Sam CampbellThe recent conflict in Georgia has seen the usual stream of bellicose statements, moral smokescreens, and rank hypocrisy, which only our world’s great leaders seem able to spout with straight faces. But behind the propaganda is an ongoing battle between the US and Russia, with Russia now starting to actively fight back after years of insulation and consolidation.
This battle has continued for many years, from the division of the former Yugoslavia, to the 2003 War in Iraq; from the expansion of NATO, to the Caspian oil pipelines flowing through the Caucasus. While many have tried to isolate this conflict into an historic month of conflict, wars in the current world system are never so neatly defined and rage through economic, diplomatic and at times military means. A battle once hidden, now open.
The justification coming from the Kremlin is that of a war to defend the persecuted minorities of Georgia, who have looked to Moscow for their defense since the disintegration of the USSR. The minorities of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia do have a legitimate demand for protection from the Georgian state. During the early 1990s thousands of these people, as well as even larger numbers of ethnic Georgians were killed in brutal civil wars in these regions. However Moscow should never be assumed to be defending the rights of minorities on any moral grounds. In the mid to late 1990s Russia waged it’s own war against separatists in Chechnya, on Russia’s northern border with Georgia. These conflicts claimed tens of thousands of people, and where marked by particularly brutal acts of violence and mass “collateral damage” caused by Russian aerial bombing.
The official US line is that it defends the “territorial integrity” of Georgia, and thus supports Georgia’s right to suppress secessionist movements within its territory. Washington takes quite a different stance when it comes to secessionist movements in Serbia, a close Russian ally. The US openly supported the Kosovarian Declaration of Independence from Serbia, in February of this year. The similarities between South Ossetia and Kosovo are obvious, both are minorities seeking self-determination by aligning and becoming a tool of either the US or Russia as these major powers compete for strategic gains.
While the western mainstream media has been quite scathing of Russia’s moral justifications, they seem to accept the hypocrisy coming out of Washington with a respect that it does not deserve.
A more realistic account of the current conflict came from the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in his weekly column in Die Zeit, who said that the Russian-Georgian war “concerns Russian-American competition for strategic control over the oil and gas resources of this whole region—it is the new great game.” Media claims that Russia is maliciously determined to re-impose its old soviet sphere of influence, seem to ignore the fact that Georgia is becoming part of the US sphere of influence. The conflict is about two-spheres of influence colliding.
For the US, Georgia is important for two reasons. The first is the obvious value of Georgia in its strategic role as a conduit for Caspian energy resources that could avoid Russian territory. In 2005 the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline came on line, now pumping one million barrels of oil per day, from Azerbaijan, through Georgia, and on to the Turkish Medditeranian port of Ceyhan. By avoiding Russian territory, the pipeline reduces not only Russian revenue on transportation charges, but also its strategic control over Europe’s energy supply.
It is important to note that when the pipeline construction began, the then Russian President, Vladimir Putin, responded not with threats, but by advocating an upgrade to an existing trans-Russian pipeline to compete economically with the new pipeline. What this showed was not so much Russian acceptance of “fair play” in the international economic system, but a realization of its power at the time. This was a theme that dominated the early years of Putin’s reign. These were years when Russia avoided direct confrontation with the West, and instead focused on consolidating the power of the Russian state, and pulling the economic back from the economic chaos of the early post-Soviet period.
The second interest of Washington in Georgia is its geo-strategic importance. For years Washington has been advocating NATO’s enlargement to include the Ukraine and Georgia. As Cheney put it, “Georgia will be in our alliance, NATO is a defensive alliance. It is a threat to no one.” In conjunction to this the US is building a world-wide Missile Defence system, with recent agreements to host missile components of this system in Poland and radar systems in the Czech Republic. Russia is not only being surrounded by NATO, but the US is actively seeking to neutralize Russia’s nuclear arsenal. In response, Russia is now discussing plans to aim nuclear weapons at Western Europe for the first time since the end of the cold war, and the possibility of Georgia hosting elements of the defense system would only exacerbate the situation.
Russia and the US are playing a risky game, with nuclear war always a possibility when a nuclear power is backed into a corner. For the average Russian and American, who has not bought into the moralizing propaganda of their rulers, this may all seem pointless. The potential economic trickle down of controlling Caucasian resources and strategic positions is unlikely to convince them to risk sending their children off to fight, or risking nuclear war itself. It is different for the business and political elites of these countries, who do not have to send their children to fight and gain all the real wealth from these conflicts. But at heart the problem is an illogical system of international economic competition that puts profits and economic expansion, before the actual logical interests of human kind. |
