EN-- F. William Engdahl -- FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE -- CHAPTER ONE A War in Georgia—Putin Drops a Bomb – Part I

EN-- F. William Engdahl -- FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE 

 

CHAPTER ONE A War in Georgia—Putin Drops a Bomb

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. − George F. Kennan, US State Department Policy Memorandum, February 1948.1

Guns Of August And One Of Those Funny Numbers

“Eight eight eight” is one of those funny numbers, like 666 or 911. Some people attach great mysterious significance to it. So it was more ominous than otherwise that on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year of the new century, a small land in the remote Caucasus mountains of the former Soviet Union decided to order its rag-tag army to march into a territory as tiny as Luxemburg to reclaim it in the name of a greater Republic of Georgia.

On that day much of the world was looking elsewhere, to Beijing, as China launched the dramatic beginning of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Many world leaders were in Beijing for the event, including the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and the new Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

The surprising news that the Georgian Army had invaded the breakaway province of South Ossetia at first drew little interest. Few people in the West had ever heard of South Ossetia. The region was remote and believed to be of little political significance.

A US-backed attack by Georgia in August 2008

surprised the West when Russia responded so swiftly to defend Ossetians

As it turned out, the small Republic of Georgia and its invasion of South Ossetia would mark the onset of the most dangerous phase in world affairs since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when the two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, stood ‘eyeball to eyeball’ and came a hair’s breadth from nuclear war.

 Some began to fear a 21st Century rerun of the Guns of August, when an equally remote event —- the assassination in August 1914 of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy by a Serb assassin in Sarajevo – triggered the outbreak of the Great War in Europe.

Others spoke of a New Cold War, a reference to the mutual balance of terror that dominated world affairs from roughly 1946 until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-1990.

That 1962 Cuban crisis, as some recalled, was triggered by US reconnaissance photos showing construction of a Soviet missile base in Cuba, A War in Georgia—Putin Drops a Bomb 3 some 90 miles from Florida. Such a missile base would give Russia the ability to launch a nuclear strike on the US homeland within minutes, not allowing US nuclear bombers sufficient time to respond.

 What few in the West—outside the Pentagon and highest US and NATO circles—were told was that the Soviet missile installation in Cuba was not a provocation out of the blue. It was Russia’s response, however ineffective and however reckless, to the earlier US decision to place its Thor and Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, a NATO member dangerously close to Soviet strategic nuclear sites.

As with Cuba in 1962, so with Georgia in 2008, the crisis was the direct consequence of an aggressive provocation initiated by military and political circles in Washington.2

End Of A Cold War, Seeds Of A New One

The Cold War ostensibly ended with Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision in November 1989 not to order Soviet tanks into East Germany to block the growing nonviolent anti-government candlelight protest movement and to let the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the ‘Iron Curtain’ dividing Eastern from Western Europe, fall down. The USSR was bankrupt, economically, militarily and politically.

The Cold War was over. The West, above all the United States of America — the symbol of liberty, freedom, democracy and economic prosperity for much of the world, above all for the peoples of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe — had won.

With the end of the Cold War, Washington proclaimed its aim was the spread of democracy to those parts of the world that had been rigidly confined within the Soviet socialist system since at least the end of the Second World War and in many cases since the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Democracy was Washington’s most effective weapon to increase its control over the emerging nations of the former Communist bloc in Europe. The word ‘democracy,’ however, as the ancient Greek oligarchic families well knew, was a double-edged weapon; it could be manipulated 4 Full Spectrum Dominance into an enraged mob and hurled with directed fury against one’s political opponents.

 All that was needed was to control the techniques for shaping public opinion and the levers of economic change. In these, Washington was well equipped; it dominated global media through instruments such as CNN, and orchestrated economic transformation through its control of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Washington would spread democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it was to be a special kind of democracy, if you will, a ‘totalitarian democracy,’ welding American economic, political and cultural hegemony together under the military control of NATO.

