Who Started Cold War II?


by Patrick J. Buchanan
August 19, 2008

http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=13323

The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having
spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.

Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we
would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where
Moscow's superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean
during the Cuban missile crisis.

If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving
erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States
into war.

From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said,
U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when
the Bear was at its most beastly.

Truman refused to use force to break Stalin's Berlin blockade. Ike refused
to intervene when the Butcher of Budapest drowned the Hungarian Revolution
in blood. LBJ sat impotent as Leonid Brezhnev's tanks crushed the Prague
Spring. Jimmy Carter's response to Brezhnev's invasion of Afghanistan was
to boycott the Moscow Olympics. When Brezhnev ordered his Warsaw satraps to
crush Solidarity and shot down a South Korean airliner killing scores of
U.S. citizens, including a congressman, Reagan did – nothing.

These presidents were not cowards. They simply would not go to war when no
vital U.S. interest was at risk to justify a war. Yet, had George W. Bush
prevailed and were Georgia in NATO, U.S. Marines could be fighting Russian
troops over whose flag should fly over a province of 70,000 South Ossetians
who prefer Russians to Georgians.

The arrogant folly of the architects of U.S. post-Cold War policy is today
on display. By bringing three ex-Soviet republics into NATO, we have moved
the U.S. red line for war from the Elbe almost to within artillery range of
the old Leningrad.

Should America admit Ukraine into NATO, Yalta, vacation resort of the czars,
will be a NATO port and Sevastopol, traditional home of the Russian Black
Sea Fleet, will become a naval base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. This is
altogether a bridge too far.

And can we not understand how a Russian patriot like Vladimir Putin would be
incensed by this U.S. encirclement after Russia shed its empire and sought
our friendship? How would Andy Jackson have reacted to such crowding by the
British Empire?

As of 1991, the oil of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan belonged to
Moscow. Can we not understand why Putin would smolder as avaricious Yankees
built pipelines to siphon the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin through
breakaway Georgia to the West?

For a dozen years, Putin & Co. watched as U.S. agents helped to dump over
regimes in Ukraine and Georgia that were friendly to Moscow.

If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?

The swift and decisive action of Putin's army in running the Georgian forces
out of South Ossetia in 24 hours after Saakashvili began his barrage and
invasion suggests Putin knew exactly what Saakashvili was up to and dropped
the hammer on him.

What did we know? Did we know Georgia was about to walk into Putin's trap?
Did we not see the Russians lying in wait north of the border? Did we give
Saakashvili a green light?

Joe Biden ought to be conducting public hearings on who caused this U.S.
humiliation.

The war in Georgia has exposed the dangerous overextension of U.S. power.
There is no way America can fight a war with Russia in the Caucasus with
our army tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor should we. Hence, it is
demented to be offering, as John McCain and Barack Obama are, NATO
membership to Tbilisi.

The United States must decide whether it wants a partner in a flawed Russia
or a second Cold War. For if we want another Cold War, we are, by cutting
Russia out of the oil of the Caspian and pushing NATO into her face, going
about it exactly the right way.

Vladimir Putin is no Stalin. He is a nationalist determined, as ruler of a
proud and powerful country, to assert his nation's primacy in its own
sphere, just as U.S. presidents from James Monroe to Bush have done on our
side of the Atlantic.

A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States.
It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to
plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother
Russia.

Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this
madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces
decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?

As for Saakashvili, he's probably toast in Tbilisi after this stunt. Let the
neocons find him an endowed chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

 
-- 
Facts are sacred ... but comment is free

"Robin T Cox"  wrote ...

> http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=13323
>
> The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having
> spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
>
> Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia,
we
> would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus

What's frightening is that the US is still angling for precisely that,
pushing hard to bring Georgia, the Ukraine and anyone else the US can use as
pawns into NATO with the intent of having this war should Russia, as the US
sees it, step out of line again.

Presumably their argument is doing this will somehow tie the hands of Russia
and prevent such a thing ever happening again.

The reality is that such things, in the same circumstances, will happen
again, but next time we will be duty bound to go to war with Russia.

It seems that some in America are relishing such a prospect. Guess the
current blood-baths they are involved in aren't bloody enough, not killing
enough people in enough countries.

