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The New World War - The Silence Is A Lie

Alex Doherty — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:11:41 +0000

Britain’s political conference season of 2008 will be remembered as The Great Silence. Politicians have come and gone and their mouths have moved in front of large images of themselves, and they often wave at someone. There has been lots of news about each other. Adam Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and billed as “the husband of Blair aide Anji Hunter”, has published a book of gossip derived from his “unrivalled access to No 10”. His revelation is that Tony Blair’s mouthpiece told lies. The war criminal himself has been absent, but the former mouthpiece has been signing his own book of gossip, and waving. The club is celebrating itself, including all those, Labour and Tory, who gave the war criminal a standing ovation on his last day in parliament and who have yet to vote on, let alone condemn, Britain’s part in the wanton human, social and physical destruction of an entire nation. Instead, there are happy debates such as, “Can hope win?” and, my favourite, “Can foreign policy be a Labour strength?” As Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, has written that the Prime Minister “resembles a tragic hero in a Hardy novel: an essentially good man brought down by one error of judgement”. What is this one error of judgement? The bank- rolling of two murderous colonial adventures? No. The unprecedented growth of the British arms industry and the sale of weapons to the poorest countries? No. The replacement of manufacturing and public service by an arcane cult serving the ultra-rich? No. The Prime Minister’s “folly” is “postponing the election last year”. This is the March Hare Factor.

Reality can be detected, however, by applying the Orwell Rule and inverting public pronouncements and headlines, such as “Aggressor Russia facing pariah status, US warns”, thereby identifying the correct pariah; or by crossing the invisible boundaries that fix the boundaries of political and media discussion. “When truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

Understanding this silence is critical in a society in which news has become noise. Silence covers the truth that Britain’s political parties have converged and now follow the single-ideology model of the United States. This is different from the political consensus of half a century ago that produced what was known as social democracy. Today’s political union has no principled social democratic premises. Debate has become just another weasel word and principle, like the language of Chaucer, is bygone. That the poor and the state fund the rich is a given, along with the theft of public services, known as privatisation. This was spelt out by Margaret Thatcher but, more importantly, by new Labour’s engineers. In The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle declared Britain’s new “economic strengths” to be its transnational corporations, the “aerospace” industry (weapons) and “the pre-eminence of the City of London”. The rest was to be asset-stripped, including the peculiar British pursuit of selfless public service. Overlaying this was a new social authoritarianism guided by a hypocrisy based on “values”. Mandelson and Liddle demanded “a tough discipline” and a “hardworking majority” and the “proper bringing-up [sic] of children”. And in formally launching his Murdochracy, Blair used “moral” and “morality” 18 times in a speech he gave in Australia as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, who had recently found God.

A “think tank” called Demos exemplified this new order. A founder of Demos, Geoff Mulgan, himself rewarded with a job in one of Blair’s “policy units”, wrote a book called Connexity. “In much of the world today,” he offered, “the most pressing problems on the public agenda are not poverty or material shortage . . . but rather the disorders of freedom: the troubles that result from having too many freedoms that are abused rather than constructively used.” As if celebrating life in another solar system, he wrote: “For the first time ever, most of the world’s most powerful nations do not want to conquer territory.”

That reads, now as it ought to have read then, as dark parody in a world where more than 24,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty and at least a million people lie dead in just one territory conquered by the most powerful nations. However, it serves to remind us of the political “culture” that has so successfully fused traditional liberalism with the lunar branch of western political life and allowed our “too many freedoms” to be taken away as ruthlessly and anonymously as wedding parties in Afghanistan have been obliterated by our bombs.

The product of these organised delusions is rarely acknowledged. The current economic crisis, with its threat to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of the last century, when Europe’s most advanced and cultured nation committed genocide. Since the 1990s, America’s military budget has doubled. Like the national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not known, because up to 40 per cent is classified “black” – it is hidden. Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said the British force would be increased. It was an order.

In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly authorised by President Bush. The “change” candidate for president, Barack Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.
War of the world

On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to power of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in Afghanistan is also coming.

It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington’s historic rapacious intervention in its “backyard”. Washington’s “Plan Colombia” is the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund “the war on drugs and organised crime” in Mexico – a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its closest neighbour and ensuring its “business stability”.

Britain is tied to all these adventures – a British “School of the Americas” is to be built in Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the American empire in the name of “global security”.

None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of “the gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged, under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years”. He describes a catastrophic “relentless winner-take-all of Russia’s post-1991 weakness”, with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware, Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato “one inch to the east”. The result, writes Cohen, “is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow’s internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not achieve during the Soviet era.”

This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents US-Russian relations as “a duel to the death – perhaps literally”. The liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, “reads like a bygone Pravda on the Potomac”. The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must therefore be a “pariah”. Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, “when the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?” It is an urgent question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid to break the lethal silence.

www.johnpilger.com

Twilight of the NPT?

tim — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:19:57 +0000

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty belongs to that venerable tradition in the Atlantic world of unequal agreements: those which—in their very texts, rather than just in their effects—give extraordinary benefits and liberties to one set of states while constraining the freedom of action and rights of others. Yet it has been remarkably successful since 1970 in attracting the adherence of the overwhelming majority of countries. Most surprisingly, the one that has benefited most from its terms—the United States—has been most vigorously attempting to undermine the npt regime over the last eight years, generating a major crisis in the efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons through international cooperation.

As Norman Dombey’s essay in this issue so vividly demonstrates, the NPT was constructed through US–Soviet negotiations in the 1960s to prevent non-weapon states from acquiring an arsenal, while leaving existing weapon states a free hand to develop and deploy—indeed, use—nuclear weapons as they saw fit. [1] Beyond a purely rhetorical commitment to negotiate disarmament, no restraints were put on them at all. By 1992, once the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—all nuclear powers—had joined, formidable instruments became available to enforce these unequal provisions. Any other country seeking to acquire nuclear weapons could now be referred for judgement before the UNSC, on the charge of posing a threat to peace under Chapter Seven of the Charter. This also allows the Permanent Five to legally bind all un member states to action—up to and including military attack—against the state in question. This threat would be particularly potent against states that had ratified the NPT, and thus submitted their nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. A weapons programme would be a direct violation of their obligations under the Treaty; thus referral to the UNSC would become a predictable institutional outcome of the NPT regime.

Policing the South

The Treaty was signed and ratified only after the Permanent Five had acquired their nuclear weapons—in the case of Britain and France, to preserve their great-power status; in the case of the Soviet Union and then China, to acquire a nuclear-deterrent capacity against the United States. The NPT was designed to lock the rest of the world into accepting the Permanent Five’s special rights. Why, in such circumstances, was the npt regime able to persist, enlarge its membership and fulfil so many of its inequitable goals, not only during the Cold War, but even after? One answer would be that most of the states who had the industrial and technological capacity to build both a nuclear bomb, and the vehicle to transmit it, were already offered protection from nuclear or conventional attack by one of the two superpowers during the Cold War.

States that persisted in their efforts to achieve nuclear-weapon status were those that faced security challenges but could not expect guaranteed protection from a superpower: Israel, in its struggle with the Arab states in the 1950s and 1960s, before the US decisively committed itself to Israeli military security; apartheid South Africa, repeatedly at war in Africa (and indeed, suffering defeats at the hands of Cuban forces in Angola in the 1970s); India, after its defeat by China in the border war of 1962; followed by Pakistan, in response to the threat from India. This explanation for the rarity of moves to circumvent or flout the NPT would also cover the cases of North Korea and Iraq. The former was neither a Russian nor a Chinese satellite, and could not rely on them for ultimate security even during the Cold War, when it faced aggression from both South Korea and the us. Iraq under the Ba’ath also faced grave military threats, not only from the Western powers but also from Israel and Iran, and could not count on superpower protection. But it had the financial resources for a nuclear-weapons programme. Conversely, the majority of states have not perceived themselves to be facing such dire military threats as to warrant the acquisition of nuclear arms. Even those with strong traditions of retaining complete autonomy over their security, such as Sweden or Brazil, have refrained from adopting such a course.

Yet absence of military threat may not fully explain the apparent achievements of the npt regime. Another element of the explanation may be that its success has been much more partial than it seems. The Treaty contains a grey zone between a state being an industrial nuclear power, in the civilian field, and being a nuclear-weapon state. It treats these two statuses as polar opposites: industrial proliferation is actually encouraged, while the cross-over to armaments is outlawed. In practice, no such gulf exists between the two: civilian nuclear power is the necessary threshold for acquiring nuclear-weapon capabilities. This has no doubt ensured that countries such as Germany and Japan—though deeply critical of aspects of the asymmetrical NPT regime—have been prepared to go along with it, for they cannot be described simply as non-weapon states. They would be better termed ‘threshold’ states, which remain within the terms of the Treaty but could, like a number of other formally non-weapon states, transform very swiftly indeed into full-fledged nuclear powers.