Most of the world was jubilant at the offer of American-style democracy. In Berlin the Germans, from both east and west, played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and danced on the Wall. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and across the nations or regions which had been locked into the Soviet side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ since 1948, the citizens were euphoric in celebration of what they believed would be the beginning of a better life, a life of freedom and prosperity, the ‘American Way of Life.’ They believed the propaganda that had been beamed at them over the years by Radio Free Europe and other US and Western government media. Paradise on earth was about to arrive, or so they thought.

The euphoria was short-lived. Almost immediately, Washington and its Western allies imposed a form of economic ‘shock therapy’ on the former socialist, centrally planned, state economies. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded immediate ‘market reforms.’ This was code for the complete transformation of entire economies.

The IMF staff had in no way been prepared for the complexity of transforming the inter-connected economic space of six former Warsaw Pact nations (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania) and fifteen former Soviet Republics. The IMF technocrats, under orders from US Treasury Secretary and former Wall Street banker, Robert Rubin, demanded immediate privatization of all state-owned industries, devaluation of the Russian ruble, and devaluation of each of the other six national currencies.3

A War in Georgia—Putin Drops a Bomb 5 IMF ‘shock therapy’ (Structural Adjustment Policies) flung open the doors of the former Soviet bloc to dollar-holding Western speculators. Among those in the stampede were the American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, the fugitive metals trader Marc Rich, and aggressive banks such as Credit Suisse and Chase. The IMF policies allowed them literally to loot the ‘Crown Jewels’ of Russia for pennies. The loot included everything from oil to nickel, and from aluminum to platinum.

A tiny handful of Russian businessmen –- mostly former Communist party or KGB functionaries –- seized invaluable state-owned raw material assets during the corrupt Yeltsin era and became billionaires overnight. They were accurately referred to in the media as Russian ‘oligarchs’ — men whose wealth would allow them to become the new masters of postcommunist Russia — the money masters. But, there was a catch: their new wealth was denominated in dollars. Russia’s new oligarchs were tied, so Washington believed, to the West and, specifically to the United States. Washington’s strategy had been to take control of post-Soviet Russia by taking control of its new billionaire oligarchs.

As a logical consequence of draconian IMF policies imposed on Russia during the 1990’s, unemployment exploded and living standards plummeted. Most shocking, life expectancy for Russian men fell to 56 years during this period. The elderly were left without pensions or adequate medical care in many cases. Schools were closed; housing fell into disrepair; alcoholism, drug addiction and AIDS spread among Russian youth.

IMF demands included savage reduction in state subsidies in an economy where all necessary social services from daycare to medical care had been provided free or at nominal cost by the state. The Russian population was again being put through hell, half a century after they had given more than twenty three million of their finest young citizens in battle so that the United States and Britain could dominate the postwar world. As many Russians saw it, economic shock therapy was a strange way for the West to show gratitude for the end of the Warsaw Pact.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had tried to revitalize the Soviet state from within with Glasnost and Perestroika; these had failed. Now, in return for Gorbachev allowing the West, via the controversial 6 Full Spectrum Dominance IMF, to dictate the terms of economic transformation into the ‘capitalist paradise,’ the administration of US President George H.W. Bush had offered Gorbachev a promise. Specifically, the official promise was that the United States would not extend NATO eastward to envelop the newly liberated countries of the former Warsaw Pact.4

Gorbachev trusted this pledge from the Bush administration in good faith, as official policy. And so it seemed. In the chaos of the moment, however, Gorbachev apparently forgot to get Bush’s promise in writing. Memories in Washington were good, but conveniently short when it suited them, as subsequent events would show.

In response to that solemn US pledge, the formerly mighty Soviet Union, now a vastly reduced Russia, had promised Washington and NATO that it would systematically dismantle its formidable nuclear arsenal. Toward that end, the Russian Duma had ratified a Start II Treaty that provided a schedule for reduction of actively deployed nuclear weapons. They made the ratification contingent on both the US and Russia adhering to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which prohibited deployment of an active missile defense shield by either side.5

On December 13, 2001, George W. Bush gave Russia notice of the United States' withdrawal from the ABM treaty. That was the first time in recent history the United States had withdrawn from a major international arms treaty. It was done in order to open the door to the creation of the US Missile Defense Agency.6

An exhausted Russia had dissolved the Warsaw Pact, its counterpart to NATO. It had withdrawn its troops from Eastern Europe and other regions of the former Soviet Union. The satellite states of the Soviet Union and even the former Soviet Republics were encouraged to declare themselves independent countries—albeit usually with Western promises and enticements of possible membership in the new European Union. The Republic of Georgia was one such new country, even though Georgia had been an integral part of a Russian empire extending back to the days of the Czars well before the Revolution of 1917.

