Putin for US president - more than ever
By Spengler
If Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were president of the United States,
would Iran try to build a nuclear bomb? Would Pakistan provide covert aid to
al-Qaeda? Would Hugo Chavez train terrorists in Venezuela? Would leftover
nationalities with delusions of grandeur provoke the great powers? Just ask
Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, who now wishes he never tried to put
his 4 million countrymen into strategic play.
In January I urged Americans to draft the Russian leader to succeed George W
Bush (Putin for
president of the United States, January 8, 2008). Putin's swift and
decisive action in Georgia reflects precisely the sort of decisiveness that
America requires.
Thanks to Putin, the world has become a much safer place. By
intervening in Georgia, Russia has demonstrated that the great powers of the
world have nothing to fight about. Russia has wiped the floor with a putative
US ally, and apart from a bad case of cream pie on the face, America has lost
nothing. The United States and the European community will do nothing to help
Georgia, and nothing of substance to penalize the Russian Federation.
Contrary to the hyperventilation of policy analysts on American news shows, the
West has no vital interests in Georgia. It would be convenient from
Washington's vantage point for oil to flow from the Caspian Sea via Georgia to
the Black Sea, to be sure, but nothing that occurs in Georgia will have a
measurable impact on American energy security. It is humiliating for the US to
watch the Russians thrash a prospective ally, but not harmful, for Georgia
never should have been an ally in the first place.
The lack of consequences of Russia's incursion is a noteworthy fact, for never
before in the history of the world has the world's economic and military power
resided in countries whose fundamental interests do not conflict in any
important way. The US enthused over Georgia's ambitions to join the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and encouraged Saakashvili to overplay his
hand. Once it became clear that Russia would not tolerate a NATO member on its
southern border, however, Washington had nothing to say about the matter,
because no fundamental American interests were at stake.
Washington looks all the sillier for its failure to anticipate a Russian action
that Moscow signaled months in advance. After the US and its main European
allies recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia in February 2008,
Russia warned that this action set a precedent for other prospective
secessions, notably South Ossetia.
There is no longer any reason to put up with the tantrums of long-redundant
tribes. If 3.7 million ethnic Georgians have the right to break away from the
142 million population of the Russian Federation, why shouldn't the 100,000
Ossetians living in Georgia break away and form their own state as well? Most
of them have acquired Russian passports and want nothing to do with the
Georgians. The Ossetians have spoken their variant of Persian for more than a
millennium and had their own kingdom during the Middle Ages.
If the West is going to put itself at risk for 3.8 million ethnic Georgians,
roughly the population of Los Angeles, or 5.4 million Tibetans, or 2 million
Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, why shouldn't Russia take risks for the South
Ossetians, not to mention the 100,000 Abkhaz speakers in Georgia's secessionist
Black Sea province? Once the infinite regress of ethnic logic gets into motion,
there is no good reason not to pull the world apart like taffy.
Forget the Kosovo Albanians, the South Ossetians, the Abkhazians, Saakashvili
and the Dalai Lama. These are relics of an older world that might deserve their
own theme park, but not their own state. Precisely what are 3.8 million
freedom-loving Georgians supposed to contribute to American strategic interests
with its US$2 billion a year of exports consisting (according to the Central
Intelligence Agency World Factbook) of "scrap metal, wine, mineral water, ores,
vehicles, fruits and nuts"? Georgia's hope was to lever its geographical
position on the Russia border by making itself useful to the American military.
If it had not been for America's insistence on installing a gang of
trigger-happy pimps and drug-pushers in Kosovo, Russia might have responded
less ferociously to the flea bites on its southern border. Make no mistake: the
American-sponsored Kosovo regime is the dirtiest anywhere in postwar history.
Writing in the Spiegel magazine website last April 24 , Walter Mayr described
Kosovo as "a country ruled by corruption and organized crime". For example,
Mayr reports,
Ramush Haradinaj is a former KLA commander who later
became prime minister of UN-administered Kosovo. His indictment in The Hague
consisted of 37 charges, including murder, torture, rape and the expulsion of
Serbs, Albanians and gypsies in the weeks following the end of the war in 1999.
Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the UN War Crimes Tribunal, called
him a "gangster in uniform". He returned to Kosovo this spring, after his
acquittal on April 3. [1]
America's wag-the-dog war against
Serbia in 1999 over alleged ethnic cleansing of Muslim Albanians in Kosovo won
the undeserved support of Republicans as well as Democrats, to the extent that
too many people on all sides of Washington politics risked their reputation to
admit that the whole business was a stupid mistake. Washington has simply dug
itself in deeper, joined at the hip to a government less savory than any banana
republic dictatorship that enjoyed American favor at the depths of the Cold War
(See The
inconvenient Serbs, Asia Times Online, April 17, 2007.)
America remains so committed to the myth of moderate Islam that it is prepared
to invent it. Kosovo, like the Turkey of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
supposedly embodies a moderate, Sufi-derived brand of Islam that will foster an
American partnership with the Muslim world. The US intelligence community knows
perfectly well that the networks that traffic prostitutes through Albania into
Italy and the rest of Europe also move narcotics, weapons and terrorists from
Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Grozny in Chechnya to Tirana in Albania and
Pristina in Kosovo.
The Russians know better. As I wrote in my January 8 endorsement of Putin for
president of the United States:
Putin understands how to exercise
power. Unlike Iraq, the restive Muslim province of Chechnya now nestles
comfortably in Putin's palm, albeit with about half the people it had a decade
ago. Russian troops killed between 35,000 and 100,000 civilians in the first
Chechen war of 1994-96, and half a million were driven from their homes,
totaling about half the population. But that is not what pacified Chechnya.
Putin bribed and bullied Chechen clans to do Russia's dirty work for it,
showing himself a master at the game of divide-and-conquer. Working from a
position of weakness, Russia's president is the closest the modern world comes
to the insidious strategic genius of a Cardinal Richelieu. That is the sort of
strategic thinking America needs.
Half the world's population
now resides in the world's three largest countries, namely China, India and the
United States. These are not multi-ethnic, but rather supra-ethnic states,
whose identity transcends tribe and nationality. There is no "clash of
civilizations", for Confucian, Hindu, American and Orthodox civilization cannot
find grounds for a clash. As for the European community, its global ambitions
succumbed to geriatric disease a generation ago.
The number of flashpoints for violence in the world has grown in inverse
proportion to their importance. The world is full of undead tribes with
delusions of grandeur, and soon-to-be-extinct peoples who rather would go out
with a bang than a whimper. The supra-ethnic states of the world have a common
interest in containing the mischief that might be made by the losers. China,
which has an annoying terrorist problem in its Westernmost province, has plenty
of reason to help suppress Muslim separatists.
Unfortunately, modern weapons technology makes it possible for a spoiler state
to inflict a disproportionate amount of damage. China recognized this when it
cooperated with the United States to defuse the North Korean nuclear problem.
The most visible prospective spoiler in the pack remains Iran. If America wants
to recover from its humiliation in the Caucasus, it might, for example, conduct
an air raid against Iran's nuclear facilities, and justify it with the same
sort of reasoning that Russia invoked in Georgia. Contrary to surface
impressions, Moscow wouldn't mind a bit.
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