This grey zone is combined with the Treaty’s blinkered focus exclusively upon the industrial side of nuclear arms: it has nothing to say about delivery vehicles—that is, missile capabilities. Thus, threshold states can proceed under the terms of the Treaty to develop even intercontinental ballistic missiles without sanction. Nor does the so-called Missile Technology Control Regime serve to block them doing so. The MTCR is an informal club, established in 1987, to prevent diffusion of technology for missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads—specifically, those able to carry a payload of 500kg at least 300 kilometres. The club’s founders consisted precisely of those developed states which possessed such technologies, namely Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and the United States. The first four names are indicative: formally non-nuclear powers, but in reality threshold states with advanced missile technologies. The list of members has now grown to 34, of which 19 are in the European Union. Another 10 are US allies; Russia joined the club in 1995. Not a single country from the global South holds membership.

In short, beneath the headline picture of the npt anchoring the monopoly of nuclear-weapon states, we find a second layer of reality: a regime, including the MTCR, which has enabled a substantial number of rich countries, allied to the US, to become threshold states with advanced missile technologies. Alongside these there is a third reality: a sustained effort by the North, plus Russia, to block the possibility of states in the global South acquiring deterrence capability. This pattern is replicated by other organizations that form part of the overall counter-proliferation regime, such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group. This was created in 1975 on US initiative, in the face of India’s nuclear-weapons programme.

We are still left with two substantial puzzles: first, why have states in the global South that have bad relations with the United States still tended to adhere to the npt regime? Secondly, why has the us itself, in the post-Cold War period, shown such hostility to the rules of a regime that gives it such inordinate privileges? The most striking examples of states remaining in the npt, apparently against their own interests, are North Korea and Iran. American hostility towards them has been long-standing and deep: there is no doubt that the United States has been programmatically committed to overthrowing both regimes, even if its tactics towards each have varied across time. Yet both have continued to declare their respect for the npt and iaea. One reason lies in the enthusiasm for civilian nuclear power embedded in the foundations of the IAEA and the NPT. It is worth pointing out that when the iaea was created in the 1950s and the npt established at the end of the 1960s, few could envisage any state from the global South acquiring the indigenous know-how to construct their own civilian nuclear-power industry. North Korea and Iran have committed themselves to achieving just that and have been able to legitimate their efforts through the iaea–npt framework. Today many others have the technological and financial resources, if they wish, to follow suit. Far from precluding the emergence of threshold states in the South, the regime’s rules actually facilitate it.

Furthermore, the NPT does allow states to acquire a nuclear-deterrent capability: under Article X, if a state faces ‘extraordinary events’ that ‘have jeopardized’ its ‘supreme interests’, it may withdraw from the restraints of the Treaty with three months’ notice. This was exactly the course taken by North Korea in the face of blunt threats of pre-emptive attack—preventive war—made by the US. Pyongyang gave notice, withdrew and carried out a successful nuclear-weapon test. After the Bush Administration’s subsequent retreat, North Korea began to return to the npt regime.

Persian smokescreen

The confrontation between Iran and the US and EU over the former’s nuclear programme is paradigmatic of the current contradictions of the npt regime. Although there are some indications that Iran conducted research relevant to nuclear-weapon production between 1989 and 1993 (in a period when neighbouring Iraq did have a secret crash nuclear programme), there has been no significant evidence since then of clandestine weapon development. [2] Since the 1990s Iran has instead sought to establish civilian nuclear energy and substantial missile capacity. By pursuing both these paths, Iran could hope to become a threshold state in the same sense as Germany and Japan, and it could do so quite legally under the NPT, to which it has continued to adhere under the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, the US—supported by the EU—has been attempting to prevent Iran from exercising its legal rights to enrich uranium for civilian uses.

This campaign under Bush has been in many ways continuous with Clinton’s policy in the mid-1990s. His Administration had dubbed Iran—with which the US had no diplomatic relations—a rogue terrorist state secretly seeking ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and imposed sweeping sanctions centred on an embargo of Iranian oil. [3] Until 2002, Western Europe rejected both the embargo and Washington’s accusations against Tehran. Trade was growing between Iran and the eu, with Germany its main trading partner. By 2000 the EU was preparing the way for a trade agreement with Iran; European oil companies, including British ones, were discussing new investments. The Russian government was pursuing a similar course and had committed itself to a contract to build a nuclear-power station at Bushehr, on the Gulf coast. Iranian foreign policy was geared towards using these links as a vector to integrate the country into the international institutional and trading order.

Against this background, and in the context of American preparations to attack Iraq, Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address denounced the Islamic Republic as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and claimed the right to engage in a pre-emptive war to overthrow it. This did not initially alter the eu’s course: it proceeded to sign a new commercial agreement with Iran. Following discussions with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Ahani—less than a week after the Bush speech—Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Piqué, speaking for the presidency of the eu, told a news conference in Madrid that the 15-country bloc would seek ‘maximum cooperation’ with Iran on trade, the fight against terrorism and human rights. [4]US pressure, however, soon swung the West European states towards joining its campaign to deny Iran’s right to organize the full nuclear-fuel cycle, and support Washington’s demand that Iran stop enriching uranium on its own territory. The British and French sought to justify this by parroting the charges routinely made against Iran by the Clinton and Bush Administrations, which they had themselves previously ignored. The German government, more squeamish about Bush-style big-lie propaganda, said Tehran should give up its rights as a necessary step towards easing tensions between Iran and the US.

The problem facing the US–British–French approach was that the iaea inspectorate, under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, was not prepared to participate in spreading unsubstantiated allegations. In December 2002 the Bush Administration therefore tried to whip up a melodramatic media campaign in the hope of railroading the iaea Board into taking action against Iran. The trick was to present the news that Iran had been constructing nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak as a shocking revelation of secret and presumably illegal activity. The us published satellite images of the two sites under construction as proof. This supposedly shocking revelation was nothing of the kind. The Natanz complex was for fuel fabrication; the Arak facility was a heavy-water reactor. NPT safeguards require Iran to inform the iaea of such facilities only six months before they go into operation. The pilot plant at Natanz was not operational until early 2006 while the one in Arak is not due to start until 2014. [5] The fact that Iran did not inform the Agency of their construction until February 2003 did not constitute any breach of the NPT, and thus the inspectorate refused to treat the us exposé as evidence of this. [6]

During 2003 and 2004 the Bush Administration worked to get rid of ElBaradei and gain control of the iaea inspectorate. They tapped all his phone calls and engaged in what the Washington Post later called an ‘orchestrated campaign’ to spread anonymous accusations that he was a secret supporter of Iran, had capitulated to pressure and was deliberately concealing damning details about Iran’s programme from the Board. ‘The plan is to keep the spotlight on ElBaradei and raise the heat’, a us official said. [7] These kinds of tactics had succeeded earlier in 2002 with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a UN body based in The Hague. Its head, José Bustani, had infuriated Washington by attempting to involve the OPCW in the search for suspected chemical weapons in Iraq; the White House successfully undermined and removed him. This had caused little stir internationally because of the OPCW’s fairly low profile, but also because its members wanted to avoid being drawn into the diplomatic row leading up to the Iraq war. The aim now was to unseat ElBaradei when he came up for re-election in December 2004. The US State Department sought alternative candidates such as Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Brazilian disarmament expert Sergio Duarte and two South Korean officials. [8] Downer was not prepared to stand against ElBaradei, while the latter three represented countries under iaea investigation for suspect nuclear work.

The drive to remove ElBaradei ultimately failed because a sufficient number of states on the iaea Board continued to back him. As a result, the us was left with only a few technicalities dating back to the 1990s on which to accuse Iran: it had twice neglected to report enrichment facilities, and there were six instances of ‘failure to provide design information or updated design information’ for certain installations. [9]iaea officials did not consider these omissions to be actual breaches of the NPT, and by autumn 2005 they had in any case been cleared up. ElBaradei certified that ‘all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and, therefore, such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.’

To put these technical violations in perspective, between 2002 and 2005 the Agency found discrepancies in the utilization of nuclear material in as many as 15 countries including Taiwan, Egypt and South Korea. In 2002 and 2003, for example, the latter refused to let inspectors visit facilities connected to its laser-enrichment programme. Subsequently, Seoul confessed to having secretly enriched uranium to a 77 per cent concentration of U-235—sufficient for weapons-grade fissile material. Neither the US nor EU suggested referring the matter to the unsc. [10] In contrast, there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has produced weapons-grade uranium. Despite intrusive inspections, no facility or plan to do so has been discovered, nor have any weapon designs surfaced. ElBaradei’s September 2005 report concluded that Iranian concealment had been effectively rectified and was no longer a significant problem. [11] With the deepening crisis in Iraq, the Bush Administration eventually split over its own confrontation with Iran: its intelligence apparatus—backed by a powerful segment of the military—sabotaged the drive against Iran within the unsc and iaea by declaring that there did not, in fact, seem to be a secret nuclear-weapon programme. For face-saving reasons, the report suggested that Iran may have had one before 2003 but had abandoned it.

