This article was published in The eXile on December 28, 2005.

The Putin regime’s latest moves to tighten controls over foreign NGOs are being portrayed in the West as yet more proof of Russia’s savage authoritarianism and anti-Western paranoia. While only a drunken apologist could deny Putin’s authoritarianism, the real question is whether or not the crackdown on NGOs is a symptom of mere tyrant-paranoia, or if Putin’s crackdown is based on some unpleasant realities that our media isn’t bothering to explore.

If the Putin regime is being paranoid, then the case of blue-chip NGO Freedom House – an American NGO whose name seems to pop up more than any other in this part of the world, particularly when it comes to the push for democracy – provides a clear example of Henry Kissinger’s dictum that “even a paranoid has some real enemies.”

Freedom House was founded innocuously enough in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President and one of the great modern champions of human rights, and Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president in 1940, uniting the mainstream American political spectrum to ensure that it would not be accused of being ideological. It was founded, according to its website, out of concern “with the mounting threats to peace and democracy…[and has been] a vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorships of the far left and the far right.”

Who today is the far-left/right dictatorship that Freedom House steadfastly opposes?

James Woolsey, who chaired Freedom House for the past three years and only recently stepped aside, told Radio Free Europe in an interview in October that Russia was one of, if not the, main target. “We are really quite honored that President Putin, who is increasingly coming to head a government that is edging towards fascism in Russia, would be critical of what the NGOs, including Freedom House, were doing to help bring about a movement toward democracy in Ukraine,” he said.

He described Russia as “fascist” several times in the interview. “We had a period of time in the early 1990s when we were working cooperatively with the Russian security services, but now apparently they have decided to try and blame the security services in the West for their own movement toward fascism,” he said. “Mr. Putin and his movement toward fascism in Russia are on the wrong side of history. They are not going to succeed… ultimately they will lose.”

All of this warlike talk might be excusable, even laudable, if it came from a genuine human rights activist who paid for these words. But this is James Woolsey – one of the closest things America has to a Blackshirt (if we’re going to abuse this over-abused word as he does). Indeed it’s almost comical – in the way that so many insane-rightwing-plots are pure applied black comedy in the Bush Era – that a seemingly-heroic, do-good NGO like Freedom House could be led by one of the most nefarious vertebrates ever to befoul the halls of American power. You’d think that Woolsey, the notorious neocon goon and ex-CIA head, would have better things to do than to front organizations which would seem, on the surface, better suited for the likes of a Jimmy Carter. But then again, it’s even scarier to consider that his role there is no accident.

A little background: Woolsey, among other things, was one of the original founding members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon vanguard which, in 1997, called for: a massive rearming of America to ensure that it had full spectrum dominance; aggressive use of American power, including military, to implement and secure American global domination; and the invasion, occupation, and democratization of Iraq. As most anti-Bush watchers know, the PNAC group famously bemoaned the fact that its imperial policies would meet resistance with the American public: “[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” Like, as in, a 9/11.What luck!

Two of its key goals explain the nexus between Freedom House and Russia: “[T]o challenge regimes hostile to U.S. interests and values; Promoting the cause of political and economic freedom outside the U.S.”

Woolsey’s resume of evil is impressive. He helped found the notorious Iraqi National Congress, which provided “proof” about Iraqi WMDs. And he also serves on the Center for Security Policy, headed by fellow goon Frank Gaffney, who in 2004 publicly advised President Bush to level Fallujah (which Bush did), invade Iran and North Korea (which Bush can’t but yet may try), and adopt “”appropriate strategies for contending with China’s increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin’s accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism.” Note how Gaffney, like Woolsey, equates “Islamofascism” with Putin’s Russia, making Russia a mortal enemy bent on destroying the US.

And speaking of fascism, Woolsey is also the co-chair of the Committee on the Present Danger, a far-right group (they love that word “committee,” like the Bolsheviks they are) famous for launching a three-month network TV scare-campaign in the early 1950s about the “present danger” that the US faced against the Soviet Union before the committee eventually dissovled. After the CPD was revived in 2004, its managing director, Peter Hannaford, was forced to resign when it was revealed that his firm had lobbied on behalf of Austrian fascist Joerg Haider.

Woolsey also boasted in the Wall Street Journal that the National Security Agency used its international eavesdropping network, ECHELON, to spy on European companies in order to give major US corporations a competitive advantage. His reasoning? “We have spied on you because you bribe.” As with Freedom House, Woolsey operates by abusing American power in ways once thought unimaginable, and then blaming the other side for uncivilized behavior which naturally provokes us.

This brief dossier is important because it casts the appointment of Woolsey as the chairman of Freedom House as not merely strange or comically sinister, but intentional. Freedom House is just one of the many effective tools used to implement the policies outlined in the Project for the New American Century, and that is why the cross-pollination, in which goons like Woolsey simultaneously head up “human rights” NGOs and far-right think-tanks, makes perfect sense.

Under Woolsey’s term, Freedom House played a crucial role in the pro-US revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – drawing on its experience covertly supporting the first “color” revolution in Serbia in 1999. According to a Washington Post article, “US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition” (Dec 11, 2000), “U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan ‘He’s Finished,’ which became the revolution’s catchphrase.

“…The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).”

Freedom House’s role included mass-printing Gene Sharp’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which was used as the guidebook for the Serbian student opposition group “Otpor.” Otpor became the model for student opposition movements in every color-revolution since, including Ukraine’s Pora and Georgia’s Kmera.

In Ukraine, Freedom House helped organize the “largest civil regional election monitoring effort” in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organized crucial exit polls showing that Yuschenko had actually won, which gave the Revolution its moral energy – as did their carefully-organized exit polls in Serbia and Georgia.

In Kyrgyzstan, Freedom House provided the printing press for the opposition newspaper My Capital News, which printed damning stories about then-President Akayev’s corrupt family. When the Kyrgyz authorities cut off electricity to MCN’s offices, Freedom House delivered emergency generators to keep it running – generators provided by the US Embassy.

The moral algebra in this tale of intrigue gets confusing because Freedom House happened to be on the side of the Good Guys in many of these fights. On the other hand, considering the way the revolutions in Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine have soured, it’s hard to say what has been won and lost – unless of course you’re measuring the spread of American power and influence.

Indeed, Freedom House is not always on the side of the good guys, as evidenced by its choice in chairmen, as well as in the makeup of its board members – a cast of cartoon-villains which includes such prime-time ogres as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Kenneth Adelman – the same Adelman who had famously predicted that the war in Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” Freedom House’s sponsors include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a far-right pro-big business foundation which, among other things, took a strong stand in the 60s against affirmative action, and once supported academics who pushed the Bell Curve theory arguing that blacks were genetically less intelligent than whites. During the early years of the Vietnam War, Freedom House argued that American intervention was justified because – yup, you guessed right – it helped the spread of democracy. Why’d they do that? Becuase that’s what Freedom House does. It agitates for right-wing America’s interests, cynically deploying appeals for democracy and human rights at properly chosen times to to serve the right’s global mission.

More recently, Freedom House sided with the American far-right by opposing America signing on to the International Criminal Court (ironically using the exact same bogus argument that Bush’s Defense Department used, citing the awful possibility that rogue nations like North Korea could bring cases against American “peacekeepers” for crimes against humanity). Today, it still refuses to condemn, let alone even cite, the illegal detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, using the same rationale as the Bush Administration (the inmates are “illegal combatants” rather than POWs and therefore are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections).

One of the most suspect gigs that Freedom House helped kickstart, in 1999, is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, a pro-Chechen “charity” group chaired by notorious Cold War Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski. Freedom House has not launched any other pro-Muslim separatist causes except for this one. Among its committee members are, again, James Woolsey, the famous crusader against Islamofascism, as well as “Cakewalk” Adelman, William “Weekly Standard” Kristol, and Max Kampelman, who is also Chairman Emeritus of Freedom House and another OG on the Project for a New American Century. Why would Woolsey, Brzezinski and the rest of the far-right supergoon squad choose, among all oppressed Muslims around the world, to heart-bleed over just the Chechens and only the Chechens? Are you starting to see why the Putin regime is “paranoid”?

Freedom House also developed a soft spot for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist opposition group in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan before their respective revolutions. Freedom House’s work with HuT was one reason cited by Uzbek authorities for throwing Freedom House out of the country.

Since 2002, Freedom House’s annual “freedom reports” have been used as the basis by the White House to determine international aid, primarily through the Millennium Challenge Corporation. The reports are also regularly cited by both the American media and Congress. Since 2004, Russia has been demoted to the very bottom ranking – “Not Free” – along with genuinely tyrannical regimes like North Korea and Libya. To those of us who live here, even those of us who oppose the direction Putin has taken, this is not only surprising but nauseating, an example of the worst type of “moral relativism” that these same right-wingers constantly denounce.

Interestingly, a feudal monarchy like Kuwait gets a higher “freedom” rating than Russia, while pro-American Egypt, whose dictator-for-life Mubarak recently won another “election” with 89 percent of the vote, and then subsequently jailed his rival for five years, was praised and upgraded on the freedom scale for apparently assisting in the formation of a few women’s groups. What is the difference between Kuwait and Russia? Go back to the Project for a New American Century: one “promotes” American interests, and the other “opposes” American interests. Therefore, the other, Russia, is “Not Free” and “fascist.”

In light of this story, it’s hard to listen to all of the Bush Administration’s Orwellian bleating about “civil society” and “democracy” in the fight to keep foreign-funded NGOs operating in Russia as they have since Yelstin’s time. In fact, Russian authorities would have to be suicidal not to tighten control. Woolsey himself outlined the role he saw them play: “I think what is important is to help build up civil society, the student organizations, the NGOs and the others that the FSB and President Putin hate so much.” This isn’t about civil society; it’s about fighting for America.

In September of 2005, Woolsey gave up his post as chairman of Freedom House. The new chairman is Peter Ackerman. And, not surprisingly, Ackerman is also the chairman of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, an organization which helps train and supply color-coded revolutions. Its website says that the ICNC “develops and encourages the use of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies to establish and defend democracy…provides assistance in the training and deployment of field advisors, to deepen the conceptual knowledge and practical skills of applying nonviolent strategies in conflicts throughout the world where progress toward democracy and human rights is possible.”

So the McDonald’s of NGOs is run by avowed US imperialists and who repeatedly and aggressively attack Russia as “fascist” and push to challenge and isolate Russia, which they see as much of a threat to American hegemony as Islamofascism. And then they whine about human rights when the Russian government moves to curb their activities on Russian soil.

The real tragedy in this is that genuinely admirable, courageous NGOs, like Memorial and Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, will suffer from the aftershocks of Woolsey and Co.’s abuse of NGOs. In the end, civil society, democracy and human rights will deteriorate, allowing the Bush goons to cite it as a reason to step up the battle against Russia. And as always the Russian people will be caught in the crossfire in a cruel and savage game, where words like “freedom” and “sovereignty” are mere Trojan Horse weapons used by one elite battling for power against another.

This article was first published in The eXile on December 29, 2005.

From The eXiled’s Special Australasia Correspondent

PERTH, AUSTRALIA–Myanmar’s been making news lately, especially here in Australia. Most of it involves Kevin Rudd, our Foreign Minister, who’s gone there on a diplomatic mission, making weird pleas to the Burmese government not to kill Aung San Suu Kyi (as if they’d ever want to do that):

…it is absolutely critical that the Burmese government guarantee Aung San Suu Kyi’s security while such a tour of the country was undertaken. I believe all governments around the world would be looking very carefully at how the security is provided for by the government.

If you aren’t fluent in embassy-speak, this is what Rudd’s really implying: “They’re gonna kill that poor woman! They’re gonna kill that PAAAW woman!”

He needn’t have bothered. The truth is that Burmese politics is stuck in the same stalemate as ever: Burma’s local oligarchy has the guns and money; Aung San Suu Kyi has the hearts‘n’minds. Neither side can get rid of the other and that’s how it’s been for over twenty years. In situations like this, there are only three possible tiebreakers: 1) the elite commits suicide, Gorbachev-style; 2) a stronger country invades and sets up its own government; 3) “the people” revolt.

Option Two isn’t likely. No one–neither China nor the West– really seems interested in taking over Myanmar.

So how about Option One: a sort of late-Soviet perestroika self-destruction? Not happening. Last year saw some cosmetic changes – a new flag, the creation of a phony Potemkin parliament – but nothing comparable to actual glasnost’.

So that leaves only one possibility: a people’s revolution. But there’s a snag: popular uprisings really only succeed in countries with large populations of angry young men. Poland in the early 80s. Romania in ’89, Czechoslovakia in ’89, Indonesia in ’98, Egypt in ’11 – look at the population pyramids for those countries, and you’ll see they had an awful lot of 15-25 year olds, right when the shit hit the entrenched-ruling-elite fan.

Same goes for the pro-Western “color revolutions” in the Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan: demographic spikes in the 15-19 and 20-25 groups followed by rapid regime change. With revolutions, it’s age that matters. More than geography. Maybe more than ethnicity. Definitely more than fucking Twitter.

Wanna know just one reason why Western countries are so apathetic? Look at America’s boomer-dominated population pyramid. (Australia’s is pretty much the same shape – my generation won’t come equal with our boomers until 2020.) Just as there’s safety in numbers, there’s also power in numbers, and, in the West, young people know damn well they’re not powerful. Society’s a prison farm. The boomers are the guards. They’re holding the stick. There aren’t enough of us to riot; no one will join in. Don’t get any ideas. Grovel hard.

So what does Myanmar’s population look like? Its last baby boom happened in the 80s, when the fertility rate was 4.0 to 4.7 – that’s four or five kids per mother. Today it’s just over two kids. This means people born before the mid-90s pose more danger to the regime than any generation after them.

Those people hit twenty during the last decade, and, sure enough, massive protests suddenly broke out in 2007 after 19 years of relative tranquility. Media sources never failed to mention that the protests were “monk-led,” but no one seems to have caught the significance of that. By Southeast Asian standards, monks are basically college students (especially in Myanmar, where the government was smart enough to close most universities after the ’88 riots). As Clausewitz might’ve said: “A monastery is a frat house by other means.”

And these monks weren’t wimps. According to a report from The Irrawaddy from 2007:

More than 10 high ranking officials and military officers were held hostage for about six hours on Thursday by monks at a monastery in Pakokku township in Upper Burma. The captors demanded the release of about 10 fellow monks arrested in a peaceful demonstration that was violently broken up by the authorities on Wednesday.

The monks captured their hostages during a standoff in which four official cars were set on fire. The hostages included the chairman of the District Peace and Development Council in Pakokku, a regional centre about 370 miles north of Rangoon with a sizeable community of monks. The hostages were freed at around 4 p.m. but it was unclear how the two sides resolved the standoff.

No wonder Orwell–who served as a colonial enforcer in Burma–hated Burma’s monks so much. By his own admission, Orwell “thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.” Those “peaceful” monk-led protests weren’t so much a Buddhist love-in as a pent-up testosterone time bomb exploding in the generals’ faces.

[Read Dr. Dolan's article "Big Brothers: George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens Exposed"]

There’s a story, too, behind what actually caused the protests. For years, the IMF has been pushing developing countries to kill fuel subsidies designed to lower the price of petrol (and hence transportation, and hence most consumer goods). So when the IMF sent a delegation to Myanmar in 2007, the Burmese government decided to impress their shock doctrine sahibs by chopping those pesky free-lunch subsidies. The price per gallon doubled immediately, from $1.40 to $2.80. This, in a country where most people earn about $2 a day.

There you go. Myanmar’s biggest demonstrations since ’88 – the first where government troops attacked monks – weren’t sparked by Aung San Suu Kyi’s three house arrests. Nor were the riots caused by government censorship, travel restrictions, ethnic forced labour, state-sanctioned torture, or any other form of dastardly Oriental despotism.

Rather, the monks revolted because their government took austerity advice from the IMF, a cabal of colonial loan sharks led by an aging Eurotrash throat-rapist.

And despite the violence, the IMF’s austerity medicine plan for Burma hasn’t changed. Last year, the IMF put out a working paper, “The Unequal Benefits of Fuel Subsidies.” It complained that despite the rise in global fuel prices from 2003-2008, “many governments in developing nations were reluctant to fully pass through these price increases to domestic consumers, resulting in substantial fiscal costs.” The paper worries, like a good loan shark would, not about the burden on the world’s poor, but rather,  “about the fiscal risk associated with less than full pass-through of these increases to domestic prices.” (I love that phrase, “less than full pass-through.” Makes it sound like those poor consumers are getting insufficiently shat on by sleazy speculators.) The paper also admits that two countries which tried to follow the IMF gameplan and slowly do away with fuel subsidies – Indonesia and Ghana – soon abandoned these “liberalization” schemes, and reinstated subsidized fuel.

By now you should’ve guessed the two components of a successful modern revolution: a large population of angry young people, and some spark to rouse them into revolution-action.

