody
conflagrations.

In the current conflict, the US government and media have cast Russia as the
aggressor. There is no progressive content to Moscow's actions in Georgia.
They are motivated by the predatory aims of the Russian ruling elite, which
is intent on reasserting Russian control over territories on its border that
it dominated for centuries. However, the eruption of war in the Caucasus is
the outcome of a policy pursued by US imperialism since the breakup of the
Soviet Union whose ultimate aim is the reduction of Russia to a
semi-colonial status.

It is inconceivable that Washington was not intimately involved in the
preparations for Georgia's attack on South Ossetia. US military advisers
virtually run the military of what Washington considers its key ally in the
Cacausus, a strategically critical bridgehead between the oil-rich Caspian
Basin and Western Europe.

Just one month ago Secretary of State Rice visited Tbilisi and reaffirmed US
support for Georgia's admission to NATO, a development which Russia
considers an intolerable threat to its security. Rice's visit was followed
by a massive three-week military training exercise, in which 1,000 US troops
participated.

The incendiary measures announced by Bush on Wednesday represent the
response of American imperialism to the major setback it has suffered as a
result of Russia's military intervention in Georgia. There is great concern
within the US ruling elite that Russia's routing of Georgia will undermine
Washington's drive to displace Russia from Moscow's former spheres of
influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and establish American hegemony
over the Eurasian land mass.

US policy makers worry that the example of Georgia will weaken US control
over right-wing client regimes it has established in a whole number of
countries that were either part of the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and
Ukraine, or allied to the Soviet Union through the Warsaw Pact.

 

A pattern of provocation

 

>From the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 to the present, the United States
has carried out a policy of militarily encircling Russia and surrounding it
with hostile states dependent upon and subservient to Washington.

As the USSR was disintegrating, the United States launched its first war
against Iraq, a key ally of the Soviet Union in the Middle East. During the
1990s, the US and Western Europe sponsored the dismemberment of Yugoslavia
in order to isolate and weaken the Russian ally Serbia.

In 1998, the US spearheaded the incorporation into NATO, the US-dominated
military alliance, of a whole number of newly independent states that had
been either part of the Soviet Union or allied to it through the Warsaw
Pact, including Estonia, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and
Bulgaria.

In 1999 the US launched the air war against Serbia. At the same time, the US
organized the construction of a new pipeline to transport oil from the
Caspian Basin, via Baku, through Georgia to the Mediterranean port of
Ceyhan, bypassing Russian territory.

In 2002, the US set up military bases in the former Central Asian Soviet
republics of Uzbekistan (since then closed at the insistence of the Uzbek
government) and Kyrgyzstan. At the end of 2003, the US engineered the "Rose
Revolution" that brought Saakashvili to power in Georgia. In 2004, NATO
admitted a new group of states formerly aligned with Russia-Lithuania,
Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. One year later Washington orchestrated the
"Orange Revolution" that toppled a pro-Russian government in Ukraine and
replaced it with a pro-American regime.

The final chapter in this assault on the strategic position of Russia was
the recognition last February of Kosova's bid for independence from Serbia.

Until now, the US has encountered no serious resistance. The events of the
past week represent a major shift. For the first time, Russia, flush with
oil money and able to exploit the overextended state of the US military,
with its massive commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed back.

This has evoked an apoplectic response in the American ruling elite, which
has no intention of accepting a diminution of its influence in the regions
formerly dominated by the Soviet Union. US imperialism will react by
immensely escalating its confrontation with Russia, no matter what the cost.

There is also a domestic component to the US escalation of tensions with
Russia. The Bush administration is consciously seeking to create an
atmosphere of international crisis in the run-up to the November
presidential election. It calculates that an election held in an environment
of fear and insecurity will boost the electoral chances of the Republican
candidate John McCain.

McCain has based his campaign on his military background and his supposed
foreign policy experience. From early on, he has called for a more combative
stance toward Russia, and has responded to the Georgia crisis by demanding
Russia's ejection from the G-8 and other punitive measures.

The Wall Street Journal in an editorial on Wednesday summed up the demand of
sections of the ruling elite and elements within the Bush administration for
a major and permanent shift to something like a new Cold War against Russia.
The newspaper wrote: "Reshaping US policy toward Russia will take longer
than the months between now and January 20, when a new president takes
office. But Mr. Bush can at least atone for his earlier misjudgments about
Mr. Putin and steer policy in a new direction that his successor would have
to deal with."

There are, in fact, only relatively minor tactical differences between
McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama on US policy toward Russia.
Both continue to demand the admission of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO,
which would put the US-led military alliance on the very doorstep of Russia.
Had Georgia already been a member of NATO, the alliance would have been
legally bound to intervene militarily in its defense following Russia's
incursion into South Ossetia.

The trajectory of the imperialist drive to carve up the world, spearheaded
by US imperialism's mad drive for global hegemony, is ominously clear. The
American ruling elite will drag American workers and all of humanity into a
catastrophe unless it is stopped. The only social force capable of achieving
this is the international working class, united in the struggle to put an
end to capitalism, the source of imperialist war, on the basis of a
revolutionary socialist program.

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