Primacy and proliferation

The fate of the NPT since the end of the Cold War has been linked to that of the American drive for global primacy in the military–political field. If that drive had been successful, the Treaty would have become irrelevant and the iaea inspectorate would have been reduced to a technical and political support system for Washington. The technological core of the US effort has focused on rendering obsolete other states’ attempts to furnish themselves with a nuclear deterrent against American attack. This could be achieved through the development of anti-missile systems within the Star Wars tradition: powerful radar and precision guidance systems could enable the US to destroy missiles on launch. At the same time, the US has been attempting to develop immensely powerful bunker-buster bombs capable of destroying underground nuclear and other military facilities. The political core, meanwhile, has been the doctrine of so-called pre-emptive war, entitling the us to attack regimes that it opposes, and to do so without the support of any multilateral institution such as the IAEA or the UN. A corollary of this is that the us is also free unilaterally to decide which states it allows to acquire nuclear weapons, without bothering with the rules of the NPT regime. This, indeed, has been the premise of the long-standing us policy towards Israel and its current approach to India.

Yet the us campaign seems doomed to failure. In the first place, the technological and military–political capacities it requires do not seem within reach. This is partly the result of drawbacks inherent in anti-missile defence systems: even if the technology works it could be overwhelmed, at least in the case of large countries such as Russia and China, by the opponent’s capacity to enlarge its stock of missiles and launch sites. More importantly, hostile states also frequently possess other, non-nuclear forms of deterrence which can lead to a loss of American nerve. This is the lesson of the confrontation with both North Korea and Iran. In each case, Washington blinked. The advanced capitalist world’s acceptance of American claims to primacy over it does not seem to extend to allowing the devastation of parts of that zone itself, such as South Korea; nor to tolerating a catastrophic interruption of its main oil supplies. Even where the us succeeds in confining destruction to an excluded state such as Iraq, it lacks the capacity to produce new regimes to its own liking.

For all of these reasons, the us campaign for global primacy and its doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive attack have not constituted a persuasive counter-proliferation regime. The other side of its strategy—promoting nuclear proliferation on the part of friendly states—has also thrown up problems, as in the Israeli, Indian and Pakistani cases. When India and Pakistan demonstrated in the 1990s that they had become nuclear-weapon states, the Clinton Administration imposed sanctions on both, at least formally respecting the spirit of the NPT. Bush, however, lifted those sanctions and then went on to negotiate and sign an agreement legitimating India’s nuclear-weapon status and inaugurating cooperation in the nuclear-energy sphere. [12] This policy not only undermines the cornerstone of the non-proliferation regime and contradicts the central purpose of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, it also demonstrates America’s political weakness: the accord will leave India largely independent in the nuclear field, unlike the British, for example, whose deterrent capacity remains deeply dependent on the us.

The Bush–Singh deal would allow India to import fissile material from the us for its civilian nuclear industry while, in return, voluntarily accepting the npt safeguards regime (including the Additional Protocol), but only for its civilian industry. India would have a free hand to develop and expand its military programme, just as the us has. Indeed the deal would free Indian resources from the civilian industry for military use. [13] India has, of course, promised within the terms of the proposed deal that it will subsequently negotiate a test ban, but this can scarcely be taken seriously since the us itself has not been prepared to ratify the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty. In these circumstances India will have gained a great prize—the Bush Administration’s endorsement of it as a legitimate nuclear-weapon state—while paying nothing in return, in this domain at least. It will have succeeded in damaging both of the main pillars of the NPT regime: to prevent proliferation and to preserve the five-state nuclear-weapons cartel, possessing the untrammelled right to maintain and enhance their arsenals.

Nuclear bonanza

The Bush Administration’s record on nuclear-weapons proliferation, then, is unremittingly negative from the standpoint of its own interests and those of its allies. The priority for rich capitalist non-weapon countries is to maintain their threshold status, while blocking states in the South from gaining it by tightening controls on their development of civilian nuclear industries and missile capabilities. The most obvious way to do this would be for Northern states to try to persuade those in the South to give up the NPT right to carry out their own uranium enrichment; but few would be ready to accept such a restriction on existing prerogatives, particularly when the five-state cartel has ignored all the phraseology in and around the Treaty on taking their own arms-control, test-ban and disarmament measures. On the contrary, the us over the last eight years has been brushing aside all restraints on its own massive rearmament in nuclear, missile and other strategic weapons.

Simultaneously, the us’s efforts to turn itself into an aggressive alternative to any rule-based non-proliferation regime have proved woefully ineffective. Its bombastic rhetoric about unilateral preventive war was combined with a volte-face on North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile North Korea has been able to cross the civilian–military boundary and thereby gain the prospect of a better deal than it received from the Clinton Administration, without moving outside the international legal framework. Iran shows every sign of being able to acquire threshold status within NPT provisions. America’s readiness to trample upon the rules of the non-proliferation regime and the norms of the UN Charter resulted in a dramatic loss of diplomatic influence: Washington was not even able to unseat the Director General of the iaea and subordinate that apparatus to the us National Security Council. Its diplomacy towards India has been a spectacular example of wishful thinking and incompetence, producing a deal which does not even give Washington the kind of leverage it has over the British. In short the Bush legacy is one of lamentable failure.

The rational solution to the crisis of the non-proliferation regime would be for threshold states in the North, such as Germany and Japan, to link up with non-nuclear states in the South to demand that the weapon states adopt serious disarmament measures—above all the us but also Israel—as the basis for reviving the NPT in the post-Bush period. This, however, seems remote, not least because there is no sign of a will to submit to such pressure within the United States itself, and in such circumstances Washington’s allies tend to shut up. Moreover, the nuclear industries of the Atlantic world and, of course, Russia are looking forward to a bonanza of new business for nuclear-energy investment, especially in the South. In their competitive battles to gain contracts they are unlikely to impose new restrictions on uranium enrichment and reprocessing amongst their prospective customers. In the main zones where military–political incentives for weapons proliferation are greatest—the ‘Greater Middle East’ and East Asia—there are no indications that the United States is interested in replacing its confrontationist policies, of backing Israel in one theatre and containing China in the other, with a more cooperative approach to regional security. Thus, in this area as in so many others, the days when the United States and its Atlantic allies could credibly present themselves as a leading force on global issues seem to lie in the past.

Notes:

[1] Norman Dombey, ‘The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Aims, Limitations and Achievements’, nlr 52, July–August 2008.

[2] The Tehran Research Reactor (trr) had carried out experiments on bismuth irradiation to extract polonium, which, when combined with beryllium, may be used for nuclear-weapon construction. Iran was not, in fact, required to inform the iaea about such research. The iaea has declared there is no evidence that Iran ever imported beryllium. Experiment details were in the trr logbook, safeguarded by the iaea for 30 years.

[3] See, for example, ‘Findings’ in the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996.

[4] Suzanne Daley, ‘French Minister Calls us Policy “Simplistic”’, New York Times, 7 February 2002. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw publicly dismissed the Bush speech as designed for domestic consumption, saying it was ‘best understood by the fact that there are mid-term congressional elections in November.’ Of course, he quickly changed his tune.

[5] Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘The Persian Puzzle I: Iran and the invention of a nuclear crisis’, The Hindu, 21 September 2005.

[6] Under the IAEA’s ‘Additional Protocol’ drafted in the late 1990s, Iran would have had to inform it of plans six months before the start of construction (rather than before becoming operational). By 2002 Iran, like many others, had not yet ratified the Protocol.

[7] Varadarajan, ‘The Persian Puzzle II: What the IAEA really found in Iran’, The Hindu, 22 September 2005; Dafna Linzer, ‘iaea Leader’s Phone Tapped’, Washington Post, 12 December 2004.

[8] Linzer, ‘iaea Leader’s Phone Tapped’.

[9] Varadarajan, ‘Persian Puzzle II’. A further issue concerned import of uranium from China in 1991.

[10] Varadarajan, ‘Persian Puzzle I’.

[11] Varadarajan, ‘Persian Puzzle II’. Some of the centrifuges assembled in Natanz showed traces of enriched uranium, but inspectors concluded that these were of Pakistani origin.

[12] The Indo-us Civilian Nuclear Agreement was revealed on 18 July 2005 by Prime Minister Singh and President Bush as part of a ‘global partnership’ to promote ‘stability, democracy, prosperity and peace’.

[13] See Arms Control Association, ‘Experts Call on Congress to Take Harder Look at US–India Nuclear Deal’, 23 November 2005.

Ossetia-Georgia-Russia-U.S.A.

tim — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:08:47 +0000

Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston. “No satire of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because Funston occupies that summit himself… [he is] satire incarnated.”