So how would the oligarchy plan to survive this possibility? Well, let’s look at Myanmar’s population pyramid for 2011:

The most dangerous age groups here are the 15-19s and 20-24s. The government’s best hope is to sit it out for five or ten years, wait for all the teens to grow up, settle down, mellow a bit and start having thirty-something-life crises.

That’s why the Burmese regime held mock elections last year – to stall those lethal twentysomethings for a little while longer, hoping the kids would take the bait, and hold off the revolution for a few more years, until the hormones drain away. And since most adolescents have next to no attention span, even a few years’ delay is enough to take the wind out of a potential uprising.

When it comes to Burmese politics, the real question is, who’ll win the war of attrition.

That’s why personal safety’s the least of Suu Kyi’s concerns. The closest she’s ever gotten to assassination was April 1989, when a provincial army captain threatened to shoot her if she crossed a six-man line – he was stopped by his commanding officer, who knew killing her would be suicidal for the junta. Suu Kyi’s real worry should be that the generals won’t do anything to trigger a revolution. Worse, even if they do, they now have twice the number of troops they had in 1988 – and unlike the Egyptians, Burma’s troops aren’t squeamish about attacking civilians. Or monks.

From what I saw while visiting Myanmar, the junta’s stalling tactic doesn’t seem to be working all that well. I was in Yangon just before last November’s elections, and from my personal anecdotal evidence, I couldn’t find anyone interested enough to actually vote. The newspapers and TV channels were full of campaign information and get-out-the-vote propaganda, but you never saw much out on the streets of  except for the occasional poster. In private conversations, the election ranked as a yeah, whatever side-topic at most – the Burmese had about as much passion for the elections as 21^st century Australians would for a royal visit: “Oh yeah, before you go, the Queen’ll be in Perth tomorrow for half an hour, yeah, then she’s off to Darwin. The West says St. George’s Terrace’ll be sealed off, so maybe you should park the car on Murray Street. Have a lovely weekend! You toooo!”

The Burmese in Yangon assumed all the action was happening in the countryside, while the people I met in Shan State assumed it was all in Yangon. In the city center where I was around election time, the Internet kept getting cut off. So I’d go to a building on Sule Paya Rd and climb a dilapidated spiral staircase up to the café on the second floor. Myanmar’s Internet still runs at mid-90s dialup speed. Accessing any site (including Gmail) required a proxy tunnelling program which only lasted 5-10 minutes. When the tunnel caved in, I’d get the message “Your Freedom is endangered!” and call one of the proxy-garçons who went from table to table like waiters. On election weekend, the Internet cafés were closed. Some people were touchy about letting Westerners into their homes until the following Monday when it was all over.

On TV, though, nothing but endless speeches. First you’d see a representative from the junta’s party, the USDP. He’d give a speech about how Burmese democracy could only be attained through stability. Then an Indian Muslim politician would appear, also giving a speech about how Burmese democracy could only be attained through stability. Every party, it seems, had exactly the same talking points. Nor did any candidate say a word about the people they were running against. This was disappointing. In Western countries, the Red Team at least pretends to hate the Blue Team when the cameras are rolling: “Damn those Autobots!” That kinda thing. The Burmese oligarchy, though, doesn’t seem to have figured out how to stage play-fights properly; how to make it look like two near-identical Dempublican factions actually represent wildly opposing philosophies. As a stalling strategy, that might actually work.

This raises another question: when (and why) did the West decide that Myanmar’s junta was worse than other governments in Southeast Asia? If you trawl through the archives of the New York Times, you’ll find this starts to happen around the early 90s. That’s when Myanmar stops being another third-world country (like Bangladesh or Bhutan) and all the rhetoric becomes morally charged. Here, for example, is a NY Times editorial calling for sanctions against Myanmar, dated March 24, 1997:

The decision whether to apply sanctions to Myanmar for its human rights abuses now rests with President Clinton. Last July, Congress passed a law calling for a ban on new American investment in Myanmar if that country’s repressive Government harmed or rearrested the democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or cracked down on the democracy movement. The President’s top foreign-policy advisers are divided. For the sake not only of democracy in Myanmar, but also of American credibility when dealing with other dictatorial regimes, President Clinton should invoke the law.

The case for sanctions on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is more convincing than perhaps anywhere else in the world. If President Clinton chooses not to apply them, there is little reason any other abusive country should take Washington’s tough talk seriously.

By all credible accounts, including the State Department’s annual human rights report, Myanmar’s Government has met if not exceeded the conditions in the sanctions legislation. In 1996, the worst year of repression in this decade, it detained hundreds of students and activists and held Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi under virtual house arrest in December. Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who would be Myanmar’s elected leader had the Government not annulled 1990 elections, has appealed to Washington to apply the sanctions.

The sanctions would also cost American business little. The United States currently has only about $220 million invested in Myanmar, almost all of it in oil and gas projects. Many American companies have already pulled out in response to public pressure and new laws in Massachusetts and several cities prohibiting government contracts with companies that do business in Myanmar.

The first thing you might wonder, reading this, is: Who decided Myanmar should be the measure of “America’s credibility when dealing with… dictatorial regimes.” Why not good ol’ US-aligned Indonesia? Suharto butchered 500,000 Timorese in five years and was still slaughtering West Papuans by the thousands into the early 1990s. That’s a far bigger genocide than anything the Burmese junta pulled off, but the NYT rarely said anything harsh about Suharto except that he was “stern” in the manner of a boarding school dean – this was after he’d banned the Indonesian Communist Party and imprisoned nearly 600,000 political dissidents.

But then the Times‘ editorial admits it: “The sanctions would also cost American business little.” In other words, America’s got a choice of various countries it can impose sanctions on (in exchange for this “credibility” stuff) and Myanmar’s one of the more affordable ones where there’s little downside, and lots of credibility upside. And that’s what matters to these Clintonite “liberal hawks”: looking like they have a conscience, without risking anything serious. It’s the Prius hybrid approach to international affairs.

The Burmese junta makes a great bogeyman for the lib-hawks of the New York Times. Finally, a government they can trash with complete impunity, unleashing their inner neocon side without risking do-gooder creds. Their criticisms don’t even have to be factually accurate, as Nicholas Kristof demonstrated in 2009 with a pathetic attempt (“Sneaking In Where Thugs Rule”) to jump aboard the Suu Kyi bandwagon. Kristoff visited a Burmese town called Myawaddy, crossing the Thai border as a day-tripper. Having cleared the immigration post, he went egg-hunting for signs of tyranny. Myawaddy’s not the best place for this for the simple reason that those Burmese towns near the Thailand border are generally quite affluent and barely resemble the rest of the country.

More deep thoughts by Nicholas Kristof

So Kristof punched out a lame piece where he contrasted Thailand’s “bustle and dynamism” with Myanmar’s “shacks beside open sewers.” (Gee, are there many countries in Southeast Asia that don’t have shacks beside open sewers?) Kristof followed this up by claiming that “the most flourishing business [he saw] belonged to a snake charmer.” It’s just bullshit – border towns are always full of commerce – but nothing sells dispatches like a splash of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

If you need any more evidence that Kristof doesn’t know Burmese politics from his own ass, read (if you can) his blog, where he writes “nobody except the regime uses the word Myanmar.”

Sorry Kristof, that’s simply not true. In Yangon, I had a hard time finding people who used either “Burma” or “Rangoon” (at least in English). The exceptions were all boomer-age, the sorts who’d call St. Petersburg “Leningrad” if they were Russians. They preferred “Burma” but that had less to do with their opinion of Suu Kyi than their generation. Plenty of people who hated the junta called their country “Myanmar.” It was also more common in general to hear “Myanma people” than “Burmese.” And this was in Yangon: the most pro-Western, anti-military, part of the country. You could literally spend weeks there without seeing a single slouch hat – definitely not the place for Jean Genet men-in-uniform fantasies.

Nicholas “The Vampire” Kristof acquires credibility

Kristof and his fellow hacks aside, Myanmar caught the attention of a much smarter and more serious lib-hawk: the great political strategist, Gene Sharp. Since the 1950′s, Sharp has devoted his career to forming strategies built around what he calls “realistic non-violent struggle.” In fact, it was his magnum opus, From Dictatorship To Democracy, that provided the strategy for the East European “color revolutions” of the early 2000s. The book’s first chapter makes it clear that Sharp is in the CIA camp when it comes to foreign policy:

There has indeed been a trend towards greater freedom and democratisation in the world in the past decades. According to Freedom House, which compiles a yearly international survey of the status of political rights and civil liberties, the number of countries in the world classified as “Free” has grown significantly in recent years: […]

However this positive trend is tempered by the large numbers of people still living under conditions of tyranny. As of 2008, 34% of the world’s 6.68 billion population lived in countries classified as “Not Free,” that is, areas with extremely restricted political rights and civil liberties.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Freedom House is a dubious neocon NGO with heavy CIA links – its Chairman from 2003-05 was former CIA director R. James Woolsey – that declares countries “Free” when they support the US military-industrial complex and “Not Free” when they resist. As the paragraph above shows, this also seems to be the basis for Sharp’s definition of “freedom,” since he considers the rise in the number of US-aligned nations to be a “positive trend.”

[Read Mark Ames' article "Freedom's Just Another Word For Fascism."]

But Sharp isn’t a mere CIA propagandist, and he’s nothing at all like the cheap spin doctors who produce Freedom House’s annual report. From Dictatorship To Democracy formed the basic strategy for a huge number of recent uprisings: the Serbian revolution against Milosevic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, this year’s uprising in Egypt. Whether Sharp knows it or not (and he probably does) he’s a major asset to the CIA team. As Ames noted in 2005, Freedom House mass-printed copies of Sharp’s book and distributed them amongst the Serb opposition group, Otpor, shortly before Milosevic’s fall.

Gene Sharp: Revolutionary guru or CIA braintrust?

And guess which country was the prototype for Sharp’s idea of non-violent revolution? If you guessed Myanmar, you guessed correct. In an interview with The Irrawaddy, Sharpe explains that From Dictatorship to Democracy was originally written as a series of articles for a Burmese émigré newspaper based in Bangkok. Shortly after, it was translated into Karen, Mon, Chin and Jing-paw, apparently for distribution among Myanmar’s ethnic minorities. According to a 2001 Salon article, this was at the request of Aung San Suu Kyi herself.

However, dissidents in Myanmar weren’t so interested. According to Sharp, the country’s ethnic opposition groups had too many “armies and mini-armies” which they weren’t willing to scrap, and “although From Dictatorship to Democracy was written for Burmese, there were no Burmese groups who really took that analysis seriously or used at [sic] as a strategy for the liberation of Burma.”

There’s some truth to this. Certainly, monks were still using violent tactics in 2007. But Aung San Suu Kyi seems to have borrowed a lot from Sharp, whose entire playbook is based on the idea that governments require people’s participation to function and that a dictatorship will soon “[die] of starvation” if its subjects are uncooperative enough. In the mid-90s, Suu Kyi encouraged Westerners to boycott Myanmar completely and avoid travelling there – this happened just as the government started building large numbers of hotels. As Sharp observes: “The requirements and effects of the regime’s past policies will somewhat limit its present ability to adopt and implement conflicting policies.” It’s this kind of stuff that makes you wonder whether the apathy over the elections was yet another weapon.

Still, I don’t have too many hopes up about Aung San Suu Kyi. Well-intentioned or not, she has the backing of a whole heap of CIA-aligned groups who seem to be counting on her to become another pro-US colour revolutionary. Besides Freedom House, she’s also gotten attention from Reporters Without Borders (RWB). As CounterPunch reported in 2005 and 2006, Reporters Without Borders received funding from the Center for a Free Cuba and Otto Reich, one of the backers of the 2002 Venezuelan military coup against Hugo Chavez. It’s also taken money from the International Republican Institute, another group that supported the coups. Like Freedom House, it’s inordinately aggressive towards countries that stand in the way of US foreign policy – CounterPunch’s Diana Barahona observed in ’05 that Reporters Without Borders gave Cuba “a lower ranking on its press freedom index than countries where journalists routinely have been killed.” And now a glowing new biography of Suu Kyi has appeared in stores, titled Struggle For Freedom, authored by Jesper Bengtsson, who is, naturally, president of Reporters Without Borders in Sweden.

One thing that’s confused me about Suu Kyi is how she has kept oddly quiet about the people who really fucked Myanmar up in the first place, before the junta came along: The British colonial overlords. It was the Brits whom Suu Kyi’s father fought against when he led the struggle for Burmese independence.

General Aung San started out as a vaguely Marxist revolutionary before the Second World War and gathered together a group of followers known as the Thirty Comrades. In 1940, he led the Thirty Comrades north towards China, seeking assistance from the Chinese Communist Party, but accidentally met with Japanese intelligence instead. The Nipponese gave the Comrades some military training to fight against the British colonials, and allowed them to hole up in Thailand (then occupied by Japan) while they mapped out their return to Myanmar. In one of the most famous events in Burmese military history, twenty five of the Comrades came together at a house in Bangkok, combined their blood in an ornate metal bowl and took turns drinking it after pledging loyalty to each other. When I visited the Defence Services Museum in Yangon, I was shown the original 2cc glass-barrel syringe they’d used to draw their blood and squirt it into the mixing bowl.

“What?” I asked. “Thirty guys to one works?”

My guide shrugged. “No AIDS back then.”

And they shared that needle in vain. (Or should it be “in vein”?) In 1947, shortly before independence, Aung San was assassinated by thugs working for his pro-British rival, U Saw. The killing lead to some interesting (and quite plausible) theories that Britain planned the murder of Aung San Suu Kyi’s father. In 1997, Kyaw Zaw, one of only two surviving members of the Thirty Comrades, claimed that the British ignored police surveillance reports that U Saw was plotting an attack. Shortly after Gen. Aung San’s death, a British army captain, David Vivian, was found to have secretly handed 170 Bren guns and 100 Sten guns to U Saw’s faction, and supposedly Captain Vivian had “no personal profit motive.” At least two other officers supplied U Saw with guns and ammo, possibly even the dum-dums used to kill Aung San. Captain Vivian was sent to Insein Prison for his role, but he escaped during a Karen riot in 1949 and returned to England via Thailand. (Unlike the Burmese, the Karen were still largely pro-British at this point, owing to Britain’s old colonial favoritism tactic, pitting ethnic group against ethnic group.) The ease with which Vivian made his getaway raises further suspicions that he wasn’t working alone. It’s not like there was a spook shortage in the region – less than five years later, the Burmese would battle a large, CIA-backed army of Chinese Nationalists in its opium-producing northeastern border with China.

Aung San’s death deprived the Comrades of a leader and a rift soon appeared between Ne Win and the group’s old communists. After taking power in ’62, Ne Win imprisoned the better part of his remaining blood brothers and brought the country under junta rule for the first time. Kyaw Zaw was exiled to China and leads the Communist Party of Burma from Yunnan Province. The other surviving Comrade, Ye Htut, retired from politics and lives in his home village two miles from Naypyidaw.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s biography of her father (in her essay collection, Freedom From Fear) is oddly quiet about his murder. She gives it two paragraphs and then quickly changes the subject. There is no mention of U Saw’s pro-British stance (for instance, he refused to sign any transfer-of-power agreements during Aung San’s delegation to London). Suu Kyi simply claims Saw had a “strange belief that once [Aung San’s cabinet] had been removed, he would become the head of the Burmese government.” It would be a “strange belief” if the decision fell to the Burmese people, but the country was still under British occupation. Suu Kyi avoids drawing attention to this – the last four pages of her essay don’t even mention the Brits by name! Just before the killing, she writes, “plans for the official transfer of power proceeded apace,” and she declares that independence “arduously came within reach,” both roundabout ways of saying: “Tommy still ran the joint.”

I can’t say whether or not the British did sponsor Aung San’s assassination, but given what the Brits have done everywhere else, shouldn’t Suu Kyi at least be curious?

Her motivations for keeping quiet about this aren’t entirely clear. On one hand, it’s in her interest to have the British on her side today. Also, she was practically raised a Brit, living in Oxford for decades, speaking with a perfect RP accent – by her own admission, her favourite writers are the pseudo-Brit T.S. Eliot, and the all-too-British Alfred Lord Tennyson. Part of me hopes, desperately, that she’s keeping mum for good reasons. The same goes for her politics. Suu Kyi has kept very quiet about how she thinks a post-junta Myanmar should be run – whether it should resist the IMF or not, whether it should allow the sort of wholesale looting that happened in much of Southeast Asia and Russia during the 90′s. Again, my strongest hope is that Suu Kyi is using the CIA and the Brits, just as her father used both the Japanese and the Brits to achieve his objectives.