On Aug 19, 9:30 am, "The Happy Hippy"
 wrote:
> "Robin T Cox"  wrote ...
>
>
>
> >http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=13323
>
> > The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having
> > spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO.
>
> > Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia> we
> > would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus
>
> What's frightening is that the US is still angling for precisely that,
> pushing hard to bring Georgia, the Ukraine and anyone else the US can use as
> pawns into NATO with the intent of having this war should Russia, as the US
> sees it, step out of line again.
>
> Presumably their argument is doing this will somehow tie the hands of Russia
> and prevent such a thing ever happening again.
>
> The reality is that such things, in the same circumstances, will happen
> again, but next time we will be duty bound to go to war with Russia.
>
> It seems that some in America are relishing such a prospect. Guess the
> current blood-baths they are involved in aren't bloody enough, not killing
> enough people in enough countries.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/17/do1706.xml

Headline:

If you miss the Cold War, you weren't there
By Dominic Sandbrook
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 17/08/2008

 Have your say      Read comments

John le Carré has a new book out in a month's time, and you have to
admire the old fox's timing.

It is almost 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the conflict that
inspired The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy, and yet in the last week half-forgotten memories of Brezhnev,
Andropov and Mutually Assured Destruction have been flooding back with
a vengeance.

Russian tanks rumbling through the mountains of Georgia, Chinese
students cheering in eerie unison - did the Cold War really end, or
did we just imagine it?


It seems callous to say it after a week that has seen a nasty little
war rip the Caucasus apart, but people have been pining for the Cold
War for a while.

"God, I miss the Cold War," said Judi Dench's imperious M in the last
Bond film. Oddly, that sentiment puts her in exactly the same boat as
John Updike's fictional American everyman Rabbit Angstrom, who on his
last appearance remarked that "it gave you a reason to get up in the
morning."

And talking of fictional American everymen, even George W Bush misses
the Cold War. "When I was coming up, with what was a dangerous world,
we knew exactly who they were," he opined wistfully a few years ago.
"It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them were."

Iain Martin: The name's Cameron... David Cameron
Since the Cold War was above all a citizen's conflict, we all have a
war story to tell.

I was in short trousers at the time, but I can vividly remember the
moment I first realised that there was a war on. I was eight years
old, and my teacher - beard, corduroy jacket, all the trimmings -
decided that it would do us all good to hear about the hundreds of
missiles that those reprehensible warmongers Reagan and Thatcher had
aimed at the peace-loving people of the Soviet Union.

I had never heard anything so exciting in my life. Not only were we on
the brink of disaster - but we were the bad guys!

It was also a conflict that left a gigantic cultural footprint, from
whole libraries' worth of spy literature to chilling post-apocalyptic
fantasies such as the BBC's Threads and The War Game, both hugely
controversial, and both splendid examples of British television.

There was something about living on a nuclear knife-edge that really
got the creative juices flowing.

Even the anti-nuclear songs of the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan whipped my schoolteacher into a lather of earnest
outrage, were a cut above anything produced today.

Where is the 99 Red Balloons of the 21st century? Where, oh where, is
the Enola Gay?

But then, for all its terrors, the post-Cold War world has never had
quite the same sense of moral engagement that animated so much
political and cultural life between the 1940s and the 1980s.

Since the Soviet Union fell apart, there has always been a sense of
something missing, of an ideological void at the centre of our self-
obsessed, debt-driven paradise.

There is a hilariously revealing moment in the diaries of the theatre
critic Kenneth Tynan when he is invited to dinner with the famously
lefty-hating Kingsley Amis. "Over liqueurs," Tynan records, "Kingsley
calmly says that I am a lover of tyranny and that I propose to turn
England into a vast prison."

Tynan feebly tries to defend himself, but his host is having none of
it: "What's more, he says, I would unhesitatingly connive at his
execution; might, indeed, be garnering evidence against him at this
moment."

That conversation took place in April 1976; it's hard to imagine it
taking place in 1996 or 2006.

And that, of course, is precisely what we miss about the Cold War. We
don't miss the prison camps, the nuclear arms race, the horrible proxy
wars in the Third World, the relentless geopolitical manoeuvres that
left thousands dead in far-away countries of which we knew nothing.

We miss the gripping le Carré stories with their existential angst; we
miss the drunken dinner-party moral one-upmanship; we miss the
excitement of living at a turning point in history, the world poised
on the edge of annihilation.

We miss all that because we were the lucky ones who never had to
sacrifice and never had to fight.

Ask the Poles or the Czechs if they miss the Cold War, and you'll get
a very different answer.

Did the Georgians enjoy the last week? Somehow, I don't think so.

chatnoir wrote:

> We miss the gripping le Carré stories with their existential angst; we
> miss the drunken dinner-party moral one-upmanship; we miss the
> excitement of living at a turning point in history, the world poised
> on the edge of annihilation.

Not to mention James Bond ...
-- 
Facts are sacred ... but comment is free