It is a thought that often comes to mind, again in August 2008 during the Georgia-Ossetia-Russia war. George Bush, Condoleezza Rica and other dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the United Nations, warning that Russia could be excluded from international institutions “by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with” their principles. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously honored, they intoned – “all nations,” that is, apart from those that the US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of others too long and familiar to mention.

The junior partner joined in as well. British foreign secretary David Miliband accused Russia of engaging in “19th century forms of diplomacy” by invading a sovereign state, something Britain would never contemplate today. That “is simply not the way that international relations can be run in the 21st century,” he added, echoing the decider-in-chief, who said that invasion of “a sovereign neighboring state…is unacceptable in the 21st century.” Mexico and Canada therefore need not fear further invasions and annexation of much of their territory, because the US now only invades states that are not on its borders, though no such constraint holds for its clients, as Lebanon learned once again in 2006.

“The moral of this story is even more enlightening,” Serge Halimi writes in Le Monde Diplomatique and CounterPunch newsletter, “when, to defend his country’s borders, the charming pro-American Saakashvili repatriates some of the 2,000 soldiers he had sent to invade Iraq,” one of the largest contingents apart from the two warrior states.

Prominent analysts joined the chorus. Fareed Zakaria applauded Bush’s observation that Russia’s behavior is unacceptable today, unlike the 19th century, “when the Russian intervention would have been standard operating procedure for a great power.” We therefore must devise a strategy for bringing Russia “in line with the civilized world,” where intervention is unthinkable.

There were, to be sure, some who shared Mark Twain’s despair. One distinguished example is Chris Patten, former EU commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party, chancellor of Oxford University and a member of the House of Lords. He wrote that the Western reaction “is enough to make even the cynical shake their heads in disbelief” – referring to Europe’s failure to respond vigorously to the effrontery of Russian leaders, who, “like 19th-century tsars, want a sphere of influence around their borders.”

Patten rightly distinguishes Russia from the global superpower, which long ago passed the point where it demanded a sphere of influence around its borders, and demands a sphere of influence over the entire world. It also acts vigorously to enforce that demand, in accord with the Clinton doctrine that Washington has the right to use military force to defend vital interests such as “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources” – and in the real world, far more.

Clinton was breaking no new ground, of course. His doctrine derives from standard principles formulated by high-level planners during World War II, which offered the prospect of global dominance. In the postwar world, they determined, the US should aim “to hold unquestioned power” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. To secure these ends, “the foremost requirement [is] the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament,” a core element of “an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States.” The plans laid during the war were implemented in various ways in the years that followed.

The goals are deeply rooted in stable institutional structures. Hence they persist through changes in occupancy of the White House, and are untroubled by the opportunity for “peace dividends,” the disappearance of the major rival from the world scene, or other marginal irrelevancies. Devising new challenges is never beyond the reach of doctrinal managers, as when Ronald Reagan pulled on his cowboy boots and declared a national emergency because the Nicaraguan army was only two days from Harlingen Texas, and might lead the hordes who are about to “sweep over the United States and take what we have,” as Lyndon Johnson lamented when he called for holding the line in Vietnam. Most ominously, those holding the reins may actually believe their own words.

Returning to the efforts to elevate Russia to the civilized world, the seven charter members of the Group of Eight industrialized countries issued a statement “condemning the action of our fellow G8 member,” Russia, which has yet to comprehend the Anglo-American commitment to non-intervention. The European Union held a rare emergency meeting to condemn Russia’s crime, its first meeting since the invasion of Iraq, which elicited no condemnation.

Russia called for an emergency session of the Security Council, but no consensus was reached because, according to Council diplomats, the US, Britain, and some others rejected a phrase that called on both sides “to renounce the use of force.”

The typical reactions recall Orwell’s observations on the “indifference to reality” of the “nationalist,” who “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but … has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

The basic facts are not seriously in dispute. South Ossetia, along with the much more significant region of Abkhazia, were assigned by Stalin to his native Georgia. Western leaders sternly admonish that Stalin’s directives must be respected, despite the strong opposition of Ossetians and Abkhazians. The provinces enjoyed relative autonomy until the collapse of the USSR. In 1990, Georgia’s ultranationalist president Zviad Gamsakhurdia abolished autonomous regions and invaded South Ossetia. The bitter war that followed left 1000 dead and tens of thousands of refugees, with the capital city of Tskhinvali “battered and depopulated” (New York Times).

A small Russian force then supervised an uneasy truce, broken decisively on August 7, 2008, when Georgian president Saakashvili’s ordered his forces to invade. According to “an extensive set of witnesses,” the Times reports, Georgia’s military at once “began pounding civilian sections of the city of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping base there, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.” The predictable Russian response drove Georgian forces out of South Ossetia, and Russia went on to conquer parts of Georgia, then partially withdrawing to the vicinity of South Ossetia. There were many casualties and atrocities. As is normal, the innocent suffered severely.

Russia reported at first that ten Russian peacekeepers were killed by Georgian shelling. The West took little notice. That too is normal. There was, for example, no reaction when Aviation Week reported that 200 Russians were killed in an Israeli air raid in Lebanon in 1982 during a US-backed invasion that left some 15-20,000 dead, with no credible pretext beyond strengthening Israeli control over the occupied West Bank.

Among Ossetians who fled north, the “prevailing view,” according to the London Financial Times, “is that Georgia’s pro-western leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, tried to wipe out their breakaway enclave.” Ossetian militias, under Russian eyes, then brutally drove out Georgians, in areas beyond Ossetia as well. “Georgia said its attack had been necessary to stop a Russian attack that already had been under way,” the New York Times reports, but weeks later “there has been no independent evidence, beyond Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages.”

In Russia, the Wall Street Journal reports, “legislators, officials and local analysts have embraced the theory that the Bush administration encouraged Georgia, its ally, to start the war in order to precipitate an international crisis that would play up the national-security experience of Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate.” In contrast, French author Bernard-Henri Levy, writing in the New Republic, proclaims that “no one can ignore the fact that President Saakashvili only decided to act when he no longer had a choice, and war had already come. In spite of this accumulation of facts that should have been blindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers, many in the media rushed as one man toward the thesis of the Georgians as instigators, as irresponsible provocateurs of the war.”

The Russian propaganda system made the mistake of presenting evidence, which was easily refuted. Its Western counterparts, more wisely, keep to authoritative pronouncements, like Levy’s denunciation of the major Western media for ignoring what is “blindingly obvious to all scrupulous, good-faith observers” for whom loyalty to the state suffices to establish The Truth – which, perhaps, is even true, serious analysts might conclude.

The Russians are losing the “propaganda war,” BBC reported, as Washington and its allies have succeeded in “presenting the Russian actions as aggression and playing down the Georgian attack into South Ossetia on August 7, which triggered the Russian operation,” though “the evidence from South Ossetia about that attack indicates that it was extensive and damaging.” Russia has “not yet learned how to play the media game,” the BBC observes. That is natural. Propaganda has typically become more sophisticated as countries become more free and the state loses the ability to control the population by force.

The Russian failure to provide credible evidence was partially overcome by the Financial Times, which discovered that the Pentagon had provided combat training to Georgian special forces commandos shortly before the Georgian attack on August 7, revelations that “could add fuel to accusations by Vladimir Putin, Russian prime minister, last month that the US had `orchestrated’ the war in the Georgian enclave.” The training was in part carried out by former US special forces recruited by private military contractors, including MPRI, which, as the journal notes, “was hired by the Pentagon in 1995 to train the Croatian military prior to their invasion of the ethnically-Serbian Krajina region, which led to the displacement of 200,000 refugees and was one of the worst incidents of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars.” The US-backed Krajina expulsion (generally estimated at 250,000, with many killed) was possibly the worst case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Its fate in approved history is rather like that of photographs of Trotsky in Stalinist Russia, for simple and sufficient reasons: it does not accord with the required image of US nobility confronting Serbian evil.

The toll of the August 2008 Caucasus war is subject to varying estimates. A month afterwards, the Financial Times cited Russian reports that “at least 133 civilians died in the attack, as well as 59 of its own peacekeepers,” while in the ensuing Russian mass invasion and aerial bombardment of Georgia, according to the FT, 215 Georgians died, including 146 soldiers and 69 civilians. Further revelations are likely to follow.

In the background lie two crucial issues. One is control over pipelines to Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Georgia was chosen as a corridor by Clinton to bypass Russia and Iran, and was also heavily militarized for the purpose. Hence Georgia is “a very major and strategic asset to us,” Zbigniew Brzezinski observes.

It is noteworthy that analysts are becoming less reticent in explaining real US motives in the region as pretexts of dire threats and liberation fade and it becomes more difficult to deflect Iraqi demands for withdrawal of the occupying army. Thus the editors of the Washington Post admonished Barack Obama for regarding Afghanistan as “the central front” for the United States, reminding him that Iraq “lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves,” and Afghanistan’s “strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq.” A welcome, if belated, recognition of reality about the US invasion.

