'Dec 9, 2008
NATO scuttles US plan to encircle Russia
NATO scuttles US plan to encircle Russia
By F William Engdahl
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ministers in Brussels have decided to ignore the wishes of the United States and delay the admission of Georgia and the Ukraine, in effect indefinitely, in what the George W Bush administration is sheepishly trying to claim is a positive "compromise".
The decision, follows the alarm which peaked among European Union member states last August over the prospect of having to go to war with Russia over an erratic leader in the Caucasus who had provoked Moscow into a reaction.
The Germans have a far too deep and painful collective memory of the last war with Russia to be willing to treat the prospect as lightly as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Washington has. The decision deepens growing fault lines across the Atlantic, and next year will be clearly more turbulent even than 2008 in terms of global geopolitics.
The Brussels decision is even more remarkable if taken as indication of Washington's diminishing power over European NATO members. The NATO Foreign Ministers meeting on December 3 issued what to the naive observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy.
They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards full membership of NATO. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies - the NATO-Georgia Commission and the NATO-Ukraine Commission - basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan.
NATO ministers also agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia "in a conditional and graduated manner".
Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact that president-elect Obama retained Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who has strongly supported bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.
The real reasons
The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia's unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili, not Moscow, who first sent Georgian troops into the breakaway province of South Ossetia, after getting a go-ahead from Washington.
On November 28, during Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony on the background to the August events, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war.
According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia's "intervention" in the region.
"We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable,"
Saakashvili said.
The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: "The issue is not about why Georgia started military action - we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory."
Saakashvili's surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia's former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who had testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of parliament.
A former confidant of Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.
He refused to name the officials who told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, as identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had "warned" Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed.
Kitsmarishvili's testimony in front of the parliamentary commission was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for "professional negligence". Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili's testimony, called the allegations an "irresponsible and shameless fabrication", adding they were "either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics".
Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president.
Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor last week. "They don't want to listen to the truth," he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.
Full spectrum dominance
As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole superpower, Pax Americana.
Russia's understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev and then US secretary of state James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any plans for sole US superpower domination.'
The decision, follows the alarm which peaked among European Union member states last August over the prospect of having to go to war with Russia over an erratic leader in the Caucasus who had provoked Moscow into a reaction.
The Germans have a far too deep and painful collective memory of the last war with Russia to be willing to treat the prospect as lightly as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Washington has. The decision deepens growing fault lines across the Atlantic, and next year will be clearly more turbulent even than 2008 in terms of global geopolitics.
The Brussels decision is even more remarkable if taken as indication of Washington's diminishing power over European NATO members. The NATO Foreign Ministers meeting on December 3 issued what to the naive observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy.
They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards full membership of NATO. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies - the NATO-Georgia Commission and the NATO-Ukraine Commission - basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan.
NATO ministers also agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia "in a conditional and graduated manner".
Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact that president-elect Obama retained Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who has strongly supported bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.
The real reasons
The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia's unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili, not Moscow, who first sent Georgian troops into the breakaway province of South Ossetia, after getting a go-ahead from Washington.
On November 28, during Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony on the background to the August events, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war.
According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia's "intervention" in the region.
"We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable,"
Saakashvili said.
The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: "The issue is not about why Georgia started military action - we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory."
Saakashvili's surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia's former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who had testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of parliament.
A former confidant of Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.
He refused to name the officials who told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, as identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had "warned" Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed.
Kitsmarishvili's testimony in front of the parliamentary commission was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for "professional negligence". Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili's testimony, called the allegations an "irresponsible and shameless fabrication", adding they were "either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics".
Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president.
Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor last week. "They don't want to listen to the truth," he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.
Full spectrum dominance
As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole superpower, Pax Americana.
Russia's understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev and then US secretary of state James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any plans for sole US superpower domination.'
1 opmerking:
Eindelijk eens wat zelfstandig nadenken in Europa. Stan, had je dit artikel al gezien in het NRC?
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