I had to walk away from the radio and tv altogether yesterday; Bush’s ideliberately inept stirring up of a hornet’s nest with Russia made me want to gio and put my fist through a window. I had to go and pot up some seedlings instead. There’s nothing gives you more perspective than potting up seedlings, unless it’s cats.
To see him tromping around in his monogrammed cowboy boots all over china-brittle alliances that are only barely glued together, it just…argh. the stupidity of it. But why? Why do something so apparently dumb?
Patrick Buchanan in The San Jose Mercury gets it:
When the Red Army went home from Eastern Europe, the United States, in violation of an understanding with Moscow, began to move NATO east. We have since brought into our military alliance six former members of the Warsaw Pact and three former provinces of the Soviet Union: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Anti-Russia hawks are now pushing to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. If they succeed, we could be dragged into future confrontations with a nuclear-armed Russia about who has sovereignty over the Crimea and whether South Ossetia should be part of Georgia.
Are these vital U.S. interests worth risking a war? Why are we moving a U.S.-led military alliance into the front yard and onto the side porch of a country with thousands of nuclear weapons? Would we accept any commensurate Chinese or Russian move in the Caribbean?
After Moscow gave us a green light to use the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to base U.S. forces for the Afghan war, the United States has sought permanent bases there. Russia and China have now united to throw us out of their back yard.
America colluded with Azerbaijan and Georgia to build a Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to transmit Caspian Sea oil across the Caucasus to the Black Sea and Turkey, cutting Russia out of the action.
In 1999, the United States bombed Serbia 78 days to punish it for fighting to hold its cradle province of Kosovo, which Muslim Albanians were tearing away. Orthodox Russia had long seen itself as protectress of the Balkan Slavs. That Clinton ignored Russia in launching this unprovoked war on Serbia was seen in Moscow as proof that Russian concerns had become irrelevant in Washington.
After helping dump over the government in Belgrade, our Neocomintern – the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and other fronts – interfered in Ukraine and Georgia, helping oust pro-Moscow regimes and install pro-American ones. Since then, NED has been run out of Belarus and its subsidiaries are about to get the boot from Moscow.
Can we blame the Russians for being angry? How would we react to left-wing NGOs in Washington, flush with Moscow oil money, aiding elements hostile to the Bush administration?
Oh yeah and fuck the EU too. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. They deserve it.
Bush and the current generation of US politicians are very fond of using WWII and ‘the greatest generation’ to buttress their chickenhawkery and although they know in theory that a big war happened in Europe, because they”ve seen the movies and played the games, they don’t know that a war happened in Europe – and it wasn’t so long ago either, and it was as vicious at what’s happening in the Middle East if not more so. We can’t forget it, we’re still getting reminders every day.
A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews executed by the Nazis during the second world war has been discovered in southern Ukraine by workers digging pipelines.
The workers stumbled upon the remains by chance last month in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near the Black Sea port of Odessa, Jewish leaders said yesterday.
[..]
According to Roman Shvartsman, spokesman for the regional Jewish community, the Nazis established a ghetto near the village. In November 1941 the ghetto was transformed into a concentration camp and at least 4,000 Jews were killed at or near the site between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942.
“The workmen were laying gas pipes near the centre of the village. They discovered hair, children’s toys, skulls and pieces of clothing,” Mr Shvartsman told the Guardian last night.
54 years later the voices of those destroyed by war come back to haunt us.
A teenage Jewish girl living under the Nazis in Poland during 1943 feared she was “turning into an animal waiting to die”, according to her diary, which documents the final months before her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Rutka Laskier, 14, the same age as the Dutch girl Anne Frank, wrote the 60-page diary over a four-month period in Bedzin, Poland. The diary, published by Israel’s Holocaust museum, documents the steady collapse of the ghetto under the weight of the Nazi occupation and deportations, as well as the first loves, friendships and jealousies of an adolescent girl growing up during the war.
You can imagine the goodwill and sheer effort required to have reached a kind of modus vivendi after a history like that, Unsatisfactory as this arrangement is, it’s nevertheless relatively peaceful and prosperous on the whole, a few genocides and regional wars notwithstanding. Peace in Europe has been fragile but holding, even with Putin’s increasingly restrictive and totalitarian grip on power in Russia.
But Bush is flailing badly at home: there’s a power struggle with Cheney in the White House, he’s poison in the polls, his own party’s against him, Iraq’s a bloodbath and the US military’s at low ebb as a result, a whole swathe of experienced officers gone or planning to go, either retired or pushed out…. I could go on. suffice it to say he’s very, very weak.
But he’s also a sociopathic, bullying dry drunk – and when he feels weak he wants to hurt something or start a fight. He also desperately needs to divert attention from his continuing military failures and his illlegalities at home: what better way to thumb your nose at everybody, to start a fight for fun, to hurt people and to get attention, than to wind up Vladimir Putin?
I really want to put what he’s doing down to pure stupidity and psychopathy, but I’m also sure there’s a game plan here. Attempt to encircle and destabilise Russia, poke iit with a stick, go to the G8 spoling for a fight, win concessions. All about the oil, always and forever about the oil.
But Bush also wants a showdown with someone, anyone, to rescue his wounded pride; and he just doesn’t give a shit who gets hurt in the process. His advisers are just using his childish need to provoke to further their country’s economic interests.
Though the San Jose Mercury gets it, I wonder if Americans in general grasp the seriousness of the political situation their President is deliberately provoking. From a brief scan of news and the blogs, no, not really. To the mainstream US media it’s mostly harmless rhetoric, Bush being Bush for tv and a chance to roll out all the old Cold war cliches. Ooh, a new cold war, when the secret agents wore trenchcoats and made glamorous dashes across Checkpoint Charlie….
Shorter US mainstream media: “What, me worry?” Oh well, it’s not them the missiles are aiimed at, is it?
It’s not like there’s a surfeit of statesmen and women with the capability or stature to defuse the situation either. To the question “Can saner heads prevail? ” I can only answer “Who?” Really, who is there? Tony Blair perhaps?
He says he can, but then he would, wouldn’t he. He wants a Legacy. But Tony Blair is a completely busted flush, a nothing, yesterday’s man just waiting for the indictment to come – unless, miracles of miracles, he’s had a resignation conversion and for once tells it like it is. As if.
So it’s down to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to talk down these two roosters from their posturing. If anyone has the weight of history on her shoulders in matters of war and peace, it’s her. Is she up to it? Given her antidemocratic record, I’m not hopeful. Now, I have some clematis to tie in.