The second issue is expansion of NATO to the East, described by George Kennan in 1997 as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era, [which] may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations.”

As the USSR collapsed, Mikhail Gorbachev made a concession that was astonishing in the light of recent history and strategic realities: he agreed to allow a united Germany to join a hostile military alliance. This “stunning concession” was hailed by Western media, NATO, and President Bush I, who called it a demonstration of “statesmanship … in the best interests of all countries of Europe, including the Soviet Union.”

Gorbachev agreed to the stunning concession on the basis of “assurances that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the east, `not one inch’ in [Secretary of State] Jim Baker’s exact words.” This reminder by Jack Matlock, the leading Soviet expert of the Foreign Service and US ambassador to Russia in the crucial years 1987 to 1991, is confirmed by Strobe Talbott, the highest official in charge of Eastern Europe in the Clinton administration. On the basis of a full review of the diplomatic record, Talbott reports that “Secretary of State Baker did say to then Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in the context of the Soviet Union’s reluctant willingness to let a unified Germany remain part of NATO, that NATO would not move to the east.”

Clinton quickly reneged on that commitment, also dismissing Gorbachev’s effort to end the Cold War with cooperation among partners. NATO also rejected a Russian proposal for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone from the Arctic to the Black Sea, which would have “interfered with plans to extend NATO,” strategic analyst and former NATO planner Michael MccGwire observes.

Rejecting these possibilities, the US took a triumphalist stand that threatened Russian security and also played a major role in driving Russia to severe economic and social collapse, with millions of deaths. The process was sharply escalated by Bush’s further expansion of NATO, dismantling of crucial disarmament agreements, and aggressive militarism. Matlock writes that Russia might have tolerated incorporation of former Russian satellites into NATO if it “had not bombed Serbia and continued expanding. But, in the final analysis, ABM missiles in Poland, and the drive for Georgia and Ukraine in NATO crossed absolute red lines. The insistence on recognizing Kosovo independence was sort of the very last straw. Putin had learned that concessions to the U.S. were not reciprocated, but used to promote U.S. dominance in the world.Once he had the strength to resist, he did so,” in Georgia.

Clinton officials argue that expansion of NATO posed no military threat, and was no more than a benign move to allow former Russian satellites to join the EU (Talbott). That is hardly persuasive. Austria, Sweden and Finland are in the EU but not NATO. If the Warsaw Pact had survived and was incorporating Latin American countries – let alone Canada and Mexico – the US would not easily be persuaded that the Pact is just a Quaker meeting. There should be no need to review the record of US violence to block mostly fanciful ties to Moscow in “our little region over here,” the Western hemisphere, to quote Secretary of War Henry Stimson when he explained that all regional systems must be dismantled after World II, apart from our own, which are to be extended.

To underscore the conclusion, in the midst of the current crisis in the Caucasus, Washington professes concern that Russia might resume military and intelligence cooperation with Cuba at a level not remotely approaching US-Georgia relations, and not a further step towards a significant security threat.

Missile defense too is presented here as benign, though leading US strategic analysts have explained why Russian planners must regard the systems and their chosen location as the basis for a potential threat to the Russian deterrent, hence in effect a first-strike weapon. The Russian invasion of Georgia was used as a pretext to conclude the agreement to place these systems in Poland, thus “bolstering an argument made repeatedly by Moscow and rejected by Washington: that the true target of the system is Russia,” AP commentator Desmond Butler observed.

Matlock is not alone in regarding Kosovo as an important factor. “Recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence was justified on the principle of a mistreated minority’s right to secession – the principle Bush had established for Kosovo,” the Boston Globe editors comment.

But there are crucial differences. Strobe Talbott recognizes that “there’s a degree of payback for what the U.S. and NATO did in Kosovo nine years ago,” but insists that the “analogy is utterly and profoundly false.” No one is a better position to know why it is profoundly false, and he has lucidly explained the reasons, in his preface to a book on NATO’s bombing of Serbia by his associate John Norris. Talbott writes that those who want to know “how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved” in the war should turn to Norris’s well-informed account. Norris concludes that “it was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of Kosovar Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war.”

That the motive for the NATO bombing could not have been “the plight of Kosovar Albanians” was already clear from the rich Western documentary record revealing that the atrocities were, overwhelmingly, the anticipated consequence of the bombing, not its cause. But even before the record was released, it should have been evident to all but the most fervent loyalists that humanitarian concern could hardly have motivated the US and Britain, which at the same time were lending decisive support to atrocities well beyond what was reported from Kosovo, with a background far more horrendous than anything that had happened in the Balkans. But these are mere facts, hence of no moment to Orwell’s “nationalists” – in this case, most of the Western intellectual community, who had made an enormous investment in self-aggrandizement and prevarication about the “noble phase” of US foreign policy and its “saintly glow” as the millennium approached its end, with the bombing of Serbia as the jewel in the crown.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear from the highest level that the real reason for the bombing was that Serbia was a lone holdout in Europe to the political and economic programs of the Clinton administration and its allies, though it will be a long time before such annoyances are allowed to enter the canon.

There are of course other differences between Kosovo and the regions of Georgia that call for independence or union with Russia. Thus Russia is not known to have a huge military base there named after a hero of the invasion of Afghanistan, comparable to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, named after a Vietnam war hero and presumably part of the vast US basing system aimed at the Middle East energy-producing regions. And there are many other differences.

There is much talk about a “new cold war” instigated by brutal Russian behavior in Georgia. One cannot fail to be alarmed by signs of confrontation, among them new US naval contingents in the Black Sea – the counterpart would hardly be tolerated in the Caribbean. Efforts to expand NATO to Ukraine, now contemplated, could become extremely hazardous.

Nonetheless, a new cold war seems unlikely. To evaluate the prospect, we should begin with clarity about the old cold war. Fevered rhetoric aside, in practice the cold war was a tacit compact in which each of the contestants was largely free to resort to violence and subversion to control its own domains: for Russia, its Eastern neighbors; for the global superpower, most of the world. Human society need not endure – and might not survive – a resurrection of anything like that.

A sensible alternative is the Gorbachev vision rejected by Clinton and undermined by Bush. Sane advice along these lines has recently been given by former Israeli Foreign Minister and historian Shlomo ben-Ami, writing in the Beirut Daily Star: “Russia must seek genuine strategic partnership with the US, and the latter must understand that, when excluded and despised, Russia can be a major global spoiler. Ignored and humiliated by the US since the Cold War ended, Russia needs integration into a new global order that respects its interests as a resurgent power, not an anti-Western strategy of confrontation.”

When News is Noise: the Media and South Ossetia

eddie — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:12:04 +0000

The Strain Behind The Smile

A Los Angeles Times editorial observed last month that China had persuaded world leaders to attend the Olympic Games "despite their misgivings about Beijing’s horrific human rights record both domestically and abroad". The horror, the editors noted, could not be entirely suppressed:

"What planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable." (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-olympics26-2008aug26,0,5033807.story)

Needless to say, no mainstream British or American journalist referred to the host nation’s "horrific human rights record" at the time of the US Games in Atlanta in 1996, or of the Los Angeles Games in 1984. And of course no media outlet has discussed "misgivings" about the awarding of the 2012 Games to Britain. But why on earth would they? Historian Mark Curtis explains:

"Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad." (Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.3)

A Guardian leader in July described how "western leaders rightly remain uneasy about giving their imprimatur to a [Chinese] regime which jails dissidents, persecutes religious groups, backs Burma and bankrolls Darfur." (Leader, ‘Beijing Olympics: Faster, higher – but freer?,’ The Guardian, July 12, 2008)

On the other hand, the Guardian leader writers might have felt uneasy about giving their imprimatur to "western leaders" who are the destroyers of Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul, and who have promoted chaos and terror in Afghanistan, Haiti, Serbia and Somalia, among many other places.

An Independent leader naturally shared the Guardian’s view:

"The outside world will have a crucial role to play in the coming years. Engagement will produce much better results than isolation. But at the same time, the developed world must guard against soft-pedalling sensitive issues such as the treatment of Tibet, or Beijing’s sponsorship of vile regimes in Africa." (Leader, ‘China must not let its brief democratic light go out,’ The Independent, August 2, 2008)

It is taken for granted that "the developed world" is the great hope for human rights. Again, comparable Independent editorials did not appear ahead of the Atlanta and Los Angeles Games condemning Washington’s "sponsorship of vile regimes".

