Two Articles on Georgia Crisis Well Worth Reading

I’m still on vacation but, like everyone else, have been quite amazed at the ongoing Georgia crisis, particularly the failure so far of the administration and the campaigns of the two presidential candidates to absorb its potential significance and the need for Washington (and the West more generally) to fundamentally reassess its global position and how over-stretched it has become. (Remember that Georgia was one of Rumsfeld’s first foreign destinations after 9/11 and was followed by a significant deployment in early 2002 of U.S. Special Forces — over Russian protests — there in what was clearly part of a much larger strategy to use the “war on terror” to build the military infrastructure for the “New American Century” in and around Eurasia.)

Two articles — both quite provocative — have appeared in the mainstream press since the crisis broke that have underlined the potential historic significance of the ongoing crisis. While they are not completely convincing, they nonetheless are well worth reading and meditating over. The first is Paul Krugman’s “The Great Illusion” which appeared in the NY Times August 15. It suggests that the latest events may herald the curtain’s fall on the second great age of globalization, the first having taken place from the end of the 19th century to August, 1914. Of course, the comparison of the two ages — with respect to terrorism (then anarchism), vast social dislocations caused by industrialization and imperialism, as well as the high degree of economic integration — is hardly new, but Krugman’s thumbnail analysis is, as I noted, thought-provoking.

“By itself, …the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically,” Krugman writes. “But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.” The article brings in a number of pertinent examples of rising nationalism in the economic, as well as the strategic and political spheres, that today’s policymakers, politicians and publics might well consider before reflexively taking Georgia’s side. Serb nationalists had a pretty good case against the Austro-Hungarian Empire back in 1914, too.

The second article, by former Singaporean diplomat and veteran provocateur Kishore Mahbubani, appeared in yesterday’s Financial Times under the headline “The West is Strategically Wrong on Georgia.” Mahbubani, who notes the hypocrisy of U.S. outrage (and how it appears to publics in Latin America and the Islamic world, in particular) over Russian actions, is particularly succinct about the strategic choices faced by the U.S. and the West at this juncture and argues for a fundamental strategic reassessment based on an understanding that the West can no longer “dictate terms” to the rest of the world as it has assumed it could do since the end of the Cold War. In fact, he argues, both the U.S. and the West have become terribly isolated from what the Bush administration loves to call “the international community.” His analysis of what strategic choices are now available to the West –it can afford only so many enemies and so should be much more discriminating in its choices — is particularly acute. Interestingly, Mahbubani, author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (2008), ends on a more optimistic note than Krugman (although I, presumably like Krugman, believe that nationalism in Asia is as likely to undermine the burgeoning “Pacific Century” as U.S. over-extension and arrogance have wreaked havoc with Bill Kristol’s and Bob Kagan’s cherished but chimerical “New American Century”.)

While the notion that the Georgia crisis takes us back to the end of the Cold War and the “return of history” has become a cliche among most of the commentariat (while some neo-cons predictably compare it to the Sudetenland, Munich and 1938), both columns see the present moment as signaling much deeper historical and even epochal challenges to U.S. and western hegemony in what is now, ever more clearly, a multipolar world that rejects Pax Americana. And, if U.S. leaders, actual and imminent, continue to insist on a hard line toward Russia, that rejection will very likely extend to Europe, as well. Indeed, western (or “old”) Europe, in particular, has some major strategic decisions of its own to make, having seen where its habitual deference to Washington has gotten it.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Worst Taliban Attack or Worst NATO Blunder?

The big news yesterday was the death of 10 French soldiers in Afghanistan. They called it the worst Taliban attack on NATO forces in three years.

But hold the presses…

AFP and al-Jazeera are reporting that the French army refuses to comment on a report in Le Monde that the 10 French soldiers actually were killed by a NATO airstrike responding to the initial attack by militants.

The soldiers told the newspaper they waited for four hours for back-up after being ambushed. But when NATO planes finally arrived they hit French troops after missing their target, the newspaper quoted the soldiers as saying. The report added that Afghan soldiers sent in as backup also mistakenly targeted the French soldiers.

A NATO official said on Wednesday: “I have nothing substantive to confirm or deny this particular suggestion. “We are aware of the media reports and therefore we have to look into it.” The official said the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) “would probably defer in the first instance to the French authorities,” in the investigation.

Junior Defense Minister Jean-Marie Bockel, asked to comment on Le Monde‘s report, said: “this is not the time for polemics, this is a day of compassion, of national unity around our soldiers.”

A Step Up for Haiti?

Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, the new Haitian prime minister, is having some trouble getting ratified by parliament — and the Haitian Constitution is no help in pointing the way to a resolution. It’s about time Haiti had a female kleptocrat — it’s quite progressive. No but seriously, Ms. Pierre-Louis seems a lot better than former president Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who hoodwinked the significant and comparatively wealthy Florida Haitian community into rooting for him, only to pull off the angelic democrat mask and reveal his true diabolic dictator face. He’s now in exile in Central African Republic, one of the only places on earth worse than Haiti. Pierre-Louis split with Aristide’s party seemingly over its promotion of mob violence. Not a fan of the Père Lebrun, I guess.

Here’s to hoping Haiti, that could-be Caribbean paradise, can finally liberalize and knock it off with the mud-eating crap already. Communist Cuba has a better standard of living, to give you an idea of how wretched Haiti is.

UPDATE: I have picked the wrong blog for flippance. I don’t have the time or inclination to debate with most of the offended commenters, mostly because I actually agree with most of you. I was not placing all the blame on the Haitian people for the centuries of political tragedy that continue to befall them, just making silly observations in poor taste. I simply wish to apologize for any misunderstandings and hurt feelings and promise to be more serious and substantive in my future contributions here.

Justin Raimondo vs. Christopher Hitchens on al-Jazeera

Justin Raimondo was on al Jazeera yesterday, with Christopher Hitchens and Nazar Janabi from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Riz Khan was the host.

The show was about al-Qaeda: after 20 years of existence, what is it’s future? Is it recruiting? Those were the questions we were supposed to address. And yet the idea that Al Jazeera was actually having Hitchens on – a militant atheist, who wants to invade practically every country in the Middle East, and has nothing but disdain for the religious and cultural ethos of the region – answers the question of why al-Qaeda is still around, albeit unintentionally.

Here it is in two parts:

An Apology to Cynthia McKinney and Chuck Baldwin

On Friday August 15, Antiwar.com featured a front page template with the images of John McCain, Barack Obama, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader below the caption, We are holding their feet to the fire: Without fear or favor. Some of our readers expressed a concern that by not including Cynthia McKinney we were deliberately ignoring a prominent woman of color.

If you note, we did not include Chuck Baldwin either. The reason is simple. Former Representative McKinney and the Reverend Baldwin are unequivocally antiwar.

We apologize if that was not explicit.