But if Myanmar does fall to a color revolutionary regime like Saakashvili’s in Georgia, then God help it. The Burmese I met during my stay knew much more about how their government worked than most Americans or Australians know about their own – one advantage that comes with having no decent media to distract you is that everyone becomes an amateur Woodward and Bernstein – but they had a tough time grasping just how Byzantine the politics in Western countries really are. Their images of America and Britain are dangerously rosy and naive, the result of decades under a government that rules through force rather than the more subtle authoritarianism in the West. The only negative information they got about the West came through poorly-written propaganda tabloids. It didn’t seem the government had bothered to translate Chomsky or Parenti or any other leftist who might’ve made a convincing case for Myanmar isolationism. Instead, it gave the 2006 Burma National Literature Award for Translation to a Burmese edition of The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman’s paean to globalization.

Don’t ask me why.

Ramon Glazov lives and writes in Perth, Western Australia. Email him at “ramonglazov at gmail dot com”

More articles by Ramon Glazov: “Inside Wikileaks: Revenge of the Second Banana“ and “How Christopher Hitchens Robbed Hunter S. Thompson’s Grave.”

I just picked up an old paperback copy of a Vietnam War book called SEALs: UDT/SEAL Operations in Vietnam by Tim Bosiljevac. The book chronicles the early history of the Sea, Air and Land Teams, from their founding under President Kennedy through the end of the Vietnam War. The SEALs were created to be the Navy’s superhuman version of the Green Berets: “a naval guerrilla/counterguerrilla [force] with an emphasis on direct action raids and missions on targets in close proximity to bodies of water.” I love that line, “in close proximity to bodies of water.” That could mean a puddle…or hell, when you consider that human beings are about 70% water–”bodies of water” could mean just about anything.

There are a lot of great Vietnam War books out there, mostly memoirs, as Dr. Dolan explained:

Virtually anyone who saw combat and has a decent memory can write a decent book about it — and Vietnam, a war characterized by thousands of small skirmishes, was richer in incident and gore than an inner-city basketball tournament. When next you hear that rough voice asking, “War — what is it good for?”, you tell it: “First-person memoirs, that’s what!”

…This high literary output was a delayed gift of the utter lack of strategy which doomed the American enterprise in Vietnam: a war which consisted largely of sending small contingents of infantry out into the jungle to find the enemy, usually by getting ambushed, is bound to be a military disaster — but equally bound to produce an extraordinary number of fantastic combat tales.

Unfortunately SEALs lacks this first-person immediacy–it’s a third-person history, Bosiljevic’s Navy College master’s thesis turned into a book, and unfortunately it sometimes reads like a thesis.

Still, this is Nam, Dude–and we’re talking about the SEALs here. That means page after page of ambushes and skirmishes, some of which make for some pretty amazing reading, even in the third dry person.

One such ambush stuck out–one of those rarely reported, long-rumored showdowns between our guys and the hated, invisible “Russian advisors” who were never officially supposed to be there in South Vietnam.

You kids out there who were born too late to remember the Cold War grudges probably won’t grasp the profound satisfaction that a scene like this offers your average armchair Cold Warrior. See, one thing our side could never get over was griping about how the Soviets were somehow cheating. This scene is the sort of “This is what happens when the SEALs catch you cheating” fantasy that all the armchair Cold Warriors dreamed about. It takes place in 1967–a big year for the SEALs in ‘Nam–in a province in the southwest corner of South Vietnam. Meaning, Russian advisors were operating in our own backyard, the bastuds!:

One particular SEAL ambush in 1967 in Kien Giang Province provided a surprise to a frogman force. The SEALs had been watching a reported supply route used by enemy forces on a remote canal. Late in the afternoon of the second day of their surveillance, a VC sampan floated into the kill zone. Besides the two indigenous guerrillas onboard, a tall, heavy Caucasian with a beard rode in the bow. He was dressed in what looked like a khaki uniform and was holding a communist assault rifle. Just as the craft pulled into the area, the communists became leery, as if sensing the danger nearby. Although initially startled at seeing the white man, the SEALs immediately let the law of the barroom prevail–when a fight is unavoidable, strike first, and strike hard. The frogmen unleashed a hail of fire into the enemy force. The Caucasian was hit in the chest in the initial burst of fire and went overboard. The VC attempted to jump in and assist him. Just then, a superior Vietcong force appeared and counterattacked. Outnumbered and outgunned, the SEALs fought a running gun battle to an area where they could extract. Later, they were debriefed about the incident by an intelligence officer. They were told to remain silent about the action. South Vietnamese intelligence had reported that the white man had been a Russian. It would remain a little-known fact that the guerrillas and North Vietnamese were assisted in their Third World brushfire war by a host of foreign advisers and technicians, including Soviets, Chinese, Eastern Bloc, Cuban, Korean, and other communist nationals.

There’s a serious ethical contradiction that seems lost on the author here, a contradiction that’s built into our DNA: On the one hand, the SEALs (very wisely) attack and kill without warning on the barroom theory about striking first and striking hard. Which makes sense, but goes against the suburban middle-class rules of fighting. Real middle-class American bar fights go something like this: a lot of shouting, a lot of loud long well-telegraphed empty threats, even formal declarations marking the combatant’s geographical location (“I’m here! I’m here, mutherfucker!”), dramatic tearing off of one’s shirt, verbal commands expressed in the Imperative Mood (“Come on! Come on, mutherfucker!”)… All that pre-game shouting in American bar-fights establishes the combatant’s sense of “fair play” that suburbanites tend to vastly overrate. It’s as though everyone’s worrying about what the post-game highlights will look like, what they’ll say after  the fight–about securing your place in history, or in the homecoming king vote. I dunno. I remember in Moscow in the mid-90s watching a Russian and an American go at it, and there couldn’t have been a bigger fight-culture clash: The American, some ripped red-head, went through the whole tearing his shirt off schtick, screaming and yelling about his geographical location, calling his Russian opponent all sorts of names implying that the Russian was a cheater whereas he wasn’t…It seemed ridiculous to everyone watching, especially the Russian guy, who tagged the redhead a few more times, messing up his Tony Award-winning act.

American Cold Warriors, armchair and otherwise, always carried around this grudge about the “rules” and about how Americans are just too damn decent for this corrupt awful world. And at the top of the grievance list was the fact that Russian advisors operated with the Vietnamese. Somehow, that just…wasn’t fair. Those damn Russkies–always cheating!

Russian advisors gloating over a downed B-52

For anyone interested, I found a Russian site set up by Russian veterans of the Vietnam War, which features plenty of old war photos, as well as articles and short memoirs from the Russians who served. (Click here.)

Also, here’s a Russian short about the Vietnam War from the Russian perspective, with English subtitles:

About a decade ago, I was in Vietnam with a bunch of Russian friends from my old Moscow newspaper The eXile. One day, I peeled off from the group and took a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels, the setting for one of the best of all the Vietnam War books. None of the Russians gave a shit about Cu Chi and all the stories I forced them to listen to out on the beaches–they found anything military boring, they’d heard too many war stories already from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, stories that were hard to top.

So off I went on an official Cu Chi Tunnels tour. There were 10 of us in my group, all but two Americans, including a retired couple from Texas: the wife was nervous, thin, harried; the husband one of those squat military retirees who infest the American southwest, tight shirt, large gut hanging over his belt, big fat forearms and fingers. Almost as soon as our tour started, the husband let us know that he was a Vietnam War veteran. He was a real loud-mouthed asshole–it was as though he’d practiced for this moment ever since Saigon fell. He did everything imaginable that day to reignite the Vietnam War. But our guide, a respectful young Vietnamese man, kept calm, letting the sore old loser blow off his steam. It added another layer of tension and entertainment to the whole Cu Chi Tunnels tour. Actually, just  walking around the cheap victory museum dedicated to my own country’s defeat made me feel like some neutered German tourist–isn’t that what post-war German tourists do, respectfully visit monuments to their defeat?

But the real action was the toothless rematch going on right here in Cu Chi: Old Veteran Guy  versus Young Wiry Vietnamese Guide. It went something like this: Our guide would show us some half-cheesy, half-horrifying commie exhibit on, say, Agent Orange, and our guide would say something like, “Agent Orange cause many death, many deformity for Vietnamese children, American government not recognize effects of illegal chemical war, refuse to pay reparations”…and the Texan would snarl, “Nope! Nope, nope, nope! Not true! No evidence! It’s all a crock, people, I know all about this, I was there. Agent Orange never hurt anyone–they’re just trying to get money from our government, that’s all.”

Or our guide would proudly relate how underdog Vietnamese, wearing shoes made out of torn tire treads, managed to defeat and outlast the mighty American imperial army. To which the veteran would bark, “Not true! You had the Russians backing you the whole time. You had an endless supply line of Russian weapons, Russian advisors, Russian and Chinese material. Don’t whitewash this little propaganda tour of yours, I know what happened! You cheated–you had all the help in the world!”

Or our guide would show us some of the clever ways that the Viet Cong concealed the entrances to their tunnels, and how they fooled the Americans with their earthy ingenuity; our veteran from Texas would literally walk over and stand between us and our skinny Vietnamese guide, and shout, “We could have pumped in poison gas into the tunnels, and it’d've all been over. I asked for poison gas, other commanders asked for poison gas too, believe me. The problem was that our side played fair–we were signatories to the Geneva Conventions. The jerks in Washington cared more about the Geneva Conventions than they cared about winning this war.”

The Americans winced and cowered. But our guide didn’t seem bothered–he seemed more worried that we would be dissatisfied tour customers. I realize now, his main goal was to make sure that the old veteran didn’t lodge a complaint.

“Our hands were tied because we couldn’t use poison gas–and let me tell you, if we were allowed to use chemical weapons or poison gas on those tunnels, we’d've saved a lot of lives, something the do-gooders in Washington couldn’t understand. So what could we do? We used fire hoses to pump in river water into the tunnel entrances that we found. That, or tear gas. But that was a waste of time. If we could have used poison gas on the communists in these tunnels here, it would have saved a lot of lives. A lot of lives.”

That was stunning–even this jerk had to couch his little fascist plans under the guise of “saving lives.” It crossed the line from asshole Ugly American to something almost downright impressive.

I kept waiting for our Vietnamese guide to blow a fuse or shout the old Texan down, or rip the vet’s cholesterol-hardened heart out with some Bruce Lee move and chomp it down while it was still beating, Jim Carrey-style. But our guide seemed genuinely empathetic, and genuinely worried that the tour would end badly. Maybe the guide had seen a lot of these types on his tour. Whatever the case, comparing the old loud-mouthed vet with this zen Vietnamese guide, you could see, in some small way, why and how we lost that war.

At the end of the tour, ol’ Texas veteran softened up, shook our guide’s hand, and congratulated him and the Vietnamese on their victory–a victory which, he now magnanimously conceded, they’d earned.

It was like witnessing the “25-years-later” scene of what happened to the Robert Duvall character decades after he wistfully declared, “Some day, this war’s gonna end…” Which is to say, there’s a reason why Coppola never filmed the 25-years-later scene.

Speaking of military advisers and cheaters…A few years ago, I faced another side of imperial humiliation when I reported on the Russia-Georgia war in South Ossetia. This time, the rumored advisors who officially didn’t exist were the American military advisors who backed and guided Georgia’s disastrous campaign. Here’s what I reported from the ruins of the decisive battle that, I wrote, would be remembered as the high-water mark for the teetering American empire:

Tskhinvali, South Ossetia – On the sunny afternoon of August 14, a Russian army colonel named Igor Konashenko is standing triumphantly at a street corner at the northern edge of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, his forearm bandaged from a minor battle injury. The spot marks the furthest point of the Georgian army’s advance before it was summarily crushed by the Russians a few days earlier. “Twelve Georgian battalions invaded Tskhinvali, backed by columns of tanks, armored personal carriers, jets, and helicopters,” he says, happily waving at the wreckage, craters, and bombed-out buildings around us. “You see how well they fought, with all their great American training — they abandoned their tanks in the heat of the battle and fled.”

Konashenko pulls a green compass out of his shirt pocket and opens it. It’s a U.S. military model. “This is a little trophy — a gift from one of my soldiers,” he says. “Everything that the Georgians left behind, I mean everything, was American. All the guns, grenades, uniforms, boots, food rations — they just left it all. Our boys stuffed themselves on the food,” he adds slyly. “It was tasty.” The booty, according to Konashenko, also included 65 intact tanks outfitted with the latest NATO and American (as well as Israeli) technology.

…During my visit to Georgia in 2003, if someone had told me that in five years American military advisers would be hightailing it from their main base in Vasiani to avoid getting slaughtered by advancing Russian forces, I would have slapped him with a rubber chicken for insulting my intelligence. Yet there they were: gasping for air in the lobby of the Tblisi Sheraton, insisting off the record that the conflict was all the Georgians’ fault, not theirs.

Some day, these wars are all gonna end. That day may come sooner than we care to think–and when it does come, it will likely be just one facet of a full-spectrum meltdown that will leave a lot of Americans holding bitterly fond memories of the wars that we were sure would never end.

The battlefield ruins of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

So now it’s official: I was right and the rest of the media was wrong about the war in Georgia last year. The EU just issued a report blaming Georgia for starting last year’s war with Russians. About 1 year and 1 month after I wrote the same thing. Unlike everyone else in the Western media, from the very start I wrote in The Nation that Georgia was to blame for starting the war, first here on Day 1 of the war, and then here a few days later.

Meanwhile, as I later wrote, the corporate media wrongly pinned all the blame for the war on a Stalinist/imperialist Russia bent on invading and taking back its former empire by force. Just as they did with the Iraq War, the media once again lied to us and almost dragged America into what they were calling a “New Cold War,” one of John McCain’s main campaign promises.

I took a lot of shit last year for not falling into line with the rest of the media over the war, so I’m going to take this opportunity to do a little Dirty Chicken dance on your faces:

EU report: Georgian attack started war with Russia

By RAF CASERT

(AP) – 2 hours ago

BRUSSELS — Georgia’s attack on its breakaway South Ossetia region marked the start of last year’s war with Russia, which retaliated with excessive force, an EU-commissioned report said Wednesday.

The report on the five-day war in August 2008 lay blame on both sides, but cited Georgia as starting the conflict with its night shelling in South Ossetia — an act it said was not justifiable under international law.

I guess we can expect mass firings in the media, and a giant bonus check my way for being right? Because America is a meritocracy, and being right gets rewarded, and being wrong gets you punished? Yeah? I’m waiting…

I wrote a lot about that war last year, in part because I went down to the war zone myself. I wrote about my experience there for the late great Radar magazine’s swansong issue–the article, “The Late Great American Empire,” remains one of my prouder moments as a lowly journalist. You can read it here.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

(This article first appeared in TheNation.com on May 11, 2009.)

The May 7 edition of the Washington Post features one of the most poorly timed op-ed commentaries in recent memory. Carrying the harmless headline “A Friend to Georgia and Russia,” it features the soothing bipartisan co-byline of Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Congressman David Dreier. The editorial argues that the best way to “reset” relations with Russia while at the same time support Georgia’s “fledgling” democracy would be–are you ready?–to enact a free trade agreement with Georgia.

There are only two problems with this position: 1) free trade agreements are widely considered to be a big cause of the mess America and Georgia are in today; and 2) Georgia doesn’t have a functioning democracy, as the tens of thousands of antigovernment protesters can attest. Just hours before the Kerry-Deier editorial was published, Georgian riot police brutally attacked protesters in the capital, Tblisi, using truncheons and rubber bullets, according to the protesters, sending dozens to the hospital, including some of the opposition leaders as well as several journalists. A popular singer turned protester, Giorgi Gachechiladze, was reportedly pinned to the ground by police and beaten with truncheons, breaking one of his ribs. Police reportedly were chanting the nickname of Georgia’s authoritarian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, during the melee.

Saakashvili chews on his tie during his disastrous  invasion of South Ossetia.

Pro-democracy demonstrations against the savvy English-speaking Georgian strongman first gelled in November 2007, when 100,000 people took to the capital’s center square to demand real democratic reforms. Saakashvili responded with force, sending in his Special Forces to brutally crush the demonstrations, shutting down the opposition media and imposing martial law, leading to worldwide criticism. Last year he nearly sparked World War III after recklessly invading South Ossetia and provoking a war with Russia, leading to war crimes accusations by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

Over the past few years, human rights organizations have increasingly condemned Georgia’s deteriorating democracy record, while most of Saakashvili’s prominent former allies have abandoned him for the opposition, accusing him of turning into a mini version of Vladimir Putin. Critics have been jailed and forced into exile; powerful figures mysteriously died, including a former prime minister and Georgia’s former top oligarch. Others have been harassed with classic police-state tactics, such as Nino Burjanadze, the former parliamentary speaker who co-led the 2003 Rose Revolution with Saakashvili, but who last year joined the opposition after accusing Georgia’s leader of creating a dictatorship. On the eve of the recent protests, members of Burjanadze’s party were arrested on trumped-up charges of allegedly trying to acquire weapons to stage a violent coup d’état.