Everything in the media starts from the assumption that ‘We mean well,’ and from the unspoken, indeed unthought, assumption that this claim need never be questioned. This isn’t just a matter of choice – career success depends on it. Senior journalists like the BBC’s Huw Edwards have to be willing to make the Soviet-style claim that British troops are in Afghanistan "to try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme". (Edwards, BBC 1, News at Ten, July 28, 2008)

Respecting Sovereignty

One tragicomic consequence of this self-imposed simple-mindedness is the inability of the mainstream media to make sense of last month’s war in Georgia. Journalists kept a straight face as they communicated George Bush’s demand that "Russia’s government must respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty." (http://afp.google.com/article/ ALeqM5i2LdnLHTyJgB2Ng8VSQyMQ3eMVrw) Few felt inclined to mention the small matter of Bush’s own invasion of sovereign Iraq, or the US-driven separation of Kosovo from sovereign Serbia.

Gordon Brown, proud ‘liberator’ of Iraq, or what remains of it, somehow avoided choking on his own hypocrisy as he insisted: "when Russia has a grievance over an issue such as South Ossetia, it should act multilaterally by consent rather than unilaterally by force."
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/31/russia.georgia)

Occasional mentions have been made of the fact that the largest pipeline between the Black Sea and the Caspian oil fields and Europe is the 1.2 million barrels a day BP Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) line that passes through Georgia and parts of Abkhazia, and which happens to be the only pipeline not under Russian control. The Christian Science Monitor recently described the politics of the pipeline:

"The $4 billion BTC pipeline, managed by and 30 percent owned by British Petroleum, was routed through Georgia to avoid sending Caspian oil through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Russia. A 10-mile pipeline could have connected Caspian oil to the well-developed Iranian pipeline system." (http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0816/p14s01-cogn.html)

In 2000, Bill Clinton described the pipeline as "the most important achievement at the end of the twentieth century." (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/geor-m02.shtml)

Securing this "achievement" has involved intense US efforts to manipulate Georgian political and military elites. The US and France are the main suppliers of Georgia’s military, but the prime US ally, Israel, has also supplied some $200 million worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted drones, rockets, night-vision equipment, electronic systems, and training by former senior Israeli officers.

To be sure, media hints that oil might help explain American and Israeli involvement have far exceeded mentions of the even more embarrassing reasons behind the British and American attack on Iraq in 2003, when the subject of oil was completely off the news agenda. Patrick Collinson wrote in the Guardian of the Georgian crisis:

"It’s a superpower confrontation in a region criss-crossed with oil pipelines vital to the west." (Collinson, ‘Money: Sell oil, buy banks?: Crude prices are falling and commodities are plummeting,’ The Guardian, August 16, 2008)

An article in the Observer last month was titled: "Europe’s energy source lies in the shadow of Russia’s anger: Behind the tanks in Ossetia are key oil and gas pipelines." (Alex Brett, The Observer, August 17, 2008)

In the Times, Richard Beeston wrote a piece headed: "Oil supplies and Kremlin’s relations with the West at stake." (Beeston, The Times, August 9, 2008)

The media have presented the West as innocently seeking to protect its energy supplies from an erratic Russian predator – we just want to keep our economies running. Perhaps the insatiably greedy Western interests that have wrecked havoc across the world in the post-1945 period are busy elsewhere.

In the Guardian, Jeremy Leggett wrote:

"The Kremlin has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. Dmitry Medvedev, lest we forget, used to run Gazprom. The Georgia crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits." (Leggett ‘Beware the bear trap: Britain, like most of Europe, is at risk of being the target of Russia’s energy export weaponry,’ The Guardian, August 30, 2008)

Recall, by contrast, the almost complete media taboo on identifying oil as a factor in the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We can imagine a companion piece by Leggett from, say, 2002:

"The White House has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. George W. Bush, lest we forget, was the founder of Arbusto Oil, and chairman and CEO of energy company Spectrum 7. The Iraq crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits."

In the real world, Johann Hari wrote of Iraq in the Independent in 2003:

"Blair went into this with the best of intentions. It is just silly to claim that Blair cooked up all these arguments to justify a grab for oil, or a straight-forward imperialist project." (Hari, ‘What Monica Lewinsky Was For Clinton The Hutton Inquiry Is For Tony Blair,’ The Independent, August 27, 2003)

A year earlier, David Aaronovitch manufactured the required sneer:

"Over in the New Statesman, John Pilger cranks out, as though Xeroxing on an old machine, piece after repetitive piece telling us that it’s all about oil and money and greed and imperialism." (Aaronovitch, ‘You couldn’t be sure what anyone would end up saying,’ The Independent, September 10, 2002)

“The UK, meanwhile” Leggett added sagely in his actual article, “has no energy strategy”. Certainly not in Iraq, where, in late June, Iraqi oil minister Mohamad Sharastani announced that contracts had been drawn up between the Maliki government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq. Edward Herman takes up the wretched tale:

"No competitive bidding was allowed, and the terms announced were very poor by existing international contract standards. The contracts were written with the help of ‘a group of American advisers led by a small State department team.’ This was all in conformity with the Declaration of Principles of November 26, 2007, whereby the ‘sovereign country’ of Iraq would use ‘especially American investments’ in its attempt to recover from the effects of the American aggression. The contracts have not yet been signed, and the internal protests are loud, but clearly the fig leaf of WMD and democracy has been stripped away as an ‘enduring’ occupation and a systematic looting of Iraq’s oil are arranged under a non-democratic tool of the occupation." (Herman, ‘Further Nuggets From the Nuthouse: The Law of Conservation of the Level of Violence,’ Z Magazine, September 2008)

The BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, Paul Reynolds, found no difficulty this week in recognising the realpolitik in Russian policy:

"In some ways, we are going back to the century before last, with a nationalistic Russia very much looking out for its own interests, but open to co-operation with the outside world on issues where it is willing to be flexible." (Reynolds, ‘New Russian world order: the five principles,’ September 1, 2008; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7591610.stm)

By contrast, Reynolds wrote in 2006:

"The third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq prompts some melancholy thoughts about how it was supposed to be – and how it has turned out.

"By now, according to the plan, Iraq should have emerged into a peaceful, stable representative democracy, an example to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East." (Reynolds, ‘Iraq three years on: A bleak tale,’ March 17, 2006; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/4812460.stm)

Russia’s plan is to look out for ‘number one’; the US-UK plan was to spread peace, love and understanding to Iraq and the region. Not a trace of recognition was allowed that the Iraq invasion was fundamentally about American profit and power, and certainly not the welfare of the Iraqi people, about whom, traditionally, US policymakers have not given a damn.

Mostly the level of analysis of last month’s conflict has been pitifully thin, as in this comment from Bronwen Maddox in the Times:

"Why now? The main reason is Georgia’s desire to throw in its lot with Nato, the US’s enthusiastic support for that, and Russia’s passionate opposition." (Maddox, ‘Simmering dispute could turn Russia against the West,’ The Times, August 6, 2008)

It simply isn’t done for corporate journalism to expose the true goals of Western corporate titans and their militant state allies. The preferred realm of discourse is restricted to nonsense about "security", "democracy" and other "humanitarian" goals.

Favouring Georgia

Britain isn’t afflicted with a state-controlled media system, although one would hardly know it from press performance. Typically, a country identified as ‘nice’ by the British government is also ‘nice’ for our ‘free press’. The same is true of governments labelled ‘nasty’. The media have therefore presented the Georgia/South Ossetia conflict as the result of irrational Russian bullying. Max Hastings emphasised in the Guardian that, "The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/18/russia.georgia)

In a rare example of independent thought in the Guardian, Peter Wilby noted the consistent bias:

"Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went ‘rampaging’ in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely ‘moved’. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was ‘reprehensible’, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was ‘offending every canon of international behaviour’." (Wilby, ‘Georgia has won the PR war,’ The Guardian, August 18, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/18/ pressandpublishing.georgia)

Wilby added:

"Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from."

Indeed, an August 19 ITV News report explained the tragic results of the fighting for the people of Georgia. But as in so much reporting, no mention was made of the initial Georgian attack or the consequences for the people of South Ossetia. In fact Georgian forces had bombed the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, for 72 hours. An August 20 article in the Times reported how a "makeshift operating table lay under a weak lightbulb in the corridor of a dank basement that smelt strongly of excrement." Dina Zhakarova, a doctor in South Ossetia, commented:

"This is where we had to try to save people’s lives. The whole place was a sea of blood while the Georgians were bombing our hospital." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/world/europe/article4568945.ece)

Dr Zhakarova described how staff had treated more than 250 people underground after the Georgian Army’s assault, adding:

"All the staff gave blood for the patients because there were so many wounded. The Georgians knew very well that this was a hospital, so how could they say that we are their fellow citizens when they were firing rockets at us? It’s nonsense."

Such commentary has been vanishingly rare.

The bias is clear, but the deeper point is far more interesting – the entrenched propaganda function of the mainstream media renders it incapable of making sense of events in Georgia and South Ossetia. References to Russian self-interest are allowed, and to Western concerns about energy security. But on the real reasons why people were killing and dying, on how Western state violence consistently supports Western corporate greed, journalists have had next to nothing to say. In a world where rational understanding conflicts with the ‘ideals’ of propaganda, "news" is often little more than noise.