‘We Won!’

 Despite the solemn pledges and apparently official agreements of Washington not to extend NATO eastward, George H.W. Bush and later, President Bill Clinton, went back on their promises. They enticed the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, one by one, into what was to become a newly enlarged, eastward expanding NATO.

George Herbert Walker Bush was the scion of a wealthy New England family that had made its fortune over decades, first with investments in Hitler’s Reich and continuing through powerful alignments with Rockefeller oil and armaments industries. “We won,” he proclaimed now, as if hailing an NFL Super Bowl victory and not the cessation of a military and political contest that often held the fate of the entire planet in the balance.

As one observer described the new American arrogance in Washington in the beginning of the 1990’s and George H.W. Bush’s administration: “Presidential travels abroad assumed the trappings of imperial expeditions, overshadowing in scale and security demands the circumstances of any other statesman…America’s anointment as the world’s leader [was] in some respects reminiscent of Napoleon’s selfcoronation.”7

The author of these critical comments was no outsider or opponent of American power. He was Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter and senior foreign policy strategist for several presidents and advisor to many, including presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Brzezinski was a careful student of the master of Anglo-American geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder. He knew well the dangers of imperial arrogance at the peak of empire. Such arrogance had in his view caused the collapse of the British Empire apparently at its peak between the end of the 19th Century and the outbreak of the First World War.

Brzezinski warned that such domineering arrogance on the part of Washington a century later could lead to a similar crisis of American hegemony. America, he warned, could lose its status as ‘Sole Superpower’ or as ‘the American Empire’—the term favored by neo-conservative hawks 8 Full Spectrum Dominance such as William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and Robert Kagan, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Zbigniew Brzezinski had been one of the architects of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. By provoking and then masterminding that war, in which the US Government had trained Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists with advanced techniques of irregular warfare and sabotage, Brzezinski had done more than perhaps any other postwar strategist, with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger, to extend American dominance through military force.

Brzezinski was no softy. He was an ardent American imperialist, what in Washington was called a ‘realist.’ He knew that American imperial domination, even when it masqueraded under the name of democracy, needed careful attention to its allies in order to maintain global power and to control what he called the chessboard — Eurasia. Other powers were to be managed and maneuvered to prevent the emergence of rivals to US dominance. In this context, in his widely debated 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski referred repeatedly to US allies, even including Germany and Japan, as America’s “vassals.”8

Brzezinski had no quarrel with the apparent end goal of the BushCheney foreign policy — namely, a global American Century, an Americanized version of imperial rule. Rather, Brzezinski differed only in his vision of the means with which to reach that goal.

 “Symptomatic of the first decade and a half of America’s supremacy,” Brzezinski had noted, “were the worldwide presence of US military forces and the increased frequency of their engagement in combat or coercive operations. Deployed on every continent and dominating every ocean, the United States had no political or military peer.”9

One area where US military forces were being deployed was in the tiny Central Asian former Soviet republic of Georgia, where since at least September 2003, the Bush Administration had been providing direct US military assistance and advisors to the tiny but strategic country that had declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990.10

The events in Georgia of August 2008 could not be understood without going back to the 1990s and the history of US NATO expansion to the doors of Moscow. The Administration of George Bush, Sr. had broken its A War in Georgia—Putin Drops a Bomb 9 promise to Russia not to expand NATO to the east. Now, in 2008, another Bush Administration was putting enormous pressure on a reluctant European Union and European governments to admit two former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, into NATO.