In response to these crude attacks on Burjanadze, other former allies of Saakashvili’s, including his former prime minister as well as Georgia’s former UN ambassador, a figure popular among Western diplomats and journalists, rushed to her support. Both are now in the opposition calling for Saakashvili to resign and for democratic principles to be restored.

This past week, again, Saakashvili has been arresting figures in the military, accusing them of planning a coup. He regularly dismisses any opposition as a Russian plot to unseat him, which suggests that he’s spinning deeper and deeper into the sort of paranoia common to tinpot Third World dictators.

Yet none of this is mentioned in the Kerry-Deier commentary; rather, some variation of the word “democracy” appears seven times in their short editorial, reinforcing the sense that Georgia really has a democracy. Interestingly enough, the name of the country’s authoritarian strongman, Mikhail Saakashvili, doesn’t appear once.

From the moment Georgia launched its invasion against the breakaway region of South Ossetia this past August, sparking a wider war with neighboring Russia, the New York Times‘s news coverage depicted Georgia as an innocent victim of Russia’s neo-imperialist evil. In doing so, the Times engaged in the sort of media malpractice that it promised its readers wouldn’t happen again after its disastrous coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Probably no article captures how the Times took on the role of Georgia’s public-relations conduit better than correspondent Andrew Kramer’s puff piece on Georgia’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, “Rebuke of a President, in the Boom of Artillery,” published just four days after Georgia invaded South Ossetia.

The article glorifies Saakashvili’s alleged bravery under fire, claiming that his biggest fault was that he loved America too much, glossing over his widely criticized crackdown on opposition media and protesters; worse, Kramer claims that Saakashvili used only “soft power,” while Russia wielded “all the hard power,” in the war.

The Times stuck to its version of events for three months. It wasn’t until the November 7 front-page story, “ Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question,” that the newspaper essentially retracted its earlier reporting:

Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

Indeed. What the Times really should have asked, but so far hasn’t, is this: with so many reporters on the ground during the war, why did it take three months for the paper to get to the true version of events?

I can answer at least part of that question, because I was in South Ossetia covering the war for The Nation and Radar magazine. I saw how the Times generated articles from the Ossetian front and how its pro-Georgian slant drove its news reporting. And here is what I can tell you about the way this extremely important foreign story was framed.

Press pool photographing Georgian corpses from atop Russian APC. (Photo: Ames)

Articles don’t simply “happen” or “pass through” journalists; they are the product of people and organizations with vested interests, ego interests, ambition interests and, of course, business interests. The Georgia war, and the easy way that the New York Times fell into and actively pushed the neocon line about innocent Georgia invaded by evil Russia, is a product of deliberate decisions and resource allocations that I personally witnessed, much to my horror and frustration.

Disparate Reports

I first started to notice something wrong with the Western coverage shortly after I arrived in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, in Russia proper. The few Western correspondents in Ossetia were gathered around a table at the Vladikavkaz Hotel, gorging on food and beer after a long, miserable tour into South Ossetia’s ruins. The A-list Western correspondents were reporting from the Georgian side of the conflict. They all stayed in Georgia’s capital, Tblisi, in one of that city’s two Marriotts or in the Sheraton Hotel, with its fantastic amenities, food and wine–leaving the squalid, Russian/Ossetian side of the war zone to be covered by the second-stringers or just plain stringers.

That’s when our Kremlin minder, Sasha, appeared looking harassed and depressed. He asked us if he could join us for a few minutes. The correspondents grudgingly agreed.

“I don’t know what to do anymore, so I have to ask you guys honestly and openly,” Sasha said. “Look, I arranged to take everyone down to [the South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali. I showed you all of the destruction that the Georgian forces caused to the city. I didn’t try to tell you what to think, because first it would be counterproductive, and secondly, why would I need to? It’s so obvious what happened. And yet I get back here and now I’m seeing the stories you’re filing. It’s all about the poor Georgian victims, or that imperialist Russia is invading poor Georgia. You saw it yourselves! You saw what the Georgians did.” He slouched forward over the table. “You’re going to write what you’re going to write no matter what I show you. So what’s the point? Maybe I should give up.”

Under normal circumstances, this would be a classic Russian guilt trip. But it was clear even to us, even though we weren’t positively disposed to a Russian handler, that Sasha’s frustration was real. It was as if the Kremlin was so excited that for once in Putin’s term, the Russians lucked into being on the good guys’ side of a major news story, and it made no sense that the “free Western media” (which the Kremlin takes much more seriously than its own cowed media) wouldn’t see the truth, that they’d do the Russian thing and twist reality into propaganda. What was so shameful and embarrassing to me, an American journalist whose own Moscow-based newspaper, The eXile, had just been driven out of existence by these same Kremlin bastards, is that Sasha was rightly frustrated. A Kremlin minder right and the Western journalists wrong? What has this world come to when the Kremlin has a better grasp of the truth than the free Western media?

That’s when Matt Siegel, a young Moscow expat who was hired a week earlier by the New York Times to serve as its stringer-correspondent covering the Russian/Ossetian side of the war, spoke up. Siegel complained to Sasha that the real problem was the way Sasha was trying to manage the Western reporters. Siegel charged that Sasha didn’t give us greater access to ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia; his Times editor wanted a story on crimes committed against ethnic Georgians, which seemed to be what all Western editors wanted. (Georgian grievances were in big demand from the Western media’s home offices. My first day in North Ossetia, I joined Tom Parfitt of the Guardian and Andrew Osborn of the Wall Street Journal, driving around ethnic Georgian villages on the Russian side of the border, chasing false rumors that we’d heard from another Western correspondent that the Georgian inhabitants there had been attacked and cleansed. All we managed to do by going into those villages was to frighten the poor villagers. Later that day, Osborn and I went to makeshift Ossetian refugee centers to check out their claims of tens of thousands of refugees; their claims checked out.)

“We don’t want to be shown the same Tskhinvali ruins again and again,” Siegel complained. “We’ve already seen them, you know? You’re not giving us anything new.”

A Brit correspondent from ITN–who, like all the TV correspondents, wore a bulletproof vest long after even their own cameramen stopped wearing them–suddenly perked up from his beer: “It’s a cover-up!” he shouted. “You’re trying to cover it up!”

The real problem was this: the editors at their desks in the home countries weren’t interested in Ossetian suffering; they wanted to exaggerate the Georgian suffering and vilify the Russians. To the second-stringers at that table, being shown the awful truth of Georgian culpability was equivalent to being handed a bunch of losing lottery tickets–because Georgian culpability and Ossetian grievances simply weren’t in demand back in New York and Washington. There was a real sense of professional anger and desperation at the table, and Sasha sensed it.

Listen:

Mark Ames, author of “The Cold War That Wasn’t” in The Nation, discusses the U.S. media’s framing of the August war in South Ossetia between Georgia and Russia, the attempt to portray Russia as the aggressor by accusing them of launching a first-strike cyber war despite the lack of any evidence, the alleged poisoning of Ukraine’s Victor Yushchenko and the current dispute between Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko over her reaction to the Georgia war, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, the precedent set by U.S. intervention in Kosovo, the danger of putting “defensive” missiles in Eastern Europe while the U.S. foreign policy establishment contemplates first strike capability, U.S. NED support for the Russian National Bolsheviks, the “shock therapy” robbery of Russian resources under Yeltsin’s autocracy in the 1990s and the consequences.

MP3 here. (64:25)

This interview aired on Antiwar.com. Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

You may not have noticed it, but a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times slipped in a story that completely contradicted a narrative that it had been building up for two straight months, one that was leading America into another war–a so-called “New Cold War.” The article exposed the awful authoritarian reality of Georgia’s so-called democracy, painting a dark picture of President Mikhail Saakashvili’s rule that repudiated the fairy tale that the Times and everyone else in the major media had been pushing ever since war broke out in South Ossetia in early August. That fairy tale went like this: Russia (evil) invaded Georgia (good) for no reason whatsoever except that Georgia was free. Putin hates freedom, and Saakashvili is the “democratically elected leader” of a “small, democratic country.”

Yes, it was only a month ago that we were stupid and crazy enough to think that the United States had no choice but to launch a costly new cold war against a nuclear power, even though we still haven’t closed the deal on a couple of mini-wars against Division-III opponents, and we were on the verge of bankruptcy. Ah, to be blissfully naïve–and bloodthirsty at the same time–wasn’t it wonderful?

As the South Ossetia war raged in early- and mid-August, the Times published an editorial labeling Georgia’s invasion as “Russia’s War of Ambition“; it also published a series of hysterical op-eds, including William Kristol’s comparing Russia to Nazi Germany (Hitler’s charred skull must be spinning in its museum case from being turned into the cheapest cliché in the hack’s analogy box), and another from Svante E. Cornell of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins–the same corruption-plagued institute that ABC News discovered was taking money from Kazakhstan’s tyrant for issuing positive reports about that authoritarian oil-rich country.

Cornell ‘s piece argued that Russia attacked Georgia not in response to Georgia’s invasion of the breakaway South Ossetian province but rather because Russia was just plain evil–and, in the style of evil villains everywhere, Russia had no motive other than to show “the consequences post-Soviet countries will suffer for standing up to Moscow, conducting democratic reforms and seeking military and economic ties with the West.”

The hysteria of two months ago already seems so dated and even bizarre, from our mid-meltdown vantage–as if reading the hysteria from a black-and-white era.

And yet even as the hysteria gave way to serious questioning, and that dangerously simple narrative crumbled, the Times never recanted or corrected itself, never even had a fake mea culpa moment as it did after Iraq–an admission that came years too late. Instead of recanting, the Times took the sly road, slipping an article in between the meltdown stories that essentially told its readers, “Yeah, we screwed the pooch on Georgia, hope ya didn’t notice, and, uh, have a nice day.” Here’s a taste, from October 7, 2008 (“ News Media Feel Limits to Georgia’s Democracy,” by Dan Bilefsky and Michael Schwirtz):

TBILISI, Georgia–The cameras at Georgia’s main opposition broadcaster, Imedi, kept rolling Nov. 7, when masked riot police officers with machine guns burst into the studio. They smashed equipment, ordered employees and television guests to lie on the floor and confiscated their cellphones. A news anchor remained on-screen throughout, describing the mayhem. Then all went black…

Now, 11 months later, Georgia’s democratic credentials are again being questioned, and tested, as the country finds itself on the front line of a confrontation between Russia and the West. Georgia and its American backers, including the Republican and Democratic United States presidential contenders, have presented Georgia as a plucky little democracy in an unstable region, a country deserving of generous aid and NATO membership. But a growing number of critics inside and outside the country argue that it falls well short of Western democratic standards and cite a lack of press freedom as a glaring example.

It’s interesting that the Times published this exactly two months after Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia–a military decision so off-the-scale idiotic that to call it a “gamble” is an insult to struggling addicts like Bill Bennett.

The real question, then, is why the Times waited until this late to question its own position–why wait until the war was long off the front pages, to publish an article about what everyone with an ounce of journalistic curiousity already knew–that Saakashvili was about as much a democrat as he was a military genius?

The push in the West by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post to get a new cold war on hinged on two major fallacies: (1) that Russia invaded Georgia first, totally unprovoked, because Georgia is a “democracy”; and (2), that Georgia is a “democracy.”

It’s as if the Times deliberately forgot what it already reported about Saakashvili last year, after he sent in his goon squads to crush opposition protests:

“I think that Misha tends toward the authoritarian,” said Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer in the United States who taught Saakashvili when he was a student at Columbia Law School in the mid-1990s, later hired him at a law firm in New York and has remained friendly with him. “I would put it this way: there is a remarkable similarity between Misha and Putin, in terms of their attitudes about presidential prerogatives and authority,” Horton said. Like Putin, he added, Saakashvili has marginalized Parliament and taken to belittling the opposition.

Perhaps sensing that the Saakashvili-as-Thomas-Jefferson narrative was a wee bit vulnerable, the Times dug in to protect the other crumbling pillar of this fable: that Russia invaded Georgia first. Only this could explain its decision to go front-page with an “although there is no evidence, nevertheless, evidence suggests” article relying on evidence so absurdly flimsy that it would have made Sean Hannity nervous (from the edition of September 16, 2008, “ Georgia Offers Fresh Evidence on War’s Start,” by C.J. Chivers):

TBILISI, Georgia–A new front has opened between Georgia and Russia, now over which side was the aggressor whose military activities early last month ignited the lopsided five-day war. At issue is new intelligence, inconclusive on its own [bold mine--author], that nonetheless paints a more complicated picture of the critical last hours before war broke out….

Georgia is trying to counter accusations that the long-simmering standoff over South Ossetia, which borders Russia, tilted to war only after it attacked Tskhinvali. Georgia regards the enclave as its sovereign territory.

Talk about projecting: that last paragraph should have read: “The New York Times is trying to counter reality’s looming consequences on the paper’s damaged credibility.” Remember, this article came out long after most Western officials were coming around to the view expressed a few weeks earlier by the US ambassador in Moscow, who admitted that the Russians, rather than invading unprovoked, “responded to attacks on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, legitimately.”

I called up a few journalists in Moscow whom I left behind in August to ask them what they thought about this story, and most of them laughed at the Times‘s “scoop.”

“It was so clearly planted by Saakashvili out of desperation,” one American journalist told me. “I just can’t believe the Times is still pushing this line. Everyone knows he screwed up. Even if the taped phone calls are real, I’m sure the Georgians heard chatter like this every week, if not every day. It’s embarrassing, really.”

This wasn’t the only “although there’s no evidence, evidence suggests” Georgia articles that the Times pushed. Of all the Kremlin-villain tales that have become easy sells lately, nothing compares to the tale about the Kremlin allegedly waging “cyberwar” against its enemies.

For reasons I can’t understand, American readers are utterly horrified by the idea that a country would do what any group of pimple-faced geeks already does–hacking into or overloading servers and sites to shut them down. To many Americans, shutting down some boring, poorly translated government site is far more horrifying than, say, bombing weddings. The “Kremlin cyberwar” story is the chupacabra of Kremlin Evil tales–there’s no evidence that the Kremlin has waged cyberwar, but yet, it’s so damn scary, and it sells papers, so why not print it?

The Estonians first tried suckering the West with the cyber-chupacabra a year ago, but subsequent investigation revealed that it was one of those “unprovables” at best.

But it’s a hot story. So on August 13, with the Russia-Georgia conflict still hot, the Times, scrambling for a new angle on Russian evil, published this Kremlin chupacabra story, titled “Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks:”

According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war…. Exactly who was behind the cyberattack is not known…. The evidence on R.B.N. and whether it is controlled by, or coordinating with the Russian government remains unclear.

“Jumping to conclusions is premature,” said Mr. Evron, who founded the Israeli Computer Emergency Response Team.

Yeah, but jumping to conclusions is so much fun, Mr. Party Pooper! Jump forward again to mid-September. It’s becoming clear by this time that Saakashvili is neither a democrat nor an innocent victim. But the Times and other American media were still heavily invested in that narrative, so while they were scrambling around for ways to shore it up, Germany’s Der Spiegel published an investigative piece–” Did Saakashvili Lie? The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader“–that showed their American counterparts basic Journalism 1A reporting:

Five weeks after the war in the Caucasus the mood is shifting against Georgian President Saakashvili. Some Western intelligence reports have undermined Tbilisi’s version of events, and there are now calls on both sides of the Atlantic for an independent investigation.

This story was published the same day as the Times‘s “exposé” about phone conversations that the Georgians allegedly taped allegedly showing that Russia invaded first–even though everyone had already abandoned that theory. Der Spiegel‘s piece is an in-depth investigation spanning countries, viewpoints and organizations. For the Times, “investigation” meant taking some tape cassettes from Saakashvili’s desk and reporting them on the front pages.

If this wasn’t bad enough, a few days later even Condi Rice gave a speech blaming Georgia for starting the war (couched in a larger condemnation of Russian overreaction).

The timing couldn’t have been worse: the Times had just been caught with its Saakashvili-enamored pants down in a way that even its competitors had managed to avoid. Soon they would be facing a massive credibility reckoning.

This was something I was looking forward to.

Ever since I went down to South Ossetia to see the war for myself, I’d developed a kind of sick curiosity to see just how the Times and all the others were going to extricate themselves from the credibility-hole they’d dug. I had a feeling it was going to come, because Saakashvili was not only a blatant liar but an incredibly bad liar. I was in South Ossetia at the close of the war–I saw the destruction that the “freedom-loving” Georgians wreaked, and the bloated, rotting corpses on the streets of the province’s capital city, Tskhinvali–so I was particularly interested in how long the sleazy tale of good vs. evil would last, and how the major media would squirm their way out of their biggest journalistic fiasco since the Iraqi-WMD blooper. Would the Times let their ombudsman out of the cage for another fake apology? “Oops! Who’da thunk our esteemed newspaper coulda screwed up this big twice in a row, dragging America into yet another war all on account of our inability to do our job as journalists?! Look, we just want to say we’re sorry and move on, m’kay? So, have you moved on yet? Because we have.”

