Headline to an article in today’s Times, by one Suzy Jagger, describing Nat Rothschild’s witness against Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, in the story of rich blokes carving up the world between themselves while swanning around on a big boat on the med that’s rapidly becoming known as 3 poofs and a Piano-gate Yacht-gate Carry On Up Corfu, or at least it is by me.
A witness with impeccable Wall Street credentials.
Wahahaha. ‘Impeccable Wall St credentials.’ Ms Jagger, you slay me.
While the UK and US media are having a happy happy fun time decidering the election and the actual electorate gets more and more irate about it, banana republicanism and all round diplomatic skullduggery goes on as blithely as usual. In this particular instance, Venezuela, it may have electoral implications – but perhaps that’s the plan.
The supposedly lame-duck Bush administration is continuing to destabilise neighbouring countries for fun and profit by fomenting dissent and plotting coups:
President Hugo Chávez last night ordered the US ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours and accused Washington of fomenting a coup attempt against his socialist revolution.
Chávez also ordered Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington to return home and threatened to cut oil supplies, plunging relations between the countries to a new low. “Go to hell a hundred times, fucking Yankees,” he told a televised rally thronged with supporters clad in red.
The move came a day after Venezuela’s ally Bolivia expelled its US ambassador for allegedly backing opposition groups engaged in bloody clashes with police and government supporters; turmoil which claimed eight lives and split the country in two.
[…]
In a day of intrigue and brinkmanship, Chávez announced that Venezuelan military officers had plotted to assassinate him with US complicity. “They’re trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia. That’s enough shit from you Yankees,” he said.
Ties would be restored when the US had a new government that “respected” Latin America, he added.
Coincidental or not, his accusation fell on the 35th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup which replaced Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The American diplomatic and security apparatus has learned precisely nothing from Chile. They think that it’s still the 1970s in South America: the cold war has never ended there for them.
It’s all beginning to look rather Georgian, or even Bay of Pigsian, isn’t it, what with the Russian navy conducting war games off the coast of Venezuela and Russian bombers at South American bases and everyone taking sides:
Russian bombers arrive in Venezuela
Russia has flown two long-range bombers to Venezuela for military exercises, a move likely to cause concern in Washington.
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said on Wednesday that the Tu-160 strategic bombers had arrived to strengthen military ties and to counter US regional influence.
Apart from the larger geopolitical political implications there are domestic US electoral considerations too, in light of the bellicose attitude being expressed shown by McCain/ Palin towards Russia. United against a common enemy and all that…
The Bush administration definitely seems to have a strategy; it’s armageddon or bust. Trouble in South America, the Caucasus, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan -any one of of those situations could ripen into regional and perhaps global war, given the right sequence of events. Surely one’s got to pay off in time to give the Republicans a pre- election boost.
Is it just me or is there more than a whiff of October Surprise to all this?
The disasters that have been Iraq and Afghanistan had sort of silenced all the humanitarian interventionists, decent leftists, war liberals and all the other surviving members of the “let you and him fight international brigage these past two years or so, but boy did the War for South Ossetia bring them back. Suddenly they have a new purpose in life, a new spring in their step: the Russians are back and everything’s all right with the world. No longer do they have to trouble themselves with tawdry, unwinnable wars in dusty countries nobody really cares about but for the oil; the Russian Bear is back and it’s happy party time for the Cold Warriors.
And nowhere more so than at the Henry Jackson Society, where Mark Attila “it’s the Serbs! The Serbs!” Hoare has been moved to ever highers flights of fancy in his descriptions of What’s To Be Done. As Aaronovitch Watch commented: “We have occasionally described the Henry Jackson Society in the past as the “I’ve got a cardboard box on my head and I’m a tank commander” element of British Decency – the breakfast cereal must be ankle deep on the floor at Peterhouse College today”
But he got competition, from none other than Denis “failed New Labour minister McShamne”, exhorting us at Comment is Free to stand Shoulder to shoulder against Russia:
As Sir Roderick Braithwaite, the astute former ambassador in Moscow and a man sympathetic to Russians pointed out some time ago, Russia has done far more invading than it has been invaded. Napoleon and Hitler failed to conquer Moscow but Russian armies – Tsarist and Soviet – have occupied every European capital east of the Rhine.
