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Who’s Gonna Tell the Kids?

Who is going to fill the American people in on the truth and significance of what’s going on in Georgia? From all indications, no onein the national press corps is up for the job.

The op-ed fraternity, dutifully echoing the Bush administration, is running with a narrative that goes something like this: Georgia, led by an urbane young man (Saakashvili) who seeks nothing more than peace and prosperity for his plucky little nation, has been brutally attacked by a Russian bear bent on meting out wanton destruction. The reporter class, ever attentive to their appointed task of providing evocative vignettes and images to justify the storylines dreamed up by their superiors (a group that includes the aforementioned pundits as well as “government officials” and serious-appearing right wing think tank hacks), has gone about their task with the brainless dedication we’ve come to expect from them. Now its time for Americans to do what most of them believe (in the face of abundant statistical evidence to the contrary) they do best: provide the poor and besieged around the world with “humanitarian aid.”

In a functioning democracy with a more or less empirically-based media system, this little bedtime story would be quickly superseded by real reportage, and from there, a mainstream narrative that would go something like this.

In the wake of September 11, Cheney and the neocons at the White House decided they would use the crisis as a pretext for implanting US bases throughout the “new” republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The strategic intent of this move, accomplished largely through the buying off of corrupt dictators, was twofold. a) To project US military power into a region of enormous and still relatively untapped mineral wealth. b) Continue the process, begun in the late 1990s with the rapid eastward expansion of NATO, of militarily encircling Russia so that it would never again be able to seriously challenge US hegemony in the world. An integral element of this strategy was using the CIA and other US government funded agencies to catapult US-friendly “democrats,” such as the Columbia-trained yuppie, Saakashvili, to power in the satellite Republics of the former Soviet Union. And as is the custom with this particular White House crowd, they made sure that the Israelis were deeply involved with their covert operatives at every level of this strategic effort.

Putin, it appears, was fully aware of this neo-con agenda from the beginning. And as a keen reader of human psychology, he also understood the fundamentally priapic character of its key architects. You can’t keep a hard-on forever, he reasoned, especially when you are trying to stick it in every available strategic “orifice” between Ankara and Indonesia. And so he watched and waited, playing Rope-a-Dope with the US for seven long years.

Like many members of the US neo-con fraternity that invented him, and has sustained him up until now, Saakashvili appears to be long on swagger and short on smarts. And as has occurred with many foolish CIA assets in the past, he apparently began to see himself through the hagiographic prism of the propaganda his handlers regularly churned out on his behalf. No doubt remembering how the summer timing of Israel’s rape of Lebanon two years ago helped to cushion the public relations fall-out from the event, Handler and Asset apparently decided that now was the time to poke the Russian bear in the eye. And so they planned a lightning strike to seize South Ossetia. Putin was ready. He came off the ropes and struck back with a clean and crisp left hook to the jaw that left the Asset (and by extension, his handlers) crumpled on the canvas. End of match.

With this single, expertly landed blow, Putin has laid bare for the world to see the enormous gap between neo-con fantasies of domination and real US power. The setback has also made manifest the almost complete bankruptcy of the current US leadership class on issues of international law and morality.

When Bush, seeking to put the best face on the enormous strategic setback just handed to him by Putin, proclaimed the Russian use of force as “unacceptable” a wave of uncontrollable, if profoundly bitter, laughter swept through the chanceries and more important news rooms of the world. The only ones able to keep a straight face through it all have been the eternally-immune-to-irony-acolytes of power in the US media.

The US has just suffered a debacle that, when viewed through the lens of history, may very well be seen as a key turning point not only in its trajectory as a Great Power, but also the definitive end of its long-held image (warranted or not) as an agent of constructive change in the world.

Who’s gonna tell the kids?

15 August 2008