And this is where the secular-humanist god of the liberal media intervened. The Times and everyone else who peddled the neocon/Saakashvili line was saved from facing up to their colossal failure by an even bigger disaster, the worst disaster to hit this country since 9/11: the global economic meltdown. Someone’s prayers were answered.

One of the prayer kingdom’s biggest secrets is how common these “I hope a disaster comes and saves me” whispers are. For example, when I was a college student, every time finals week approached, I wanted to get hit by a car. Final exams meant facing the unbearable shame of four wasted months. So I’d slip on my headphones, zig off of the sidewalk and zag into Berkeley’s traffic-clogged streets like an unleashed Irish setter, waiting for some hippie to splatter me on his VW van windshield. If it meant spending the next twenty years on a feeding tube, that seemed a fair tradeoff.

But the hippie drivers, with their insane respect for pedestrians, wouldn’t cooperate. Like the evangelical Christian’s apocalypse, my prayed-for mega-disaster that would save me from my private mini-disaster never arrived.

In that sense, the Times and all the other Saakashvili pom-pom-ers were lucky: the VW van that never hit me during finals week leveled the entire planet’s financial well-being, saving journalism’s biggest names from owning up to their failure. And the unmistakable evidence for this failure just keeps pouring in: today, for example, Reporters Without Borders ranked Georgia near the bottom of its press freedom index–well below notoriously despotic nations like Tajikistan, Gabon and even Hugo Chávez’s villainous Venezuela. So yes, thank [NAME OF OMNISCIENT BEING] for the financial meltdown, because even though it may mean pink slips for many of the reporters and editors who screwed up the Georgia story, I have a funny feeling that when they’re standing in the soup kitchen line a few months from now, they’ll be thinking with relief, “Homelessness may suck, but it’s a small price to pay for avoiding the colossal shame I was about to face over the Georgia war story. Thank you, global depression! You’ve made this journalist happy!”

This article first appeared in The Nation. Buy his book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion.

I was in Georgia last week researching a magazine story on the Russo-Georgian conflict, when I stumbled upon the shuttered Russian embassy in Tbilisi. The gated compound looked normal — no bullet holes or anti-Russian graffiti — but there was a mysterious pile of trash dumped right in front of the building’s main gate. There was a sign on the ground, too, that according to a Georgian security guard read something like this: “This is a Russian soldier’s toilet.”

And if you look closely, there is actually a cracked porcelain john lying at the far end of the mess (check out the second pic below). The funny thing is that no one, including the guards posted at the embassy 24/7, seemed to know how the trash got there. Nor did they care. People were just going about their business as if it didn’t exist. In fact, the trash seemed to be protected, sectioned off by specially placed red police tape.

All in all, this ain’t much of a fuck you to the Russians, but with russkie troops still crawling all around the edges of town just hoping the Georgians will start some shit, this is the bravest fuck-you the Georgians can muster.

Yasha Levine is an American journalist living in Moscow. You can reach him at levine@exiledonline.com.

*****

America’s chickenhawks are ready to turn Georgia into a nation of missing-relative-seeking refugees.

I’d hate to be Georgia right now. So many American pundits have plans for the Georgians, brilliant schemes designed to get Georgia into a big war with the Russians. “Here’s what you oughta do….” It’s like listening in on bar talk—some drunk trying to talk a 98-pound weakling into a rematch with the hulking thug who just put him on the floor. Funny thing, they never want to prove their theory themselves.

The backseat generals started early. On August 16, a week after the fighting between Russian and Georgian troops started, the neocon magazine Weekly Standard featured a chirpy, upbeat article listing all the hardware we could ship to the Georgians to help them fight a nice, long, bloody guerrilla war.

It was classic Tom Clancy stuff, all based on the idea you make war with stuff, not people. These guys just won’t face the fact that for the guerrilla, the key weapon, the only weapon that matters, is people—and starting a guerrilla war means sentencing most of the people in your address book to a very nasty death.

Now we’ve got Sarah Palin, everybody’s favorite sniper-mom, volunteering to go to war with Russia over South Ossetia.

As far as I know, Palin isn’t volunteering to go there herself. She sticks to targets that don’t shoot back, like moose. But then that’s what all these eager volunteers have in common: none of them are actually going to go over and fight the Russians themselves, and as far as I know none of them even thought about asking the poor Georgians whether they’re up for the sheer Hell of a guerrilla war. All the Georgians wanted was to join NATO, make a little money and maybe get a used car. They’re like a guy who joins the Army for a college scholarship and finds himself on the front lines—except they’re not even in NATO yet. We’re volunteering them to make the ultimate sacrifice and we haven’t even let them in the club yet.

The absolute craziest cheerleading came out of an article in DoD buzz by Greg Grant, quoting an anonymous Department of Defense source who wants Georgia to become the new Hezbollah.

Greg’s anonymous warmonger got a big, way-too-enthusiastic boost from Noah Schachtman who writes for this lame-named war site, “The Danger Room,” in Wired magazine. His article, “Should Georgia Become A Black Sea Hezbollah?” seems to come up with a gung-ho answer, basically, “Sure! Do it!” Wrong question, and definitely wrong answer.

I’m pretty sure if you asked any Georgians, they’d screech, “Agh! No! We don’t want to live like Hezbollah, cowering in our huts under constant bombardment, raising kids with no prospects but martyrdom!” But then the neocons haven’t asked anybody in Georgia. Safe in their living rooms, they think it’d be a great idea for Georgia, a very unwarlike little middle-class country, to try to imitate the Lebanese Shia who make up Hezbollah’s suicide squads.

The strangest thing about these articles is that they just drip admiration for Hezbollah. It’s weird to find American defense pundits praising Hezbollah all of a sudden. I’ve been talking up Hezbollah’s military wing for years, and all I got was a lot of abuse.

Back when Israel and Hezbollah fought in 2006, every mainstream military pundit was assuring America that Israel would soon drive Hezbollah out of South Lebanon. I said no chance, and eventually, without admitting they were wrong and I was right, the pundits have changed their minds. Now they just love Hezbollah and want our poor Georgian allies to imitate Hezbollah. But these armchair Rambos just don’t get it. You can’t take a peace-loving, middle-class Georgian and make him into a Hezbollah guerrilla. You have to start with the right kind of people, because guerrilla war—I keep having to repeat this—is about people. It’s not gadgets, it’s not clever strategies, it’s not a McGyver episodes. It’s being willing to accept a level of misery and death the average American can’t imagine. Won’t imagine. That’s what it takes. That’s why I knew Hezbollah would win the 2006 war with Israel: because they have been through decades of misery, cluster bombs raining down on their miserable villages, raids by the proxy-force South Lebanon Army—and through it all, Hezbollah has been doing the slow, boring work of organizing the dirt-poor Shia, providing basic services, suffering with them and preparing them for the big fight. That’s what makes a good guerrilla army: misery channeled into paramilitary organization. That’s what made it possible for the Shia to force the Israelis out of Lebanon, and then fight them to a stalemate when they tried to come back in 2006: because they’d been living rough, poor and hopeless for a long time, then had that misery turned into a coldblooded willingness to die. That’s the un-cool, no-fun side of guerrilla warfare: the guerrillas lose way, way more people than the armies fighting them.

And it’s not just the terrible deaths, it’s the sheer misery, years of it, that leads up to those deaths. Maybe these gung-ho guys who want the Georgians to start a guerrilla war could just stop a second and imagine what it’s actually like to live through that kind of Hell. We’ll start with the relatively light stuff. If you’re a family from an insurgent area, the first thing you notice is that you no longer have electric light or running water. It’s standard counterinsurgency practice to bomb insurgent communities’ water and power sources. We generally just flick past that part of the news stories to more “serious” things, like casualty figures. But it’s not so trivial if you’ve ever tried to live without water and power, especially when you’re trying to take care of kids. They don’t bomb the power plant by accident, or because they’re bad people. It’s standard counterinsurgency pratice to make life unbearable for the civilians who back the guerrillas. The enemy escalates your misery, day after day, from cutting off your medical supplies, power and water to random artillery strikes and air attacks on anybody who goes outside to get a loaf of bread.

Then come the kidnappings, the reprisal killings, the massacres. Again: not accidental “atrocities” but standard military practice. There’s a standard figure for guerrilla warfare that for every soldier the guerrillas kill, they can expect to lose ten people from their own community. But that’s a very conservative figure.  It can go much, much higher. It’s a lot easier to kill the civilians who support the guerrillas than to catch the guerrillas themselves. That’s how the British brought the Boers to the negotiating table: couldn’t catch the Boer guerrillas so they put the whole Boer civilian population in concentration camps to die of every African plague they had going. Worked real well: 25% of the whole Boer population died and the Boer guerrillas out in the veldt went insane with grief, gave up the war—which they were winning, militarily.  Think of all the people you know, everybody in your family, and randomly cross out a quarter of their pictures from your little family album. That’s the price Georgia would pay if they were foolish enough to listen to Wired magazine.

If neocons have their way, Georgian civilians will wind up like Chechens on justsickshit.com

It comes down to pure, grim arithmetic: the size of the civilian population backing the guerrillas, their birth rate, and the size and birth rate of the enemy army. And from that perspective things look very bad for Georgia. There are more than 140 million people in Russia and Moscow has had no problem recruiting mercenaries, “kontraktniki,” to serve in Chechnya. They’ve done it so well in Chechnya that they’ve just about killed off all the Chechen males of military age. You can do that with small populations. It’s what we did by proxy in El Salvador, a nice small country, and it’s what the Russians would do in Georgia if the Georgians really were stupid enough to play Red Dawn with them.

Here’s what these American Hezbollah fans’ daydream would mean if you’re a Georgian civilian during an anti-Russian insurgency: the door gets kicked in at 3 am and a squad of mercenaries comes in firing from the hip. If your family doesn’t die in their beds it’s because the contraktniki have a use for some or all of you. The uses can be gang-rape if you’re a woman or girl, ransom if they think you or your relatives have money, or interrogation if you were unlucky enough to grow up with some of the local insurgents. It doesn’t matter to them if you’re a pacifist, if you’ve spent your life avoiding the local hotheads who run the insurgency. They’re going to torture you anyway, and whether you talk or not they’re going to kill you when they’re done, most likely in some way involving power drills or gasoline because that’s also standard counterinsurgency practice.

And even when you’re dead they’re not through with you. They’re going to drive an army truck up to your family’s shattered house next morning and dump your body in the mud outside so your mother and sister can see exactly what they did to you.

Hezbollah was able to endure the misery of guerrilla war for a lot of reasons—none of which apply to Georgia at all. Hezbollah’s backers are impoverished Shia Muslims, who are in love with martyrdom, have no possessions to speak of, and have a very high birth rate. It may sound brutal, but high birthrates are basic to guerrilla war, for the simple reason that a lot of people are going to be massacred—dozens of your people for every enemy soldier the guerrillas kill.

The Georgian bithrate is very low, 10.87 per thousand. That’s barely better than Germany (9.35) and about half of Lebanon’s—and the Shia population has a much higher rate than the overall Lebanese rate. The Chechens are another people with a very high birth rate, the highest by far of any former Soviet people.

But the total size of the population matters too. the Chechen population is small enough that the Russians have simply killed most of the young men willing to fight them, because there are (or were) only about 1.5 million Chechens. Georgia is also a very small country, with a total population of 4.6 million.

The Georgians just aren’t the kind of desperate, poor community that can handle a guerrilla war. Georgians always have had a rep for smart businessmen. All they wanted was to join NATO and have decent lives; they didn’t sign up to go through what the Shia or the Chechens have suffered. They’re not desperate or young or crazy enough for a guerrilla war, luckily for them.

I’ve been wondering why so-called “experts” just don’t understand the sheer Hell involved in starting a guerrilla war. I think one reason is that we take the American Revolution as the classic example of guerrilla fighting. Well, it wasn’t typical. It was the cleanest-fought semi-guerrilla war in history. Except for “Bloody” Tarleton in the Carolinas, the Brits fought relatively cleanly against us, for the simple reason that the rebels were white English-speaking Protestants the redcoats had been going to dances with a few months earlier. That’s not how most counterinsurgency armies fight, and it sure isn’t typical of British counterinsurgency. Ask the Kikuyu, or the Boers, even the Scots, about that. In the English Civil War, both sides fought pretty clean while it was English-on-English, but when Cromwell’s army headed north to crush the Scots’ rebellion, they took mighty few prisoners. And when they crossed over to Ireland—ugh, you don’t wanna know.
The Russians, the opponent these armchair guerrillas are setting little Georgia up to fight, aren’t even squeamish about massacring their own people, let alone foreign insurgent civilians. You’d think people would know that, after what’s happened in Chechnya over the last 14 years of war. The Chechens say they lost at least 100,000 dead in the First Chechen War alone.

Nobody’s sure how many have died in the Second Chechen War, but we know they died in really horrible ways, because this was a war between death squads, Russian and Chechen death squads looking for anybody who they thought supported the other side. Those people were snatched, died in sheer agony, and either didn’t get found or were dumped where their families could find them, just for the horror of it. And those who survived had sufferings of their own. Rape is basic strategy in this kind of war, and so is burning houses and driving civilian populations from their homes. At least one third of the total Chechen population had to flee their homes at least once.

After years of fighting the Russians, there are so few men of military age left in Chechnya that the insurgents have to drop their Islamic rules and let Chechen war widows volunteer for suicide missions, like the group that occupied a Moscow musical theater in 2002.

By the time a “war widow” is ready to take over a Moscow theatre and plant bombs around the exits, she’s seen a lot more than her husband’s death. She’s lived through something that we can’t even imagine. In fact, guys like these so-called experts at Wired seem to be trying real hard not to imagine what would happen to the Georgians if they took this insane advice.  It’s way more fun, I guess, if you don’t think too hard about what you’re asking these people to do.

This article first appeared on Alternet.

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

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You probably didn’t know that CNN censored Putin for being just too darn sensible. Yep, it’s true. About two weeks ago, Putin gave the network an exclusive 30-minute interview. And you know what happened? Nothing. It was never allowed to air. CNN doesn’t know it yet, but that decision might have cost them their Russian broadcasting rights.

On August 29, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with senior political correspondent Matthew Chance for a CNN exclusive interview. “This was unprecedented access to Russia’s powerful prime minister, the former KGB spy now increasingly at odds with Washington,” an overly dramatic voice-over introduced the segment as Chance and Putin enjoyed pre-game banter and a walk through the courtyard of Putin’s palatial Sochi residence. Once seated, Chance didn’t waste any time with his provocative questions:

Matthew Chance: But it’s been no secret either that for years you’ve been urging the West to take more seriously Russia’s concerns about international issues. For instance, about NATO’s expansion, about deployment of missile defense systems in eastern Europe. Wasn’t this conflict a way of demonstrating that in this region, it’s Russia that’s the power, not NATO and certainly not the United States?

Vladimir Putin: Of course not. What is more, we did not seek such conflicts and do not want them in the future.

That this conflict has taken place—that it broke out nevertheless—is only due to the fact that no one had heeded our concerns.

I think both you and your—our—viewers today will be interested to learn a little more about the history of relations between the peoples and ethnic groups in this regions of the world. Because people know little or nothing about it.

If you think that this is unimportant, you may cut it from the program. Don’t hesitate, I wouldn’t mind.

It was a prescient comment. Not only did CNN delete Putin’s historical roundup of relations between Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia going back to the 18th century that followed, the network cut out almost everything else as well. Despite the “unprecedented access” hook, for its U.S. feed, CNN reduced the 30-minute interview into a series of sound bites that seized and ridiculed Putin’s crackpot theory that the Republican party started the war to boost McCain’s ratings. CNN’s international audience, enjoying the news from hotel rooms all round the world, got to see a little more of the footage. But most of it had to do with Russia’s ridiculous “non-political” decision to ban some American poultry importers from doing business with Russia because of their poor quality control standards. CNN’s intentions were clear: Putin must come off looking like a fool. And it seemed Putin gave them the perfect material. Embargoes on dead chickens and global neocon conspiracies? Gosh, what serious self-respecting world leader would start talking this kind of gibberish? Even Ahmadinejad doesn’t sink that low. Well, the chicken meat embargo might have been a little weak, but the neocon conspiracy I’m not so sure about. But more on that later.  (You can see the heavily edited interview clips on CNN website, but the network never made the full version available. But you can see it on Russian TV.)

Not surprisingly, this didn’t go down none too good with the Prime Minister. See, as it turns out, when Putin told CNN he wouldn’t mind if they cut some of his comments, he wasn’t exactly being honest. Not only did he mind, but he was sovereignly pissed off to find the entire interview censored. After all, he is the one that usually does the censoring. And it’s not like he gives out TV interviews every month, or even every year. If I’m not mistaken, the last interview Putin gave to American TV was waaaay back in 2000, when he was on Larry King Live making crude comments about the sinking of the Kursk submarine.