[…]
President Sarkozy’s remarks that Russia had some rights in Georgia sent a chill down the spine of Baltic states which have Russian speaking citizens, installed after Stalin’s invasion of these small countries in 1940. Finland, which fought a war with Russia in 1940, shivers at what the new Putin doctrine might mean.
[…]
Putin may have thought that sweeping the Georgian pawn off the board was the end of the game. Alas, it is is only the beginning, and Britain cannot betray Poland and its fellow EU and Nato allies as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.
McShane does seem to have a talent for distilling all the cliches uttered about Russia’s “aggression” in Georgia to the purest grade of wingnuttery, doesn’t he, with his talk about not betraying Poland “as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.” It’s great stuff, but to me Marko still has the edge, as he wouldn’t make such schoolboy errors in his rants.
Georgia invades breakaway region of South Ossetia, Russia
responds by sending troops to defend it, with all the danger of turning this into a fullscale war between Georgia and Russia. Der Spiegel has the best coverage in English that I’ve seen, while the main Georgian English language news service Civil.ge, which was up earlier today now seems to have been slashdotted.
Tensions had been high for a while, with the root of the conflict going back to the last days of the Soviet Union, when newly resurgant Georgian nationalism met head to head with its Ossentian counterpart. Russia helped end the war that started when the USSR collapsed completely and has since made South Ossetia into a protectorate, providing most of the population with Russian passports. For Russia, separatist regions like this and Abkhazia have always been a way to keep a hand in its “Near Abroad”, but it also has an interest because of its own North Ossetia, which you might remember from the school siege of Breslan.
Now this socalled “frozen conflict” has occasionally erupting into open violence again but never as bad as today. This time it looks like it’s becoming a real shooting war between Georgia and Russia. But why now? Tensions had been ratcheting up in the past year, with various incidents including alleged Russian incursions of Georgian airspace, as well as Georgian attacks on South Ossetian targets and Ossetian attacks on Georgian soil. Then again, these things have all happened before and never degenerated as fast as this time.
Now Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, came to power in one of those coloured revolutions that are usually massively backed by the CIA and western business interests like George Soros. Which meant the US got an important new ally, who showed his gratitude by sending 2,000 Georgian troops to Iraq, half of which he now wants back to stop the “Russian aggression”, but that’s of lesser concern. What was important that with Georgia being pro-western, Caspian Sea oil could now be transported through a brand spanking new pipeline to Europe, without the Russians having the ability to shut down the tap. In return for this Georgia got a lot of American assistance in rebuilding its army. Thanks to this support Saakashvili has already manage to force one breakaway region, Adzharia, back into Georgia properly and while America probably isn’t keen to see its puppet engage in a shooting war with Russia, it must’ve known something was up and if not given its blessing, at least agreed to look the other way.
From what I can make out, Georgia is clearly the aggressor here, having been largely responsible for creating much of the tension in the first place, than used this as an excuse to invade South Ossetia proper. With Russia taking the bait and coming to the Ossetians’ aid, Saakashvili now can portray his country as the victim of Russian aggression and because the west is predisposed to believe the worst about post-Putin Russia anyway, he may get away with this. On the other hand, if Russia gets too riled, he may have bitten off a lot more than he could chew.
It will be …interesting… to see how our great leaders deal with this crisis. Since they gave Kosovo the right to secede from Serbia, they can hardly deny South Ossetia the same right, can they?
We Brits can take any amount of radioactive fallout – just as long as we’ve still got the cup that cheers but does not inebriate:
Nuclear threat sparked tea worry
The threat of a nuclear attack on the UK in the 1950s caused concern over the supply of tea, top-secret documents which have now been released reveal.
Government officials planning food supplies said the tea situation would be “very serious” after a nuclear war.
Indeed it would be serious. All that heat’d sour the milk.