Some Sanity From The Insane

By Ron Beasley

Eight years ago I would not have believed that I would ever think Pat Buchanan could be a voice of sanity.  But as neocons like Robert Kagan can hardly contain their enthusiasm when they see an opportunity to fire up the cold war again it is Buchanan who comes across as sane.  Now the neocons never did like the "War on Terror".  Their attempts to turn it into a "real" war have for the most part been dismal failures.  Over at LewRockwell.com Pat Buchanan describes how hypocritical the neocon's outrage over Russia's response to Saakashvili's blunder really is.

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight – Russia finished it. People who start wars don't get to decide how and when they end.

Russia's response was "disproportionate" and "brutal," wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more "disproportionate"?

Russia has invaded a sovereign country, railed Bush. But did not the United States bomb Serbia for 78 days and invade to force it to surrender a province, Kosovo, to which Serbia had a far greater historic claim than Georgia had to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, both of which prefer Moscow to Tbilisi?

  Did Western actions since the breakup of the Soviet Union ultimately lead to this confrontation?

That Putin took the occasion of Saakashvili's provocative and stupid stunt to administer an extra dose of punishment is undeniable. But is not Russian anger understandable? For years the West has rubbed Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat and treated her like Weimar Germany.

When Moscow pulled the Red Army out of Europe, closed its bases in Cuba, dissolved the evil empire, let the Soviet Union break up into 15 states, and sought friendship and alliance with the United States, what did we do?

American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite Scalawags to loot the Russian nation. Breaking a pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev, we moved our military alliance into Eastern Europe, then onto Russia's doorstep. Six Warsaw Pact nations and three former republics of the Soviet Union are now NATO members.

Bush, Cheney and McCain have pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This would require the United States to go to war with Russia over Stalin's birthplace and who has sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula and Sebastopol, traditional home of Russia's Black Sea fleet.

When did these become U.S. vital interests, justifying war with Russia?

The United States unilaterally abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty because our technology was superior, then planned to site anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against Iranian missiles, though Iran has no ICBMs and no atomic bombs. A Russian counter-offer to have us together put an anti-missile system in Azerbaijan was rejected out of hand.

We built a Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey to cut Russia out. Then we helped dump over regimes friendly to Moscow with democratic "revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia, and tried to repeat it in Belarus.

Buchanan goes on to point out that the US would have responded in much the same way if Russia made moves in the Western Hemisphere.  Of course the neocons and the Bush administration ware their hypocrisy like a badge of honor.

Comments

[EL]

When you see the world through the good/evil lens of McCain/Bush, then even Pat Buchanan becomes a protoliberal. I can't believe I just wrote that, although I always found Pat interesting in a perverse way.