http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski208.html

Is the American Enterprise Really War in the Caucasus?

by Karen Kwiatkowski
by Karen Kwiatkowski

DIGG THIS


Years ago, I optimistically read AEI fellow Jeane Kirkpatrick’s
defense of our foreign policy hypocrisy, entitled Dictatorships and
Double Standards. Even as a Cold War conservative at the time, I
recall feeling that she protested too much. The American Enterprise
Institute’s sustained role in propagandizing American wars, including
the creative and carelessly contrived 2003 invasion of Iraq, certainly
belies the organization’s moniker.

Paying attention to the real work of the AEI is almost enough to turn
a person into an anti-American world socialist… but perhaps that’s
precisely the point, given the ideological backgrounds of so many of
the neoconservatives there.

Yet, the AEI remains, posing as an organization that advocates for
freedom of individuals rather than the state. It continues to shill
for war, global conquest, and to promote a kind of fantastic
Washington mastery-of-the-planet idea. The most recent case in point
is this week’s AEI policy panel entitled "The War in the Caucasus."

Fred Kagan spoke at length on the Russian-Georgian conflict, with many
PowerPoint slides. The pudgy Ph.D. droned on and on, apparently boring
not only myself, but many in the AEI audience, some of whom appeared
to be suppressing yawns. Of course, this lethargy may be explained by
the fact that the audience consisted mostly of well over-fifty and
similarly pudgy white men. The few young people in the audience
appeared not to be paying close attention. Fred Kagan is insufferably
boring.

Because Fred was purporting to give a military style tactics and
strategy briefing, my mind wandered back to my military days. We liked
well-organized, concise, and accurate briefings. Where speculation was
called for, such speculation was presented with full disclosure,
conservatively, and constrained always, always, by known facts.

Did I mention "concise?" What about "factual?" Good, I thought so.
Needless to say, what Fred (who, as the presentation proceeded,
increasingly reminded me of one of the pigs in Animal Farm)
communicated could have been better done by a 21-year-old airman.
Interspersed and interwoven between Kagan’s various "facts" was
Kagan’s ill-considered and pathetically transparent hopes for larger
war, and his narrowly contrived opinions about what the conflagration
in Georgia meant for the globe.

Perhaps I was simply in a bad mood because Fred had three different
pronunciations for the city of Tbilisi, each of which he insisted upon
giving equal time. Egalitarianism and self-determination is justified
for faulty pronunciations, but sadly, not for South Ossetians or
Abkhazians.

But I don’t mean to pick on Fred. Next was former Army Lt. Col. and
prolific author Ralph Peters. Peters appeared to fully share Kagan’s
ideas of the grand significance of Russia’s invasion, and he was
angered by President Bush’s sissified reaction. Airlifting Georgians
back from supporting our own invasion of Iraq, a quickly deployed U.S.
military-humanitarian mission, and declaring our undying support for
that great democrat, Saakashvili? This was not nearly enough for
Ralph, who looked like an aging hippie in a suit. I met Peters at NSA
in the mid-1990s, and remember him as young, clean cut and energetic.
This week at AEI, his familiar stomping ground, he seemed fuzzily
hysterical, and almost frail as he panted for more war.

It goes without saying that these effeminate men-children flock to
play war, even as they avoid real debate, real disagreement, and real
combat. Intimidated by a complex and uncontrollable world, they create
in their own minds an ordered controllable fantasy. Hence the tidy
attraction of socialism – but this ideological flirtation with super-
centralized control of human activity is normally overcome by
education and maturity – and for most moral people, ownership of
perfection is granted to a higher, immortal power. It is eerie to
witness the arrested intellectual and moral development on public
display at AEI. But more frightening is AEI’s institutional avoidance
of reality and justice, and its enthusiastic cultivation of what Hayek
called the pretense of knowledge.

The strangest aspect of the AEI panel was the fluidity of AEI’s
pronouncements on the wrongness of the Russian military action against
the Georgian state, its cities and population, AEI’s pointed criticism
of Russia’s economic motivations, and AEI’s repeated claims for the
rights of small states to be left alone, to rule themselves, to
evolve. With each high-minded criticism of Russia’s actions over the
past few weeks, I wondered why no one in the audience was physically
wincing at how accurately AEI’s criticism applied to our own cavalier
destruction of states, governments and cities, our own insistence on
loyal puppet governors (like Saakashvili himself, supported by
American taxpayer dollars, and Washington back-room dealings) as we
occupy Iraq, and manipulate the governments of Afghanistan and
Pakistan, and other countries around the world.

Our 20th-century American habit, continued to the present day, is to
send our military halfway around the world to dominate and destroy
small countries with fourth-rate defenses. This not only doesn’t seem
to embarrass the great minds at AEI, it is embraced by them – except
when a once and future (and now very wealthy) enemy follows suit.
Then, miraculously, the language of freedom is summoned. That
elsewhere these same intellectuals can smoothly take the side of
separatist Kurds, Shiites, Kosovars and even Chechnyans – using the
same exact language, belies the real purpose and intent of AEI: to
promote the neoconservative Washington consensus – clothed in the
language of freedom and democracy.

For a good reading of Washington’s strategic interests in Georgia (and
these do NOT include democracy, self-determination, freedom or peace)
you are better off looking at this paper from the Army War College.

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB757.pdf

For wisdom that applies today, we may actually find it in AEI. Jeane
Kirkpatrick observed in 1988 that, "Russia is playing chess, while we
are playing Monopoly. The only question is whether they will checkmate
us before we bankrupt them." Resident AEI scholar Leon Aron, on the
panel this week, wrote of Russia under Putin in 2006,

… [the Kremlin decided to]…. reanimate the role of the state, occupy
"commanding heights" in economy again, repossess the "jewels" in the
"economy's crown," and put the executive branch of the government
above all the other branches, permanently.

Kirkpatrick and Aron, as with every topsy-turvy articulation from the
AEI, have it exactly right – except for orientation. American interest
in Georgia in the past decade is the result of neoconservative fear
that Russia will bankrupt America’s heavily indebted and credit-
dependent government. And rather than contemporary Russia becoming
less free, more economically centralized and tyrannical, Aron’s
projection more accurately reflects the United States today, an ugly
America that AEI promotes and nurtures.

August 15, 2008

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF
lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian
perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show
American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and
Liberty and Power. To receive automatic announcements of new articles,
click here.

Copyright © 2008 Karen Kwiatkowski