And then there’s the issue of Saakashvili’s CNN time. Just in the past month, Saakashvili has appeared a dozen times on the network giving interviews averaging 5 to 10 minutes each. As CNN correctly pointed out, Putin is a former KGB spy, so he knows all the details, down to the nearest second. And that’s exactly why he’s taken it as a personal insult from CNN’s headquarters (and probably more proof of an international media/government conspiracy against him). But he just might have the last word.

The word on the street here is Putin is out for blood. It’s payback time. According to a source with high-level government connections, the Russians are planning punitive actions against CNN. At this point, it is just a rumor, but they are preparing to kick out about half of the half-dozen Western journalists working at CNN’s Moscow bureau. Sooner or later they’re going to have to apply for a visa renewal and that’s when it’s gonna go down. They’ll be denied, clean and quiet like. We can only pray that the tool Matthew Chance is up for a new visa soon.

Matthew Chance: the soon-to-be-jobless hack.

So why did CNN decide to cut the interview? The thing is, Putin came off pretty darn well. Sure, the chicken embargo was embarrassing, but the McCain/neocon conspiracy theory wasn’t as crazy as some would want you to believe. Gary Brecher has been saying all along that this little war had the mark of a half-baked neocon plan for world domination. As Gary says, Georgia’s move makes no sense at all from a Georgian perspective. Somebody must have told those idiots they’d be safe to retake South Ossetia. And who better than Cheney?

In general, Putin was able to strike an unusually sympathetic chord during the interview. It sure wasn’t anything like the grotesque interview he gave eight years ago, where he made that cruel “it sank” Kursk joke. This time around, he was level headed, reasonable and, most importantly, very convincing and believable—not what you’d expect from the evil Stalin/Hitler hybrid personality being pushed on the American public. And that worried the hell out of CNN editorial staff, enough to make them crudely censor the entire thing and hope no one noticed.

So, what parts of Putin did CNN leave on the cutting room floor?

Putin the anti-Stalinist:

Therefore, those who insist that those territories must continue to belong to Georgia are Stalinists: They defend the decision of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. [It was Stalin who first split up Ossetia and gave the southern half to Georgia.]

Putin the caring:

For us, it is a special tragedy, because during the many years that we were living together the Georgian culture—the Georgian people being a nation of ancient culture — became, without a doubt, a part of the multinational culture of Russia….[C]onsidering the fact that almost a million, even more than a million Georgians have moved here, we have special spiritual links with that country and its people. For us, this is a special tragedy.

Putin the peaceful:

You and I are sitting here now, having a quiet conversation in the city of Sochi. Within a few hundred kilometers from here, U.S. Navy ships have approached, carrying missiles whose range is precisely several hundred kilometers. It is not our ships that have approached your shores; it’s your ships that have approached ours. So what’s our choice?

We don’t want any complications; we don’t want to quarrel with anyone; we don’t want to fight anyone. We want normal cooperation and a respectful attitude toward us and our interests. Is that too much?

Putin the conscientious businessman:

Construction of the first gas pipeline system was started during the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and for all those years, from the 1960s until this day, Russia has been fulfilling its contract obligations in a very consistent and reliable way, regardless of the political situation.

We never politicize economic relations, and we are quite astonished at the position of some U.S. administration officials who travel to European capitals trying to persuade the Europeans not to buy our products, natural gas for example, in a truly amazing effort to politicize the economic sphere. In fact, it’s quite pernicious.

It’s true that the Europeans depend on our supplies but we too depend on whoever buys our gas. That’s interdependence; that’s precisely the guarantee of stability.

Yasha Levine is an American journalist based in Moscow. You can reach him at levine@exiledonline.com.

*****

It’s been tons of funs watching the dust settle over South Ossetia, watching everybody go crazy and do their best to avoid the fact that Putin kicked our proxy ass. If you’ve ever wondered how countries deal with military defeat, wonder no more, because you’ve just lived through it, and if you watched any tv, you saw loser propaganda in action 24/7.

It’s something you’ve almost got to admire (remember that “almost”), the way people put their hands on their ears and hum away the bad news. I can imagine Hitler down in the bunker in his last days: “Ah, vee are holding zee Russians off in zee alley two blocks vrom here! Vee have a full squad of twelve-year old veterans mit almost five bullets left, plenty of materiel! If zat alley holds out, perhabz an army of Aryan ghosts vill come to zee rezz-cue like in mein dream last night!”

It’s not quite that bad, OK, but it’s still a hoot to see grown men making up stories to make themselves feel better. My old public-library war porn mag, Aviation Week, ran a whole series of dumb-ass tech-geek stories about how the Georgian air defenses were “winning,” with headlines like “Georgia Burns Russian Air Force.”

What all that amounted to was that the Georgians shot down four Russian planes, three Su-25s and a recon bomber. Considering that Russia has about 250 Su-25s in service, and the sheer Hell the Russian CAS inflicted on Georgian armored units, that’s a very small price for the Russkies to pay. The only way Aviation Week could make it look like the Georgians had kicked ass was by comparing the Georgians’ performance with the Syrian air defense vs. Israel. The Syrians’ total kills was, you guessed it, zero. That’s the same score they always rack up, has been since 1982. If it’s a Syria vs. Israel dogfight, you can put up the Syrian half of the scoreboard before the game even starts: a big Arabic goose egg. I’d have a better chance than Syria if you gave me a driver’s side mirror and sent me out into the yard to try to blind incoming pilots with the reflection. Or I could stand by the nearest air force runway and yell stuff, try to hurt the pilots’ feelings: “Helmet hair, helmet hair!” I’d outscore the Syrian air defense net easy.

Casualties are no way to score a war anyway, not unless you know how much the attacker considers “unacceptable.” And this is the Russians we’re talking about: they’re not squeamish, whatever else you can say about them. I don’t read the Russian press, but I can bet they’re not wringing their hands over those four pilots shot down, or the few soldiers they lost in the ground war—and they didn’t lose that many anyway; nobody’s even pretending the ground war was anything but a rout.

Consider the way we think about casualties and you’ll see what a tricky calculation it is. Remember when we lost 18 men in Mogadishu in Clinton’s day? That was so horrifying we left Somalia instasntly. So when the 2004 elections came around, I remember some stupid pundit betting his last creds that if US casualties topped a thousand KIA by Nov. 5, Bush was outta there. Well they did, and he wasn’t. We’d adjusted our idea of unacceptable casualties quite a bit already.

From what I know about Russians, I’d say they consider a year without casualties way worse than one where they kick ass in a small war like Ossetia. I read somewhere that Russian villagers used to organize village vs. village fights where every man in the village would get a big club and form a line, then walk into a line of guys from the next village, trying to hit a home run on your neighbor’s skull. They called it “Wall vs. Wall.” The Soviet Army actually had to make that little game illegal in the 1950s because they were having too hard a time recruiting. It seems two out of three village kids were maimed or braindamaged or dead, thanks to “Wall vs. Wall” games, by the time they hit drafting age. And proud of it.

So it’s very, very dicey using losses to make your point. Losing a few men in a winning battle probably made the folks in Moscow happy. People are pretty good at handling casualties, till it’s their own leg getting blown off. Hell, nobody remembers the French lost 1.5 million men out of a population of 40 million in WW I. And they held. They had to put down a lot of frontline mutinies—that’s where Petain made his name–and shoot a lot of gloomy Gustaves (“Cheer up, mon ami, or better yet we’ll shoot you to cheer up the others!”) but they held. So please, don’t tell me that losing four CAS aircraft is going to keep Putin awake nights. Hell, he probably gets his cut on every new Su-25 built, so replacement orders are good news for him.

All you had to do was listen to the new Russian front man, Medvedev, talking to Sarkozy and the Western press to see how cocky the Russians are feeling. Medvedev is one of these short guys, so he loves nothing better than flipping off the world. And that’s what he did, not even pretending to play nice: “We’re staying in South Ossetia for good, we’re staying in Abkhazia, get used to it, Losers!” It was pretty much that simple.

What the war really meant was that Russia found a way to use all that conventional weaponry they paid so much for. It’s not easy these days for a big power to get its money’s worth on all that conventional hardware. It just doesn’t apply to most contemporary warfare; it’s like trying to fix a skin ulcer with a bulldozer. So when a big country can finally unleash all that expensive hardware like we did in the first Gulf War, and Russia just did against Georgia, you can hear the sex-grunt on the home front as loud as through a Motel Six wall, “Oh yeah yeah YEAH! Armored thrust! Oh yeah, GRAD, GRAD, GRAD!”

What it takes is a weak country trying to play like the big boys. That’s what Saddam did against us, and that’s what the Georgians did with a little whispering-in-the-ear from their new neocon friends. These guys are living in the past. You don’t take land these days by sending your lame little conventional army into a place like Kuwait or South Ossetia that’s protected by the big players. That’s dumb. You either make a deal with the big power to betray their local client, like the Indonesians in the sixties persuaded the CIA to let them have the eastern half of New Guinea in return for massacring the whole membership list of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, or you infiltrate some of your ethnic group in there, peasants who don’t know how to do anything but pop out babies, and wait for the demographic map to change—you know, the Kosovo strategy.

The biggest tactical mystery of the Ossetia war is still the Roki Tunnel, as in, why didn’t the Georgians blow it up? Some interesting stuff has come out since the dust settled. Well, new to me anyway. Like did you know that the Georgians actually did try to blow up that tunnel way back in 1991?

Yup, and they used exactly the method I suggested in my last column, before I even knew they’d already tried it: they sent a truck full of high explosives into the tunnel and blew it up.

I admit I got that idea driving through the Caldecott tunnel to Emeryville, where I spent some time this summer to get away from the Fresno heat. Every time I go into that tunnel I think about how wonderful it would be to make my last commute in a gasoline tanker full of high-octane fuel, with a deadman switch in my hand connected to a detonator duct-taped to the side of the fuel tank. It’d be so damn easy. They don’t even check trucks coming into the tunnel. And you can hijack a gas truck easy: just stage a fake accident, shoot the driver, move the body over to the passenger side and off you go. Commuting to SF and Oakland would get a lot more interesting for a few months, or years.

I’m not saying it would disable the tunnel forever; that’s a tricky prospect. That article I’ve linked to about the Georgians’ 1991 attempt to blow up the tunnel has some interesting stuff about how you go about really destroying a tunnel. Seems you have to know the geology of the rock it’s built into. The Roki tunnel apparently was built on a mix of granite and sand. If you blow up your truck under the granite, you’ve got a chance to repair the break, but if you do it smart and blast a section that’s dug through sand, it’s almost impossible to repair the break.

Of course the Georgians didn’t really have to destroy the tunnel totally, just close it down long enough to keep the Russian Army from reinforcing on the ground. That should have been do-able, with their inventory of planes and air-to-ground guided munitions. You know, I wonder if they fell for that same casualty-shy thinking that you see in the Aviation Week article trying to gloat over downed Russian planes. It’s a problem for American-advised armies; we worry too much about casualties sometimes. I can’t help wondering if the Georgians thought about attacking the tunnel mouth by air and backed off because they thought they’d lose planes. Which they probably would have. And so what? It would have been worth it, way worth it. If you think coldbloodedly about it, blocking that tunnel was worth way more than shooting down a few Russian planes over South Ossetia (if the Georgian AF even did shoot them down; from what I’ve heard, it was SAMs that got those Su-25s). It was a God-given chance to take the upper hand. How often do you fight a campaign where there’s only one road into the battlezone? Incredible they didn’t spend every plane, every commando, every dollar they had getting to that tunnel.

I say “every dollar” because one advantage of dealing with the Russian army is simple old bribery. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to bribe Russian troops. When that crazy Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev was driving his convoy of guerrillas deep into Russia, he had to pass all kinds of Russian Army checkpoints. He dealt with them real simple: “Here’s ten rubles, we’re coming through!” Incredible. You have to understand, Russians and Chechens hate each other like poison, but these Russian troops were willing to let a convoy of Chechen killers armed to the roof racks through their roadblocks just for vodka money. And from what I hear, the Georgians have a long history of playing the Russian system, oiling the wheels with a little baksheesh. Why didn’t they offer to make the guards at the tunnel mini-oligarchs in return for a little help stacking boxes of HE inside the tunnel and running a wire back to the detonator? I just don’t get it.

There’s some kind of big strategic hole at the center of this campaign, when you look at it from the Georgian perspective. It just doesn’t make any sense. I kind of get the feeling somebody in Tbilisi made the fatal mistake of believing what they were getting told by Dick Cheney. Next to marching on Moscow in September, that’s the deadliest thing a war leader can do.

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

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Here’s some more cool combat vids for you desk casualties. This time it’s Georgian troops shooting the Hell out of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on the day they rolled in to retake the province after Bush and Cheney promised them the Russians wouldn’t dare do a thing. So it didn’t work out all that great, but on that first day, when it was Georgian upgraded T-72s vs. Ossetian civvies with AK-47s, our little allies had themselves a real barnburner of a time, and luckily, one of them took these vids to show his little Facebook friends.

This vid shows the happiest man in Georgia on that day (August 8), some Georgian redneck doing exactly what we’ve all dreamed of doing: rolling down the main drag of an enemy city with both hands on a heavy machine gun, looking for any civilian dumb enough to poke his or her head up. This guy actually yells, “Yee-haw!” every now and then, after firing off a short burst at an apartment building or park. It’s so much like an American “Yee-haw!” I can’t help wondering if he learned it special, from those Special Forces instructors we sent down there to teach the Georgians how to fight. He’s easy to please, this guy; he’s sitting there holding a big gun with nice easy D-grips for both hands, with a huge ox-tongue trigger he can trip with his thumb, and every now and then he fires a burst into a tree just to keep those Ossetian squirrels from going insurgent. I’m going to dream of this one for a long, long time.

This one is guys doing the same thing, rolling down a dusty Ossetian street taking small arms fire, but they don’t seem to be having as much fun with it. Maybe because this one’s filmed inside some jeep-thing that doesn’t seem to have any armament. Or maybe the weapon is up top and I can’t see it in the video. The guys in the vehicle yell at each other nonstop but since they’re talking Georgian, I have no idea what they’re saying. All I know is they don’t sound near as happy as the man with the machine gun. Probably it’s the usual chatter you hear on combat-vehicle videos, a mixture of backseat drivers telling the driver where to turn and the squad coward screeching about an imaginary enemy tank coming around the corner. They’re hiding, this bunch of geeks, behind a T-72, and you watch it proceeding down the street like a lowslung pit bull, turret swiveling just like those American instructors taught them to do. And you hear a nonstop chatter of small arms fire, but one thing you learn after watching a lot of combat video is that unaimed, non-sniper small arms fire is nothing to worry about if you’re in any kind of halfway decent armored vehicle, or even in a decent trench, or rubble pile. There’s a reason soldiers only perk up when they hear engines coming: it takes some serious Detroit iron to mount a gun that can cut through the clutter and zap people at any distance. So this jeep or whatever tools down the street, scared and jumpy, hugging the tank’s ass, but nothing happens to it. A lot seems to have happened to the street it’s going down, though. Those Georgians may try to come off the poor victims but I dunno, guys, there’s a lot of blownup shit in every shot I’ve seen of Tskhinvali, and those “Yee-haws” from the gunner kinda make it sound like the Georgians were having themselves a real party, Quantrill style.

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

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Five days after Georgia invaded and seized the breakaway separatist region of South Ossetia, sparking a larger-scale Russian invasion to drive Georgian forces back and punish their leaders, Russia surprised its Western detractors by calling a halt to the country’s offensive. After all, the mainstream media, egged on by hawkish neocon pundits and their candidate John McCain, had everyone believing that Russia was hellbent on the full-scale annihilation and annexation of democratic Georgia.

But then came Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement–and we’re now forced to ask ourselves serious questions about the recent conflict: what really started it, how dangerous was it and what, with serious careful consideration, could be done to prevent it from turning into a worst-case scenario?

Up until now, this war was framed as a simple tale of Good Helpless Democratic Guy Georgia versus Bad Savage Fascist Guy Russia. In fact, it is far more complex than this, morally and historically. Then there are two concentric David and Goliath narratives here. The initial war pitted the Goliath Georgia–a nation of 4.4 million, with vastly superior numbers, equipment and training thanks to US and Israeli advisers–against David-Ossetia, with a population of between 50,000-70,000 and a local militia force that is barely battalion strength. Reports coming out of South Ossetia tell of Georgian rockets and artillery leveling every building in the capital city, Tskhinvali, and of Georgian troops lobbing grenades into bomb shelters and basements sheltering women and children. Although true casualty figures are hard to come by, reports that up to 2,000 Ossetians, mostly civilians, were killed are certainly believable, given the intensity of the initial Georgian bombardment, the wanton destruction of the city and surrounding regions and the generally savage nature of Caucasus warfare, a very personal game where old rules apply.

