Where Dick Goes, Trouble Follows

While I'm processing videos from DNC protests on Sunday, I thought I'd point out that our dear friend Dick Cheney is heading to Georgia to cause trouble. Said he was already planning to go before the Russia-Georgia showdown. Funny how the announcement came a day after Russia said it considered NATO re-supply of Georgia to be pre-positioning for war.

Missile-Defense Arrogance as a Reflex Action

No matter how the United States played the completion of the missile-siting deal with Poland, Russia was bound to see it as directly tied to the Georgia midadventure. But the U.S. could have let the low-level signing of the deal August 14 speak for itself. Instead, Condi Rice came storming in to Warsaw with trumpets blaring, setting the propaganda level to "high" and reminding those ignorant Russkies that missile defense was for everyone's benefit.

Funny, then, how a good conservative Reagan aide like Jack Matlock could be interviewed on Public Radio International's World and call the Bush administration "amazingly provocative" in its approach to concluding the Czech and Polish deals. Funny how a good U.S. buddy like Mikhail Gorbachev could write a New York Times op-ed piece blaming the U.S. for a good portion of a re-kindled Cold War.

Condi's having to lie through her teeth to make the point in Poland that this "limited" missile-defense system (the twin to systems deployed in California and Alaska) is only good for spotting single missiles from rogue states like Iran. If only that were true. Frances FitzGerald and other analysts already have argued how the multi-tiered missile defense of the 1990s and 2000s is in many ways even more offense-oriented than Reagan's original Star Wars plan. George N. Lewis and Ted Postol, in a detailed article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, shows that the current European Midcourse X-band radar in the Czech Republic would not be useful for discriminating warheads from far locations like Iran - and forget about North Korea. However, the radar might be worthwhile if it was combined with a future Forward-Based X-band Radar currently being considered for Azerbaijan - or Georgia. Georgia, hmm, where have I heard of that potential NATO member before?

I'm with Matlock, Gorbachev, and similar radicals - if you want to see where at least half of the new Cold War posturing is coming from, look to Washington. Condi might say that even mid-level Russian diplomats these days are using a mocking, ugly tone not heard since the Brezhnev era. But when Russian critics are chided like toddlers in discussions of Star Wars weapons, and respond with disdain, the next step is vituperative and nasty rhetoric coming from the Bushies.

Imperialism and Seven-League Boots

At the end of the day, Georgia's "ownership" of South Ossetia or Russia's "dominance" of Georgia doesn't matter, except insofar as citizens of any nation respond best to home-grown jingoism that makes their dominance of others feel good. Certainly works for us, eh? But now we have open war in Georgia at the start of the Olympics in Beijing. (Notice how the Soviet Union waited until the Suez Crisis of 1956 to invade Hungary, and global student protests in 1968 to invade Czechoslovakia? The Kremlin loves diversionary tactics, whether under socialist or authoritarian management.)
Yes, Saakashvili is a jerk. So are Medvedev and Putin. All three are popular precisely because they go to war in the name of the Motherland. The numerous stories at antiwar.com can help you sort out the claims from both sides.
There are some rather stupid progressive groups in the U.S. and Europe who would like to see the U.S. as the primary hand in all this, because the Pentagon wants to expand bases in Georgia. As Bob Anderson from Stop the War Machine points out, the U.S. is becoming such a minor player, such a paper tiger, that other nations can take the role of lead imperialist without consulting us one way or another. And it is our job in the peace community to say that Russians and Georgians are equally wrong in exploiting each others' territority, and that it is time to call in the UN to resolve border disputes before this spirals further out of control.

Putin Says He's Got a Mandate; Chavez Says "Mellow Out, Dudes"

Two questionable elections Dec. 2 reached opposite conclusions. Vladimir Putin claimed to no great surprise that a rigged electoral process had given him a "mandate" to do whatever the hell he wanted. Meanwhile, after losing a narrow squeaker on changing the constitution, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela did not blame the CIA and cancel the results, but accepted them with dignity. For now at least.

Is it fair to even lump these two events together? Yes, because of the process of mobilizing the grass roots. Putin's Russia remains capitalist, but he's been convinced for some time that the Russian people have a soft spot for authoritarianism and the personality cult - witness Stalin's continued popularity. Why waste time with messy democracy when Putin gets adorned on T-shirts whenever he cracks heads? The results say as much about Russian people not being very appreciative of democracy or multiculturalism (witness the crackdown on gays and foreigners) as it does about Putin's siloviki friends from the KGB and FSB.

Chavez knows he can mobilize similar forces, since the urban poor he relies on would rather be whipped up into violence than follow the nonviolent land-seizure methods of Bolivia and other Latin American countries. (It was funny to see some left-bloggers who were so anxious to see a Chavez victory, they gave us some "Dewey Defeats Truman" headlines Sunday night.) My gripe with Hugo all along has not been his Bolivarian economic models, but his demagogic tendencies and his intention to whip up violence. Maybe his response to his electoral loss indicates he's realizing the price he pays for being a provocative loudmouth. The first test will be to see if he can restrain Chavistas seeking revenge. The second test will be whether he avoids the temptation to slowly adopt centralized socialist models through what Matyas Rakosi of Hungary used to call "salami tactics" during the Cold War. Venezuela would do a lot better following the Evo Morales model of radical alternative economics.