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Who is on the Side of the Angels?

Alex Doherty — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:31:12 +0000

Ever since Georgia invaded its break-away province of South Ossetia earlier this month, there has been a concerted attempt by both Georgia and its allies to portray its subsequent fight with Russia as a conflict between “David and Goliath”. Georgia is the small David fighting the Goliath of the ruthless Russian army.

Although it seems it retaliated to Russian provocation, it was Georgian forces that first moved into South Ossetia, sparking the wider conflict. However the predominant way the story has been reported in the west is that it is Russia that is the major aggressor. It is true that Russia has retaliated against the Georgian incursion into Ossetia with brutal, disproportionate force. However, the way that Georgia has tried to manipulate the crisis is in itself quite remarkable too.

In the great tradition of spinning the truth in military campaigns, Georgia may have been comprehensively defeated militarily, but it is seen as having won the propaganda war. Little, brave Georgia has taken on the nasty Russian Republic.

When the journalist Peter Whilby examined press releases issued by Georgia’s PR consultants, he noted that they used deliberate “terms that trigger western media interest” in describing the Russian actions, such as “civilian victims”, “nuclear”, “humanitarian”, “occupation” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The Georgians had also cleverly targeted bankers and analysts on Wall Street in New York that had successfully filtered their message onto prime time American TV. The effect of this, claims Mark Ames, the editor of Moscow’s alternative paper The eXile, “was brilliant”. He says “now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia.”

The propaganda battle between Russia and Georgia has even made the front-page of the magazine PR Week in the UK. In the article Georgia’s hired PR company, Aspect Consulting attacked Russian “propaganda.” Aspect Consulting’s founding partner James Hunt told PR Week how he could not understand how the PR companies working for Russia could be “comfortable about that.” He said bluntly: “I’m on the side of the angels”.

For someone who likes to portray himself on the side of good over evil, Hunt has had a controversial career. He has defended some of the biggest companies during three of the biggest environmental and health scandals of recent times in the UK. He worked for Shell on the Brent Spar debacle in the mid-nineties, when Shell attempted to recklessly dump its redundant oil platform in the Atlantic. A hugely successful public campaign by the environmental organization Greenpeace forced the oil giant to dispose of the Brent Spar on land. It also forced Shell into a comprehensive review of its environmental policies and practices.

Hunt also worked for the global fast-food giant McDonalds over what was known as “mad cow disease” in the mid-nineties as well as working with biotechnology seed companies over their promotion of genetically-modified crops, despite known health and ecological risks that those crops entail. Aspect’s current clients still include biotechnology companies such as Novartis and Exxon Mobil, the global oil company that has been at the forefront of action to deny climate change. Many would see his career as dancing with the devil, not flying with the angels.

Aspect started working with Georgia last year to assist the country become part of both the EU and Nato. The agency was reportedly paid some $750,000 to promote the Georgian cause. The agency has been trying to spin the truth over what happened, arguing that it was not Georgia that started the war, and that the war was “about punishing Georgia for wanting to pursue an Euro-Atlantic future”.

Whilst there must be elements of this, the first major act of aggression was on Georgia’s behalf against the people of South Ossetia, although there are reports that Russia was trying to provoke a Georgian attack. Moreover in that conflict, Georgia – a population of 4.4 million, with a military equipped by the Americans and Israelis – was far superior to the South Ossetians, who have a population of around 60,000. Initial reports coming out of South Ossetia talk of a ferocious assault by the Georgians in the capital city, Tskhinvali. There were reports of some 2,000 Ossetians killed, including woman and children sheltering in bomb shelters.

There is also evidence that the Georgians would not have attacked South Ossetia without American military and logistical support. There are certainly close connections between the Georgians and US neo-conservatives. One of Georgia’s top lobbyists in the last few years has been Randy Scheunemann, who recently became the Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.

Scheunemann was one of the key neo-conservative pushing for the Iraq war when he was a project director at the Project for a New American Century. Scheunemann also headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which also called for a US invasion of Iraq.

Scheunemann has a history of working with McCain on the Georgian issue. In 2005, when he was a registered lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a resolution in the US Congress that called got Georgia’s membership in NATO. The following year, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to Georgia. During the trip, McCain denounced the South Ossetian separatists, and speaking at the military base at Senaki, he declared that Georgia was America’s “best friend.” McCain also added that Russian peace-keepers in the region should be thrown out.

By April this year, Scheunemann had formally ceased his own lobbying work for Georgia. However the same day that McCain phoned the president of Georgia offering support for the country, a lobbying firm, called Orion Strategies that is partly owned by Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.

A Month later, Scheunemann was forced to distance himself from the firm, but despite this the Washington Post notes “For months while McCain’s presidential campaign was gearing up, Scheunemann held dual roles, advising the candidate on foreign policy while working as Georgia’s lobbyist. Between January 1, 2007, and May 15, 2008, the campaign paid Scheunemann nearly $70,000 to provide foreign policy advice. During the same period, the government of Georgia paid his firm $290,000 in lobbying fees.”

Having political advisors who are also paid lobbyists for a foreign country obviously raises serious conflicts of interest that the McCain team has hardly dealt with by forcing Scheunemann to break his formal ties with the Georgians.

We should not forget how strategic Georgia is to the West because of oil. Although Georgia has no significant oil reserves of its own, it is a key transit point for oil from the Caspian and central Asia destined for the thirsty markets of Europe and the US. The 1,770km Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline pumps up to 1 million barrels of oil per day from Baku in Azerbaijan to Turkey. The pipeline route was specifically designed to avoid Russia, running in part through Georgia instead.

Russia does not escape blame in the conflict either. Last week, the Independent newspaper quoted a senior Russian military analyst saying that Russia tried to provoke a conflict to “prevent Georgia from joining Nato.” Russia has also been using PR companies to spin its message. The country uses two agencies that form part of the global giant Omnicom company. GPlus in Brussels and Ketchum in Washington.

GPlus and Ketchum were first hired by the Kremlin to cover Russia’s presidency of the G8. Gplus has received significant criticism for handling the Russian account including during the current conflict. GPlus argues that all it does for the Russians is “give them logistical support to assist spokespeople with handling the European media.” But their Georgian PR opponents have said that the PR companies acting for the Russians have been “misleading foreign journalists” and pumping out Russian Government propaganda.

However what we do know is that both sides are using propaganda and both sides have used indiscriminate force against civilians, which in itself is a war crime. The respected organization Human Rights Watch reported last week that there was “mounting evidence” that both the Russian and Georgian military had “used armed force unlawfully during the South Ossetian conflict.” According to Human Rights Watch, both sides had used “indiscriminate force against civilians.”

What we know is that in war, the situation is hardly ever black and white. The truth gets trampled on both sides, as they both issue propaganda to suit their own ends. It will be the innocent civilians who suffer, who will be bombed, killed, injured, terrorized, made homeless and starving. It will be the innocent who look for their loved ones in the burnt out buildings, over-stretched hospitals and over-flowing morgues. As the innocent die on both sides, no one can claim to be on the side of the angels.

Because there are no angels in war.

NATO Briefing

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:13:02 +0000

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in 1949, as a defensive organisation, in the early years of the Cold War. Its initial members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. The Warsaw Pact was founded in response, by the then Soviet Union and its allies, in 1955. In the 1950s, Greece, Turkey and West Germany joined, followed by Spain in 1982.

At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, but NATO was not. With the disappearance of one superpower, the other did not just fade away and allow a harmonious world to emerge – as we were promised at the time. The US moved to fill the positions vacated by its previous rival. Nowhere is that more clearly demonstrated than with the expansion of NATO.

As the countries of eastern Europe embraced free market economics and multiparty democracy, the US moved rapidly to integrate them into the US sphere of influence via NATO. This was an effective strategy – remember the ‘new Europe’ issue at the time of the war on Iraq – with Poland vigorously backing the US, against the ‘old Europe’ of Germany and France. The first steps towards full-membership were taken via the Partnerships for Peace programme from 1994.

In March 1999, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were all admitted to full membership. Ten days later they found themselves at war with their neighbour Yugoslavia, as part of NATO’s illegal bombing campaign. But the change at that time was not limited to NATO expansion. At NATO’s fiftieth anniversary conference in Washington in April 1999, a new ‘Strategic Concept’, was adopted. This moved beyond NATO’s previous defensive role to include ‘out of area’ – in other words offensive – operations. The geographical area for action was now defined as the entire Eurasian landmass.

In March 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to NATO – not only former Warsaw Pact members, but also former Soviet republics. This has contributed to international tension as Russia sees itself being surrounded by US and NATO bases, including in the Balkans, the Middle East and central Asia.

