Ignoring The Signs

By Cernig

How is it that the Bush administration could flip so quickly from "We can ignore Russian wishes" to "Russia is the new old Evil Empire"? By turning a deliberate ideological blind eye to the warning signs.

Gareth Porter lays it out.

There were plenty of signals that Russia would not acquiesce in the alignment of a militarily aggressive Georgia with a U.S.-dominated military alliance. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin made no secret of his view that this represented a move by the United States to infringe on Russia's security in the South Caucasus region. In February 2007 he asked rhetorically, "Against whom is this expansion intended?"

Contrary to the portrayal of Russian policy as aimed at absorbing South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Russia and regime change in Georgia, Moscow had signaled right up to the eve of the NATO summit its readiness to reach a compromise along the lines of Taiwan's status in U.S.-China relations: formal recognition of the sovereignty over the secessionist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in return for freedom to develop extensive economic and political relations. But it was conditioned on Georgia staying out of NATO.

That compromise was disdained by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. After a Mar. 19 speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington, Saakashvili was asked whether Russia had offered a "Taiwan model" solution in return for Georgia stay out of NATO. "We have heard many, many suggestions of this sort," he said, but he insisted, "You cannot compromise on these issues..."

Russia, meanwhile, had made it clear that it would respond to a move toward NATO membership for Georgia by moving toward official relations with the secessionist regions.

U.S. policymakers had decided long before those developments that the NATO expansion policy would include Georgia and Ukraine. They convinced themselves that they weren't threatening Russia but only contributing to a new European security order that was divorced from the old politics of spheres of interest.

But their view of NATO expansion appears to be marked by self-deception and naivet�

Now where have we seen "self-deception and naivet�uot; before? Oh yeah - in just about everything the neocons have planned. "It'll be a cakewalk", "we'll be greeted as liberators", "turning the last corner" etc etc ad nauseam. They seem constitutionally incapable of looking past their own ideology of American exceptionalism at the real world - something that suggests that they may well be projecting their own vain and misplaced wishes to be personally exceptional themselves.

Meanwhile, Russia has decided that if it has taken an inch it may as well take a mile, keeping troops dug in to Georgian soil and using article 5 of the Aug. 12 accord as a very viable excuse. That article says they're allowed to station troops in a buffer zone until the international community can provide peacekeepers. Its quite obvious they figure that the US - which is still occupying a country it invaded on a far shabbier pretext five years ago and using the same reasoning to do so - doesn't have a leg to stand on when it objects and that it can safely ignore American protests. That may not make it right, but it is "keeping it real".