 That new NATO expansion came in the wake of a bold announcement in early 2007 by the United States Government that it planned to install advanced missile bases and radar stations in two former Warsaw Pact countries, now NATO members: Poland and the Czech Republic.11

The Bush Administration claimed that the decision to place its deceptively-named Ballistic Missile ‘Defense’ infrastructure in Poland and the Czech Republic was allegedly to defend against ‘rogue states like Iran.’12 This assertion produced the strongest response from the Kremlin. In actual military fact it was not defensive at all, but a major offensive gain for Washington in any future military showdown with Moscow.

In February 2007, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addressed the annual Munich, Germany International Conference on Security, formerly the Wehrkunde Conference. Delivering a keynote speech that was extraordinary by any standards, Putin’s remarks caught many in the West by surprise:

NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders…[I]t is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?13

These frank words from Russia’s President unleashed a storm of protest from Western media and politicians. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB career officer who had briefly headed the FSB (the KGB’s successor organization for foreign intelligence), could be accused of many things. He had clearly climbed to the top of Russia’s power pyramid not by being a ‘nice guy.’ One thing Vladimir Putin could not be accused of, however, was being stupid, especially when Russian vital interests were threatened.

 For the first time since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 Western media spoke of a New Cold War between the West and Russia. In fact, however, the speech of the Russian President only made open and public a process that had never ended, even with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Origins Of The Iron Curtain

The Cold War began in the late 1940s with, among other events, the formal creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but even with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90, it had never really ended. That was what was so uncomfortable about Putin’s speech and so difficult for Western listeners to digest.

Putin had, in effect, exposed the dangerous implications of Washington’s entire post-Cold War NATO expansion strategy as one of encirclement of Russia and not one of guaranteeing peaceful transition to Western-style democracy for the nations of the former Soviet Union.

Washington, the de facto commanding head of NATO, had been steadily advancing its military superiority over Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the projected deployments to Poland and the Czech Republic, this had reached the point where Russia felt compelled to react openly and bluntly.

What was unfolding clearly in the first years of the new millennium was aggressive military expansion by the United States. Underneath layers of calculated misinformation and effective propaganda campaigns about spreading US-style democracy to the former Soviet Republics and Eastern bloc countries, the United States was steadily building towards a military confrontation unlike any the world had seen since the Cold War.

The principal architect of the original Cold War policy of ‘containment’ was George F. Kennan, US State Department Director of Policy Planning. In 1948, in an internal policy memorandum classified Top Secret, he outlined the foreign policy objectives of the United States as it was creating the post-war empire to be known as the American Century.

Kennan’s thesis, eventually declassified, was stunningly clear:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population….In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.14

America’s leading post-war planners had been involved in the 1939 War & Peace Studies Project of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Their strategy had been to create a kind of informal empire, one in which America would emerge as the unchallenged hegemonic power in a new world order to be administered through the newly-created United Nations Organization.15

The architects of the post-war US-dominated global order explicitly chose not to call it an ‘empire.’ Instead, the United States would project its imperial power under the guise of colonial ‘liberation,’ support for ‘democracy’ and ‘free markets.’ It was one of the most effective and diabolical propaganda coups of modern times.

So long as the United States was the world’s largest economy and American dollars were in demand as de facto world reserve currency, this charade worked. As long as Western Europe, Japan and Asia depended on US military protection, the de facto American Empire could effectively portray itself as the beacon of liberty for newly independent nations of Africa and Asia.16

A genuinely fearsome East-West barricade arose as tanks, bombers and weapons of mass destruction were rolled into position around the socialist economies of the Warsaw Pact after 1948, as well as the new Peoples’ Republic of China and Tito’s Yugoslavia, separating them from a US-dominated ‘free world.’

 It was during this period–between Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, and the formal creation of the USdominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949 — that Eurasia was effectively placed beyond the reach of US economic policies. Eurasia — the vast geopolitical treasure stretching from the River Elbe in Germany down to the Adriatic, through Sofia, Bulgaria, across the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, through Central Asia and China –- was henceforth sealed off from the direct influence of US investment capital and, for the most part, beyond the reach of US economic policies.

Next:

CHAPTER ONE

A War in Georgia – Putin Drops a Bomb

The ‘Geographical Pivot’ Of History