Over the last few years, the US drive for global domination has become increasingly active in military terms. NATO has become a vehicle for this process, in particular with the war on Afghanistan. This has been a NATO-led war since 2003, when NATO assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), established in 2002. By May 2008, there were around 47,000 troops from 40 countries in Afghanistan under the auspices of ISAF, with NATO members providing the core of the force.

Recently, the US has turned its sights on the strategic area of the Black Sea and south-western Asia. This region is very significant in terms of energy production and transportation. The US backed the change of government in Georgia in 2003, which has led to an increasing pro-western orientation. In 2005, Georgia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace scheme, and Georgia signed an agreement supporting and aiding transit of NATO forces and NATO personnel.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, Albania and Croatia were invited to join. President Bush called for Georgia to be allowed to join the membership Action Plan, which is the next stage towards full membership. This was rejected due to opposition from several countries, led by Germany and France. But Georgia was assured in a special communique that it would eventually join NATO and a review of the deision has been pledged for December 2008.

NATO is also a nuclear-armed alliance, and US nuclear weapons are stationed in five countries across Europe. There is strong campaigning opposition to the nuclear weapons in those countries. NATO also has a nuclear ‘first use’ policy. This is exceptionally dangerous, particularly at a time of global instability where we are entering a new Cold War.

Further expansion of NATO, to include former Soviet republics like Georgia and the Ukraine, must not take place. Such a step, taken together with the development of the US Missile Defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, would be highly provocative and destabilsing. We do not want a new world order based on NATO aggression, pursuing the US military agenda.

UK backs US stance on Russia

Alex Doherty — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:03:57 +0000

In an article in the Times on the day that NATO foreign ministers met in an emergency meeting to discuss their response to the crisis surrounding South Ossetia, Miliband demanded that international monitors be sent to Georgia to oversee the ceasefire and to defend “Georgian sovereignty.”

“The invasion of Georgia was entirely unjustified,” Miliband wrote, “and we will strengthen support for its wish to join Nato.”

“You don’t need to be a student of the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to find the sight of Russian tanks rolling into a neighbouring country chilling,” Miliband continued, deliberately evoking the language of the Cold War.

“The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others.”

Miliband complained of “overwhelming Russian aggression.” Russia, he said, had “provided no evidence of war crimes” and had “violated successive UN Security Council resolutions which they themselves agreed.”

Russia, Miliband went on, had “blatantly violated the sovereignty of a neighbouring (and democratic) country.”

“The British position,” Miliband declared, “is that aggression cannot and will not redraw the map of Russia’s former ‘near abroad’ (or anywhere else).”

NATO foreign ministers must reassert their commitment to Georgia’s territorial integrity, Miliband insisted, and “confirm the commitment made at the Nato summit in April to membership for Ukraine and Georgia and to follow it up with serious co-operation—militarily and politically—as part of a structured route map to eventual membership.”

Miliband struck a high moral tone. But the British government is in no position to criticise others for “overwhelming aggression” and violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states.

The Labour government supported the US-led invasion of Iraq without any UN mandate under the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and assisted in enforcing “regime change” in that country through military aggression.

Only 17 months earlier, it had participated in the invasion of Afghanistan on the spurious grounds that the country was responsible for the 9/11 terror attack. Although the assault on Afghanistan had the backing of other NATO countries, it was no more legitimate for that. NATO forces have repeatedly targeted civilians. The government of Hamid Karzai is a Western puppet regime with little local support even in the capital.

On the same day that Miliband’s article appeared in the Times, it was announced that British Special Forces would take part in a “decapitation” strategy in Afghanistan. Its aim will be to assassinate leading opponents of the Western-backed regime who are thought to be in the tribal territories of Pakistan.

The Independent quoted what they called “senior defence sources” who said that their intelligence pointed to an “implosion of security” in Pakistan, following the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf. It cannot be doubted that the plan is to extend the NATO campaign into Pakistan.

A history of aggression and provocation

In 1999, British forces participated in the bombing of Serbia, which targeted civilians and neutral embassies. Earlier this year, Britain recognised the unilateral breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia.

The UK government had no concern then for the territorial integrity of Serbia. Rather, its support for Kosovo’s independence was justified on exactly the same grounds as those now being claimed by anti-Georgian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. That step must in itself have contributed to the Russian decision to act as it did in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Britain, in alliance with the US, has adopted an increasingly aggressive attitude in regions that border on Russia and were part of the former USSR.

In April, Britain backed the US call for Georgia to become a NATO member. France and Germany were reluctant to initiate the process that would lead to membership, recognising that the move could only antagonise Moscow. Britain has also backed the US plan to base a ground-based missile interceptor system in Poland and an x-band radar site in the Czech Republic.

Miliband, who is to visit Georgia on Wednesday, called for both economic and political support for Georgia and Ukraine. He said that Britain would play its full part in sending observers to monitor the ceasefire.

He rejected the idea of expelling Russia from the G8, floated in Washington. But he insisted that the other powers must be able to act as the G7 whenever they wished. While the practical implications of being excluded from the G8 may be small, it is a significant diplomatic gesture.

Other European powers have urged a more cautious approach. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walther Steinmeier warned against a “knee-jerk reaction” to the Georgia crisis. He called for the lines of communication to be kept open between the West and Russia.

A reckless bellicosity

The decision to send Miliband to Georgia followed criticism in the British press that the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown had not responded to the Georgian conflict adequately. A front-page headline in the Sun demanded, “Where’s Gord?” It was followed days later by an article written by the Sun’s political editor Trevor Kavanagh headlined “Hello? Gordon? We still can’t hear you.” This response indicates a deep dissatisfaction with Brown’s performance in the key sections of the international financial elite for whom Murdoch’s media empire speaks.

Kavanagh pointed to the Russian warning that Poland’s decision to host the US missile defence system made it a military target.

“This escalation in tension only makes the question more urgent,” Kavanagh wrote: “Where on earth are Gordon Brown and his Foreign Secretary David Miliband?”

Other international leaders were taking a prominent role, but Brown had let Conservative opposition leader David Cameron make the running on Georgia, Kavanagh said. Brown had only issued statements after Cameron appeared on the media. Tony Blair, Kavanagh pointed out, would not have behaved in this way.

Kavanagh’s article appeared on the day that Cameron flew to Tbilisi to meet with President Saakashvili. He had been invited to the capital after he compared the response of the West to the Georgian crisis with the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1939.

Cameron called for visa restrictions on Russians, “Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.”

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office pointed out that there are already visa restrictions on Russians. But the damage inflicted on the Labour government was real.

Cameron’s intervention followed the outbreak of what was described in the media as warfare in the Labour Party as Miliband challenged Brown’s leadership.

Miliband criticised the performance of the government in a Guardian article at the end of July. Labour could still win the next election, Miliband insisted, even following two by-election defeats. But he did not mention Brown’s name, which was taken as a sign that he was putting himself forward as a potential leader.

Guardian columnists Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashley were quick to offer their support to Miliband. Toynbee was once a firm supporter of Brown in his contest with Blair. But she could barely contain her enthusiasm.

“Suddenly everything changed,” she wrote following Miliband’s article. “The burst of optimism was so startling it dazzled those too long trapped deep in a dungeon. In that one moment it was all over for the old leader who had plunged them into these depths. Suddenly here was the chance of escape everyone was waiting for.”

Ashley was positively adulatory. “A man who has often seemed too fastidious for frontline politics,” Ashley wrote of Miliband, “suddenly looks like a killer.”

Brown’s difficulties did not go unnoticed in Washington. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Kyle Wingfield, editorial writer for the paper’s European edition.

“When Gordon Brown returns home from his summer vacation,” it began, “he may find that the locks at 10 Downing Street have been changed.”

This internecine conflict left the Brown government slow to respond to the Georgian crisis. Cameron was able to seize a certain advantage. He is presenting himself as the best candidate to continue the close alliance in foreign policy between London and Washington.

Brown has played his part in creating the circumstances that created the international crisis over Georgia. As chancellor of exchequer, he provided the finances that made it possible for Britain to fight a war on two fronts and act as Washington’s closest ally. But now with the economy on the brink of recession and international tensions sharpening, the question of whether Brown is capable of continuing in a leading role inevitably emerges.

Cameron has raised one of the touchstone issues of British politics. His reference to appeasement was to the policies of the Chamberlain administration at the beginning of the Second World War. He made these remarks in a situation that has been recognised as bearing dangerous similarities to the international crises that preceded previous world wars. Implicitly, Cameron is presenting himself as the better potential war leader.

Brown is not about to concede the point. His response has been to despatch his foreign secretary to the flashpoint. Eager to show his mettle, Miliband took a belligerent line at the NATO summit. The contest among British politicians to demonstrate that none of them are Chamberlains may itself become a factor in escalating international tensions as they compete in bellicosity ever more recklessly.