But you don’t hear about this story from the Western media. Indeed, you hear little if anything about the Ossetians, who seem to hardly exist in the West’s eyes, even though their grievance is the root cause of this war.

While Russia and America see the conflict in abstract terms about spheres of influence and protecting allies, for Ossetians, who still recall the centuries of massacres Georgians committed against them, it is highly personal. They will still recall the Georgian massacres in the early 1920s, when Georgia was briefly independent, which exterminated up to 8 percent of the Ossetian population. In 1990, when Georgia was again moving towards independence, the ultranationalist leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia abolished Ossetia’s limited autonomy, leading to another Ossetian rebellion that was only quelled by a peace agreement signed by Georgia, Russia and the Ossetians. Gamsakhurdia was subsequently deposed, and Georgia’s ethnic chauvinism was shelved until the rise of current president Mikhail Saakashvili in 2003.

Ossetians have traditionally relied on their powerful northern neighbor Russia for protection against Georgia. The Georgians, in turn, have tried to counter Russian hegemony, for which they are no match, by aligning closely with the United States, finding friendly ears among old cold warriors and Bush-era neocons.

When he first rose to prominence, the American-educated Saakashvili was often referred to as “Georgia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky”–the Russian ultranationalist firebrand who once promised to retake Alaska. Although Saakashvili was subsequently rebranded as a Euro-democrat, he promised to reunite Georgia and bring his separatist regions to heel, by force if necessary, whether the aggrieved ethnic groups liked it or not.

At the root of this conflict is a clash of two twentieth-century guiding principles in international relations. Georgia, backed by the West, is claiming its right as a sovereign nation to control the territory within its borders, a guiding principle since World War II. The Ossetians are claiming their right to self-determination, a guiding principle since World War I.

These two guiding concepts for international relations–national sovereignty and the right to self-determination–are locked in a zero-sum battle in Georgia. Sometimes, the West takes the side of national sovereignty, as it is in the current war; other times, it sides with self-determination and redrawing of national borders, such as with Kosovo.

In that 1999 war, the United States led a nearly three-month bombing campaign of Serbia in order to rescue a beleaguered minority, the Albanians, and carve out a new nation. Self-determination trumped national sovereignty, over the objections of Russia, China and numerous other countries.

Why, Russians and Ossetians (not to mention separatist Abkhazians in Georgia’s western region) ask, should the same principle not be applied to them?

The answer is clear: because we say so. That sort of logic, in an era of colossal American decline and simultaneous Russian resurgence, no longer works on the field.

But sadly, this news hasn’t been conveyed to neocon hawks like Robert Kagan or to John McCain, who seem to still be living in 2002, when American military power was seen as the answer to all the world’s problems. There is even evidence to suggest that America encouraged Saakashvili to think he could solve this conflict by war. Ever since 2002, when American Green Berets dropped into Georgia to train its troops against phantom Al Qaeda cells, the Bush Administration has drawn the former Soviet nation closer into what appeared to be a military alliance, culminating in Georgia’s 2,000-man contribution to the Iraq coalition forces (the third-largest contingent), and American joint training exercises in July, just a few weeks before Georgia’s blitzkrieg attack on South Ossetia. In the UN, Russian attempts in the early hours of the war to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire were shot down by American and British diplomats, who objected to the clause calling on both sides to “renounce violence”–exactly Saakashvili’s position.

The question we must ask is: Are we willing to risk war, including nuclear holocaust, in order to fulfill the aspirations of Mikhail Saakashvili? While Bush and McCain speak of Saakashvili as if he’s a combination of Thomas Jefferson and Nelson Mandela, he’s seen by his own people as increasingly authoritarian and unbalanced. Last year, Saakashvili sent in his special forces to violently disperse opposition protesters in the capital city, followed by a declaration of martial law. He sacked the opposition television station (partly owned by Rupert Murdoch), exiled or jailed his political opponents, and stacked the courts with his own judges while removing neutral observers, leaving even onetime neocon cheerleaders like Bruce Jackson and Anne Applebaum feeling queasy. Hardly the image of the “small democratic nation” that everyone today touts.

The Russian response has, of course, been disproportionate and heavy-handed–exactly what’s to be expected of them ever since Boris Yeltsin first showed the world how post-Soviet Russia fights its wars, starting with Chechnya in 1994. Georgia has been terrorized by indiscriminate aerial bombing and the constant threat of invasion by a vastly superior Russian force–eerily reminiscent of NATO’s campaign against Serbia in 1999. Indeed, many observers believe that the current Russian response is a direct blowback of the Kosovo campaign, which is why there are so many similarities.

But what is the best way to respond? The neocons and even CNN reports talk about exploring military options, which is absurd given the consequences of war with nuclear-armed Russia. Woofing loudly like John McCain is likely to prove as effective as Bush’s woofing did with North Korea, before he was forced to crawl back to the negotiating table.

In fact, one of the most effective ways America could respond to this crisis is by rethinking its entire geopolitical approach of the past two decades, which has been hegemonic, arrogant, hypocritical and reckless. If we set a better example, then we could at least reclaim the moral authority, or “soft power,” that we once had.

Instead, we’ve left the world other more brutal lessons about geopolitical power and how to use it, and the Russians are showing they’ve learned from us well. One lesson they learned from Kosovo is that when you bomb a petty nationalist leader like Saakashvili or Milosevic, eventually–when the cease-fire is called and the sense of defeat settles in–the nationalist firebrand who brought them to defeat pays with his seat in power.

This article first appeared in The Nation. Write to Mark Ames at ames@exiledonline.com. And buy his book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion.

No dramatic photo compositions here, just grim pictures of burnt-out tanks, spent RPGs, charred human remains and columns of Russian armored machinery on patrol in South Ossetia and Georgia. Now updated with graphic photos straight from the battle scene.

The spray painted graffiti on the back and sides reads: “Chechnya.”

The banner reads “Year of Transnistria in South Ossetia.” Transnistria is another breakaway republic otherwise known as Moldova.

I woke up to discover a weird link to a Digg post sent over by a friend of mine. It was a poll conducted on CNN’s website asking readers:

Do you think Russians actions in Georgia are justified?
1) Yes — it’s peacekeeping
2) No — it’s an invasion

Surprisingly, 92% of readers thought that the Russians were justified. Taking into account CNN’s boneheaded and overwhelmingly pro-Georgian coverage, the poll didn’t make any sense. Were sheepish CNN viewers actually using their brain? It didn’t seem likely. Well, the poll no longer appears on the site. It was taken down after charges of manipulation started surfacing. Apparently, Russian bloggers circulated the poll and called on Russians to let their voice be heard. And if there’s one thing CNN doesn’t like doing, it’s hearing what those damn Russkies have to say.  CNN had no idea that this seemingly innocuous poll would demonstrate the huge rift in opinion between the West and Russia and underline the importance that information warfare has played in this conflict, not to mention show whom CNN was really rooting for.

“Information is no longer a staff function but an operational one. It is deadly as well as useful.”
—Executive Summary, Air Force 2025 report.

The Georgians didn’t just take this message to heart, they took whole sections out of DoD’s handbook on Information Operations and followed them to the letter. Even the most cursory look at this conflict shows that Georgia’s attack was an almost perfect textbook example of how modern warfare should be fought on the information front. The Georgians showed an amazing grasp of Info Ops concepts, pulling off counterpropaganda, launching disinformation campaigns and manipulating media perceptions as if they did this type of thing every day.

Oh, the Russians tried to do their part, too. But it still isn’t clear if they didn’t give a shit about what the world thought or just failed miserably. Either way, it was bad news for the Kremlin. Despite a military victory, they are going to have a heard time getting the world to go along with their plans for post-war Georgia. All because they failed to win over the hearts and minds of the world community. The Georgians knew the importance of a well-defined information war strategy. That’s because Georgia has had ample training by the masters of this art: America and Israel. Both have provided military strategy assistance, not to mention weapons training. The Americans were just in Georgia giving them a month-long military refresher course called “Immediate Response 2008” (tab picked up by U.S. taxpayers). Israeli advisers were spotted in Georgia during the first few days of the war and had been training the country for years. In fact, Georgia’s Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli himself.

So how did things go so wrong for Russia and so right for Georgia? Borrowing a few talking points from a document on Military Information Operations prepared by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, I’m going to try to evaluate their performance. What did they do wrong? How can they improve?

Psychological Operations

DoD definition: Psychological Operations (PSYOPs) are focused on the cognitive domain of the battlespace. PSYOP seeks to induce, influence, or reinforce the perceptions, attitudes, reasoning, and behavior of foreign leaders, groups, and organizations in a manner favorable to friendly national and military objectives. PSYOP is just another way to say that P word no one likes to use anymore, propaganda.

Analysis: This here is a no brainer. Georgia has dominated the psychological playing field from the beginning. As Mark Ames discovered, Georgian leaders were making collect calls to just about every influential person on Wall Street, convincing them that Georgia was the victim of Russian aggression even as Georgian rockets were leveling Tskhinvali. And that was before Russia officially entered into the fray. Saakashvili then made himself available for round-the-clock CNN and BBC interviews. He repeated the same simple lines in near-perfect English, and always flanked by an EU flag: “Russia is an aggressor. We are a small democratic country. Please help us.” Georgia was putting the “CNN effect,” as the military types like to call it, to extremely good use. The pro-Georgian CNN effect was so strong, in fact, that CNN used footage of Tskhinvali for a report on the destruction in the Georgian town of Gori. Check it out:

All the Russians did was call an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to try to pass a resolution demanding that Georgia and the S. Ossetia lay down their arms. It wasn’t much of a psychological operation, one that the U.S. didn’t even back.

Psychological Operations Grade: Georgia: A+, Russia: F+

Counterpropaganda

DoD description: Counterpropaganda activities are used to identify and counter adversary propaganda and expose adversary attempts to influence friendly populations and military forces situational understanding. They involve those efforts to negate, neutralize, diminish the effects of, or gain an advantage from foreign psychological operations or propaganda efforts.

Analysis: As soon as Russia started seeding reports that Georgia’s shelling of Tshinkvali might have led to more than 1,000 casualties started appearing, Georgia went on the defensive. Their brutal drive to retake the city was quickly forgotten and replaced with Georgian reports of Russian air raids on civilian targets. Georgia was now the victim of a Russian military invasion. When Russia accused Georgia of ethnic cleansing in S. Ossetia, the Georgians countered with claims of Russian genocide against the Georgians. Pictures of dead bodies, taken by Western journalists, appeared in every Western newspaper. To drive the point home, Saakashvili himself went to the city. The PR event was cut short, however, when Russian jets were spotted above. Cowering in fear, Saakashvili was bundled into a civilian Humvee and whisked away. The debacle convinced Russian viewers that Saakashvili was a coward, but to a Western audience it was more proof that Russian jets were attacking Gori. Georgian counter-propaganda was bolstered by the fact that Georgia made no attempt to hinder Western journalists’ access to the war zone, while Russia made it almost impossible for non-Russian reporters to get into S. Ossetia. Big mistake. Russian newspapers even bitched about it. When Russia tried to reiterate that it was not attacking civilian targets, Georgians claimed that Russian jets were bombing Western-financed oil pipelines deep inside Georgia proper. It was an utter lie, but that didn’t stop the headline from hanging up on Drudge Report for two whole days. Even now, after Russia signed an agreement to stop fighting, a disheveled and sleep deprived Saakashvili accuses Russian troops of attacking central Gori and moving tanks to take over Tbilisi. Who cares if it’s true. The Russian side is silent on the matter.

Counterpropaganda Grade: Georgia: A, Russia: F

Electronic Warfare

DoD description: Electronic Warfare operates across the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio, visible, infrared, microwave, directed energy, and all other frequencies. This includes targeting mass media and communications.

Analysis: Here is where both sides were more or less evenly matched. Both countries mounted cyber attacks on news outlets and government sites. As their first order of business, Georgia blocked all Russian TV transmissions and blocked all the .ru sites. Russia did the same, but despite those notorious Russian hackers, Georgia still managed to get the upper hand. Aside from getting reports of Russian attacks suppressed (thanks to Georgia’s effective counterpropaganda machine), Georgia’s big win was in managing to bring down the website of Russia Today, the only English-language TV coverage coming out of South Ossetia and the source of hard-hitting interviews like this one (skip about 1 minute forward):

Russia couldn’t keep up. And how could they? What, take down cnn.com?

Electronic Warfare Grade: Georgia: B, Russia: C-

You can email Yasha Levine at levine@exiledonline.com.

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

Of course, if you want to get all serious and actually study up on Ossetia, North and South, and Georgia and the whole eternal gang war that they call the Caucasus, you can check out a column I did on that school-hostage splatter in Beslan, North Ossetia, a few years back.

But for me, right now, I say let’s stick to the action. This is the war of my dreams—both sides using air forces! How often do you see that these days?—so I’ll skip the history. Just remember that South Ossetia is a little apple-shaped blob dangling from Russian territory down into Georgia, and most of it has been under control of South Ossetian irregulars backed by Russian “peacekeepers” for the last few years.

The Georgians didn’t like that. You don’t give up territory in that part of the world, ever. The Georgians have always been fierce people, good fighters, not the forgiving type. In fact, I can’t resist a little bit of history here: remember when the Mongols wiped out Baghdad in 1258, the biggest slaughter in any of their conquests? Nobody knows how many people were killed, but it was at least 200,000—a pretty big number in the days before antibiotics made life cheap. The smell was so bad the Mongols had to move their camp upwind. Well, the most enthusiastic choppers and burners in the whole massacre were the Georgian Christian troops in Hulagu Khan’s army. Wore out their hacking arms on those Baghdadi civilians.

So: hard people on every side in that part of the world. No quarter asked or given. No good guys. Especially not the Georgians. They have a rep as good people, one-on-one, but you don’t want to mess with them and you especially don’t want to try to take land from them.

The Georgians bided their time, then went on the offensive, Caucasian style, by pretending to make peace and all the time planning a sneak attack on South Ossetia. They just signed a treaty granting autonomy to South Ossetia this week, and then they attacked, Corleone style. Georgian MLRS units barraged Tskhinvali, the capital city of South Ossetia; Georgian troops swarmed over Ossetian roadblocks; and all in all, it was a great, whiz-bang start, but like Petraeus asked about Iraq way back in 2003, what’s the ending to this story? As in: how do you invade territory that the Russians have staked out for protection without thinking about how they’ll react?

Saakashvili just didn’t think it through. One reason he overplayed his hand is that he got lucky the last time he had to deal with a breakaway region: Ajara, a tiny little strip of Black Sea coast in southern Georgia. This is a place smaller than some incorporated Central Valley towns, but it declared itself an “autonomous” republic, preserving its sacred basket-weaving traditions or whatever. You just have to accept that people in the Caucasus are insane that way; they’d die to keep from saying hello to the people over the next hill, and they’re never going to change. The Ajarans aren’t even ethnically different from Georgians; they’re Georgian too. But they’re Muslims, which means they have to have their own Lego parliament and Tonka-Toy army and all the rest of that Victorian crap, and their leader, a wack job named Abashidze (Goddamn Georgian names!) volunteered them to fight to the death for their worthless independence. Except he was such a nut, and so corrupt, and the Ajarans were so similar to the Georgians, and their little “country” was so tiny and ridiculous, that for once sanity prevailed and the Ajarans refused to fight, let themselves get reabsorbed by that Colussus to the North, mighty Georgia.

Well, like I’ve said before, there’s nothing as dangerous as victory. Makes people crazy. Saakashvili started thinking he could gobble up any secessionist region—like, say, South Ossetia. But there are big differences he was forgetting—like the fact that South Ossetia isn’t Georgian, has a border with Russia, and is linked up with North Ossetia just across that border. The road from Russia to South Ossetia is pretty fragile as a line of supply; it goes through the Roki Tunnel, a mountain tunnel at an altitude of 10,000 feet. I have to wonder why the Georgian air force—and it’s a good one by all accounts—didn’t have as its first mission in the war the total zapping of the South Ossetian exit of that tunnel. Or if you don’t trust the flyboys, send in your special forces with a few backpacks full of HE. There are a lot of ways to cripple a tunnel. Hell, do it low-tech: drive a fuel truck in there, with a car following, jackknife the truck halfway through with a remote control or timing fuse—truck driver gets out and strolls to the car, one fast U-turn and you’re out and back in Georgia, just in time to see a ball of flame erupt from the tunnel exit. And rebuilding a tunnel way up in the mountains is not an easy or a fast job. Sure, the Russians could resupply by air, but that’s a much, much tougher job and would at least slow down the inevitable. Weird, then, that as far as I know the Georgians didn’t even try to blast that tunnel. I don’t go in for this kind of long-distance micromanaging of warfare, because there’s usually a good reason on the ground for tactical decisions; it’s the strategic decisions that are really crazy most of the time. But this one I just don’t get.

Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn’t react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock’n’awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then…uh, they’d be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did. They thought he’d help. And I just saw the little creep on TV, sitting in the stands watching the US-China basketball game. (Weird game—the Chinese were taller, muscled the boards inside but couldn’t shoot from outside. Not what you expect from foreign b-ball teams at all.) I didn’t even recognize Bush at first, just wondered why they kept doing close-ups of this guy who looked like Hank Hill’s legless dad up in the stands. Then they said it was the Prez. They talk about people “growing in office”; well, he shrunk.

And the more he shrinks, the more you pay for believing in him. The Georgians were naïve because they were so happy to get out from the Soviets, the Russians’ old enemy, the US, must be paradise. So they did their apple-polishing best to be the perfect obedient little ally. Then we’d let them into NATO and carpet-bomb them with SUVs and ipods.

Their part of the deal was simple: they sent troops to Iraq. First a contingent of 850, then a surprisingly huge 2000 men. When you consider the population of Georgia is less than five million, that’s a lot of troops. In fact,  Georgia is the third-biggest contributor to the “Coalition of the Willing,” after the US and Britain.

You might be thinking, Wow, not a good time to have so many of your best troops in Iraq, huh? Well, that’s true and it goes for a lot of countries—like us, for instance—but at least we’re not facing a Russian invasion. The Georgians are so panicked they just announced they’re sending half their Iraqi force home, and could the USAF please give’em a lift?

We’ll probably give them a ride, but that’s about all we can do. We’ve already done plenty, not because we love Georgians but to counterbalance the Russian influence down where the new oil pipeline’s staked out. The biggest American aid project was the GTEP, “Georgia Train and Equip” project ($64 million). It featured 200 Special Forces instructors teaching fine Georgia boys all the lessons the US Army’s learned recently. Now here’s the joke—and military history is just one long series of mean jokes. We were stressing counterinsurgency skills: small-unit cohesion, marksmanship, intelligence. The idea was to keep Georgia safe from Chechens or other Muslim loonies infiltrating through the Pankisi Gorge in NE Georgia. And we did a good job. The Georgian Army pacified the Pankisi in classic Green-Beret style. The punch line is, the Georgians got so cocky from that success, and from their lovefest with the Bushies in DC, that they thought they could take on anybody. What they’re in the process of finding out is that a light-infantry CI force like the one we gave them isn’t much use when a gigantic Russian armored force has just rolled across your border.

The American military’s response so far has been all talk, and pretty damn stupid talk at that. A Pentagon spokes-thingy called Russia’s response “disproportionate.” What the Hell are they talking about? They’ve been watching too many cop shows. Cops have this doctrine of “minimum necessary force,” not that they actually operate that way unless there are video cameras around. Armies never, ever had that policy, because it’s a good way to get your troops killed needlessly. The whole idea in war is to fight as unfairly and disproportionately as possible. If you’ve got it, you use it. Thank God we never fought “proportionately” in Viet Nam. The French tried that, because they never had much of an air force, and got wiped out. By the time the French withdrew from Indochina, their Lefty Prime Minister, Mendes-France, made a big show of promising peace withing 30 days of taking office—and his commanders in Indochina said privately, “I don’t think we can hold out that long.” That’s what fighting “proportionately” gets you: Dien Bien Phu.

If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what “disproportionate” means is—well, imagine that you’re watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ass whipped by a bully, and you say, “That’s inappropriate!” I mean, instead of actually helping him. That’s what “disproportionate” means from the Pentagon: “We’re not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we’re with you in spirit, little buddy!”

The quickest way to see who’s winning in any war is to see who asks first for a ceasefire. And this time it was the Georgians. Once it was clear the Russians were going to back the South Ossetians, the war was over. Even Georgians were saying, “To fight Russia by ourselves is insane.” Which means they thought Russia wouldn’t back its allies. Not a bad bet; Russia has a long, unpredictable history of screwing its allies—but not all the time. The Georgians should know better than anybody that once in a while, the Russians actually come through, because it was Russian troops who saved Georgia from a Persian invasion in 1805, at the battle of Zagam. Of course the Russians had let the Persians sack Tbilisi just ten years earlier without helping. That’s the thing: the bastards are unpredictable. You can’t even count on them to betray their friends (though it’s the safer bet, most of the time, sort of like 6:5 odds).

This time, the Russians came through. For lots of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush is weak and they know it; that the US is all tied up in that crap Iraq war and can’t do shit; and most of all, because Kosovo just declared independence from Serbia, an old Russian ally. It’s tit for tat time, with Kosovo as the tit and South Ossetia as the tat. The way Putin sees it, if we can mess with his allies and let little ethnic enclaves like Kosovo declare independence, then the Russians can do the same with our allies, especially naïve idiotic allies like Georgia.

Luckily, South Ossetia doesn’t matter that much. I’m just being honest here. In a year nobody will care much who runs that little glob of territory. What’s more serious is that another, bigger and more strategic chunk of Georgia called Abkhazia, on the Black Sea, is taking the opportunity to boot out the last Georgian troops on its territory. Georgia may lose almost all its coastline, but then the Georgians were always an inland people anyway, living along river valleys, not great sailors.

What’s happening to Georgia here is like the teeny-tiny version of Germany in the twentieth century: overplay your hand and you lose everything. So if you’re a Georgian nationalist, this war is a tragedy; if you’re a Russian or Ossetian nationalist, it’s a triumph, a victory for justice, whatever. To the rest of us, it’s just kind of fun to watch. And damn, this one has been a LOT of fun! The videos that came out of it! You know, DVD is the best thing to happen to war in a long time. All the fun, none of the screaming agony—it’s war as Diet Coke.

See, this is the war that I used to see in the paintings commissioned by Defense contractors in Aviation Week and AFJ: a war between two conventional armies, both using air forces and armored columns, in pine-forested terrain. That was what those pictures showed every time, with a highlighted closeup of the weapon they were selling homing in on a Warsaw Pact convoy coming through a German pine forest. Of course, a real NATO/Warsaw Pact war would never, ever have happened that way. It would have gone nuclear in an hour or less, which both sides knew, which is why it never happened. So all that beautiful weaponry was kind of a farce, if it was only going to be used in the Fulda Gap. But damn, God is good, because here it all is, in the same kind of terrain, all your favorite old images: Russian-made tanks burning,  a Soviet-model fighter-bomber falling from the sky in pieces, troops in Russian camo fighting other troops, also in Russian camo, in a skirmish by some dilapidated country shack.

No racial overtones to get bummed out by—everybody on both sides is white! And white from places you don’t know or care about!

The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

What will last is those beautiful videos, like some NATO-era dream, like God giving me one last chance to see the weapons I spent my twenties dreaming about in action. Even the wounded-civilian videos are interesting because a lot of the wounded are fat and old, which you didn’t see much in classic Korean or Normandy or Nam footage.

We’re the new normal, but damn, we sure are ugly casualties. Skinny people just look better sitting in rubble with bloody faces, I can’t lie.

As the war fades out—and it will; countries don’t fight to the death these days—there’ll be time to see how the various weapons systems played. I’m especially interested to see how well the Georgian air defense missiles, some very good recent Russian models, worked. But there’s plenty of time to bebrief later. For now, just go to LiveLeak or YouTube (LiveLeak has better stuff right now) and enjoy yourself. This is when us war nerds get all the free porn we can handle. Call in sick, take your comp time, whatever—just don’t miss those videos.

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

Click the cover, buy the book!

The outbreak of war in Georgia on Friday offers a disturbing and somewhat surreal taste of what to expect from John McCain should he become our nation’s Commander in Chief. As the centuries-old ethnic animosities between Georgia and Ossetia boiled over into another armed conflict, drawing in neighboring Russia, McCain issued a stark-raving statement from Des Moines that is disturbingly reminiscent of the language used in the lead-up to NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in 1999, a war McCain zealously pushed for:

“We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to assess Georgia’s security and review measures NATO can take to contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation,” McCain said.

Calling on NATO to “stabilize this dangerous situation” is not going down well with Russia, where images of dead Russian peacekeepers and of frightened Ossetian refugees streaming across its borders have put the country in a very vengeful mood. It’s hard to imagine what measures NATO could take under a McCain presidency, but in the mind of a man who thinks US troops should stay in Iraq for 100 years, and who runs around singing “Bomb Bomb Iran!” it’s not hard to guess–and even harder not to be horrified by what it may mean come January 2009, should he win.

McCain’s call to NATO-ize the war is not only frightening, it’s also delusional: both NATO and US forces are already stretched beyond the breaking point, even by Joint Chief of Staff chairman Michael Millen’s own recent assessment.

But McCain’s brain remains undeterred by reality, a fact that became painfully clear today in Des Moines when he also demanded, “The US should immediately convene an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to call on Russia to reverse course.”

The problem with McCain’s bold demand about going to the UN is that Russia already tried doing exactly what McCain called for–and got rejected by McCain’s neocon pals in the Bush Administration. Early this morning, Russia convened an emergency session of the UN Security Council, calling on both sides to immediately cease hostilities, return to the negotiating table and renounce the use of force–but the last part about renouncing the use of force is exactly what Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili refuses to do.

The Bush Administration showed that it too has no patience with crunchy “renounce the use of force” resolutions. According to a Reuters report from earlier in the day:

At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a Russian-drafted statement.

The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the United States, Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides “to renounce the use of force,” council diplomats said.

The meaning of this is clear: the United States and Britain are backing Saakashvili’s invasion. Why would we back Saakashvili’s reckless war, when last year even Bush was denouncing the Pinochet-wannabe’s violent attack on his own people during a peaceful opposition protest in Georgia’s capital, as well as shutting down the opposition media and exiling of political opponents? That would be a brain-teaser if the last seven years hadn’t answered this question so many painful times already.

But with McCain, answering this is a little trickier. When he issued today’s Des Moines statement calling for Russia to do what Russia already did a few hours earlier, you have to ask yourself: either McCain’s short-term memory is totally shot, encased in an impenetrable tomb of aluminum-zirconium plaque… or worse, McCain simply doesn’t give a damn about reality, he just wants to get Georgia’s war on, as badly as Saakashvili does.

The awful truth is probably a combination of the two, which is the worst of all worlds, considering McCain’s raving Russophobia, and his campaign team’s financial and ideological ties to Saakashvili. As has been reported, McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, neocon Randy Scheunemann, has a long financial relationship with Saakashvili to lobby his interests in the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

In 2005, Mr. Scheunemann asked Sen. McCain to introduce a Senate resolution expressing support for peace in the Russian-influenced region of South Ossetia that wants to break away from Georgia, the records show.

Such resolutions of Senate support are symbolic but helpful to countries in their diplomatic relations. The Senate approved Sen. McCain’s resolution in December 2005, and the Georgian Embassy posted the text on its Web site.

Sen. McCain has endorsed Georgia’s goal of entering NATO, a matter for which the country hired Mr. Scheunemann to lobby. In 2006, Senator McCain gave a speech at the Munich Conference on Security in Germany in which he said “Georgia has implemented far-reaching political, economic, and military reforms” and should enter NATO, a text of his speech on the conference Web site shows.

Scheunemann, a bearded, pear-faced gun geek who looks like what might have happened to an aging GI Joe doll if it had spent years stuffing its face at pricey restaurants while power-schmoozing politicians and petty dictators, also worked for recently-disgraced Bush fundraiser Stephen Payne, lobbying for his Caspian Alliance oil business. The Caspian oil pipeline runs through Georgia, the main reason that country has tugged the heartstrings of neocons and oil plutocrats for at least a decade or more.

Randy Scheunemann: NeoCon Joe With A Lobbyist Grip!

In 2006, McCain visited Georgia and denounced the South Ossetian separatists, proving that Scheunemann wasn’t wasting his Georgian sponsor’s money. At a speech he gave in a Georgian army base in Senaki, McCain declared that Georgia was America’s “best friend,” and that Russian peacekeepers should be thrown out.

Today, Georgian forces from that same Senaki base are part of the invasion force into South Ossetia, an invasion that has left scores–perhaps hundreds–of dead locals, at least ten dead Russian peacekeepers, and 140 million pissed-off Russians calling for blood.

Lost in all of this is not only the question of why America would risk an apocalypse to help a petty dictator like Saakashvili get control of a region that doesn’t want any part of him. But no one’s bothering to ask what the Ossetians themselves think about it, or why they’re fighting for their independence in the first place. That’s because the Georgians–with help from lobbyists like Scheunemann–have been pushing the line that South Ossetia is a fiction, a construct of evil Kremlin neo-Stalinists, rather than a people with a genuine grievance.

A few years ago, I had an Ossetian working as the sales director for my now-defunct newspaper, The eXile. After listening to me rave about how much I always (and still do) like the Georgians, he finally lost it and told me another side to Georgian history, explaining how the Georgians had always mistreated the Ossetians, and how the South Ossetians wanted to reunite with North Ossetia in order to avoid being swallowed up, and how this conflict goes way back, long before the Soviet Union days. It was clear that the Ossetian-Georgian hatred was old and deep, like many ethnic conflicts in this region. Indeed, a number of Caucasian ethnic groups still harbor deep resentment towards Georgia, accusing them of imperialism, chauvinism and arrogance.

One example of this can be found in historian Bruce Lincoln’s book, Red Victory, in which he writes about the period of Georgia’s brief independence from 1917 to 1921, a time when Georgia was backed by Britain:

[T]he Georgian leaders quickly moved to widen their borders at the expense of their Armenian and Azerbaijani neighbors, and their territorial greed astounded foreign observers. ‘The free and independent socialist democratic state of Georgia will always remain in my memory as a classic example of an imperialist small nation,” one British journalist wrote…. “Both in territory snatching outside and bureaucratic tyranny inside, its chauvinism was beyond all bounds.”

On Thursday, following intense Georgian shelling and katyusha rocketing into Tskhinvali, refugees streamed out of South Ossetia telling reporters that the Georgians had completely leveled entire villages and most of Tskhinvali, leaving “piles of corpses” in the streets, over 1,000 by some counts. Among the dead are at least ten Russian peacekeepers, who fell after their base was attacked by Georgian forces. Reports also say that Georgian forces destroyed a hotel where Russian journalists were staying.

In response, Russian jets bombed Georgian positions both inside South Ossetia and into Georgia proper, attacking one base where American military instructors are quartered (no Americans were reported hurt). By mid-afternoon Moscow time, as local television showed burning homes and Ossetian women and children huddling in bomb shelters, armored Russian columns were crossing into Georgian territory, and Georgia’s President called for a total mobilization of military-aged men for war with Russia.

The invasion was backed up by a PR offensive so layered and sophisticated that I even got an hysterical call today from a hedge fund manager in New York, screaming about an “investor call” that Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze made this morning with some fifty leading Western investment bank managers and analysts. I’ve since seen a J.P. Morgan summary of the conference call, which pretty much reflects the talking points later picked up by the US media.

These kinds of conference calls are generally conducted by the heads of companies in order to give banking analysts guidance. But as the hedge fund manager told me today, “The reason Lado did this is because he knew the enormous PR value that Georgia would gain by going to the money people and analysts, particularly since Georgia is clearly the aggressor this time.” As a former investment banker who worked in London and who used to head the Bank of Georgia, Gurgenidze knew what he was doing. “Lado is a former banker himself, so he knew that by framing the conflict for the most influential bankers and analysts in New York, that these power bankers would then write up reports and go on CNBC and argue Lado Gurgenidze’s talking points. It was brilliant, and now you’re starting to see the American media shift its coverage from calling it Georgia invading Ossetian territory, to the new spin, that it’s Russian imperial aggression against tiny little Georgia.”

The really scary thing about this investor conference call is that it suggests real planning. As the hedge fund manager told me, “These things aren’t set up on an hour’s notice.”

Where this war is leading is impossible to say, but as Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Chechnya, have shown, wars have a funny way of lasting longer, costing more in money and lives, and snuffing out whatever individual liberties the affected populations may have. As good as this war is for Saakashvili, who has become increasingly unpopular at home and abroad, or for McCain, whose poll numbers seem to rise every time the plaque devours another lobe of his brain, it also bodes well for the resurgent Prime Minister Putin, who seems to have become increasingly peeved with his hand-picked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev’s flickering independence and his liberalizer shtick. There’s nothing like a good war to snuff out an uppity sois-disant liberal who’s getting in your way–even McCain, frozen in an antiperspirant-induced fog, can still grasp this basic reptilian concept.

As I’m filing this, Russian forces are battling to take back Tskhinvali, while Saakashvili has been alternately claiming to have pulled his forces back, or that his forces are in full control of the city and defeating the Russians. Meanwhile, Georgia has been on a massive, successful, multi-layered PR offensive in the West, helped by years of cultivating people like John McCain as well as the army of neocons and old cold warriors who naturally gravitate to a fight with Russia.

This article first appeared in The Nation. Write to Mark Ames at ames@exiledonline.com. And buy his book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion.