The latter “nay” vote consisted of 34 stalwart America First, non-interventionist Republicans and but 8 Dems from the AOC/Squad wing. The rest of the bipartisan UniParty mob voted “yea” in behalf of the stupidest piece of neocon busybody meddling in what is absolutely none of America’s business to yet come down the legislative pike.
The “Georgia” in question, of course, is a small country located in an obscure corner of the South Caucasus. What the act does is mobilize the whole of government in Washington – including sanctions, foreign aid and even military might – to punish its leading political party called Georgian Dream for not being sufficiently anti-Russian and pro-Atlanticist.
Let’s see. In so far as we can tell the little red spec on the map below could not be located by one in a hundred Congress persons without a color-coded pointer arrow. Self-evidently, Georgia is massively surrounded by the Russian Bear and, in fact, was an integral constituent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for more than 70 years, having notoriously even given birth to Joseph Stalin himself. And 120 years before that it had been an integral party of Czarist Russia after a predecessor kingdom was annexed in 1801.
At the same time, its capital of Tbilisi lies 3,500 kilometers as the crow flies from the nearest thing to the Atlantic, otherwise known as the English Channel. Never in all of history prior to neocon agitation in the last two decade did anyone on the planet associate Georgia with the Atlantic world.
So why in hell do these geniuses on the Potomac think this no-count spec of a country doesn’t have the right – in its wisdom or otherwise – to ignore entreaties to join NATO. And, instead, to make nice to its great big next door neighbor and historic kinsman, which has been the policy of the Georgian Dream party since it came to power in 2012.
Still, we do mean “spec” of a nation. Georgia’s 3.8 million population is barely that of Los Angeles; it’s $34 billion GDP is equal to about 8 hours of USA output; and it anemic national income per capita of $9,150 is roughly equal to that of the Dominican Republic.
So what in the hell does this have to do with US homeland security? And why in the world does Congress insist that Georgia join NATO, which itself should have been disbanded 34 years ago when the Soviet Empire disappeared into the dustbin of history? Besides, Georgia’s tiny armed force of 20,000 is not even half the 53,000 employee headcount of the New York City police department.
Yet, the MEGOBARI Act insists that Georgia is crucial to America’s national interest and that it become an ally in the battle against alleged Russian aggression:
“[T}he consolidation of democracy in Georgia is critical for regional stability and United States national interests… (so it is) the policy of the United States to support the constitutionally stated aspirations of Georgia to become a member of the European Union and NATO,” to “continue supporting the capacity of the Government of Georgia to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity… (and) to combat Russian aggression, including through sanctions on trade with Russia and the implementation and enforcement of worldwide sanctions on Russia.”
Well, after the calamity of an endless sequence of Forever Wars and the catastrophic $160 billion waste of American treasure on the utterly pointless proxy war against Russia next door in Ukraine, it is damn near impossible to imagine what these fools on Capitol Hill are thinking.
The truth is, the homeland security of America doesn’t give a rat’s ass about who governs Georgia and whether its foreign policy is pro-Russian, anti-Russian or punctiliously Swiss-like neutral. And the very last thing Washington should do is attempt to put another NATO stalking horse on Russia’s very doorstep, when the fact of the matter is that Russia is no threat whatsoever to America’s homeland security.
To remind:Russia’s $2 trillion GDP is just 7% of America’s $29 trillion economy; it’s ordinary defense budget of $70 billion is also only 7% of the $1.0 trillion monster at the Pentagon; its nuclear force is geared to deterrence just like ours, with nothing even remotely close to a first strike capacity; and its conventional air and sealift capacity is so meager that it couldn’t even get a single battalion on its 1980s era rust bucket aircraft carrier as far as Nantucket before it would be consigned to Davy Jones’ Locker by America’s formidable coastal defenses.
In other words, this whole legislative brouhaha on behalf of an “ally” we don’t need, and which doesn’t wish to be one in any event, is aimed at further weakening Russia, which is not a threat to America’s Homeland Security in any way, shape or form. Yet these war-besotted UniParty legislators mean to pull out all the stops in their utterly misguided efforts to push the US Empire deep into the very heartland of Eurasia.
Right after declaring it is US policy to impose its will on Georgia and degrade Russia, in fact, the bill mandates the delivery to congressional committees of a specially prepared classified report “examining the penetration of Russian intelligence elements and their assets in Georgia, that includes an annex examining Chinese influence and the potential intersection of Russian-Chinese cooperation in Georgia.”
What the f*ck?! It’s none of Washington’s business if the elected Georgian Dream government of a remote micro-country irrelevant to America’s Homeland Security chooses to invite, tolerate or ignore the presence in its country of alleged foreign intelligence operatives. For crying out loud, on that standard the US would have to close half of its 200 embassies around the world because they are crawling with CIA agents operating under diplomatic cover and regime change agents from NED, USAID, the International Broadcasting Agency and others.
Indeed, the sheer imperial arrogance of this portion of the bill in particular cannot be gainsaid. The implication of the related sanctions section of the MEGOBARI Act is that Washington would wage economic warfare on a country that has never done America a bit of harm, and has no capacity to do so now, because some ideological dipshits and career politician busybodies in Washington say so.
And, yes, we do mean unprovoked Washington warfare against a tiny statelet in the Caucasus. The bill also actually empowers the President to start slinging the go-to interventionist weapon of sanctions against Georgian Parliament members and political party officials who “knowingly engaged in significant acts of corruption, or acts of violence or intimidation in relation to the blocking of Euro-Atlantic integration in Georgia.”
There you have it: The US Congress claims to have jurisdiction over the foreign policy of damn near every nation on the planet. And if there were any doubt about this intention, additional statutory language makes that clear that if need be Georgia would drafted for Washington-directed military duty against Russia:
“…in consultation with the Secretary of Defense… to expand military co-operation with Georgia, including by providing further security and defense equipment ideally suited for territorial defense against Russian aggression and related training, maintenance, and operations support elements.”
If the italicized passage sounds like another Ukraine in the making, the resemblance is actually even more striking. That’s because what we have here is another territorial and ethnic adjustment problem that emanated from the break-up of the Soviet Union. And like in the case of Ukraine, the Washington neocons and arms merchants have gussied it up into a “rule of law” and sovereign border issue, which, also like the case of Ukraine, is not that at all.
In fact, like the Washington sponsored coup in Kiev in February 2014, Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, which overthrew Soviet era and Russian friendly President Eduard Shevardnadze, had no small amount of help from the usual Washington suspects – NED, USAID, State and the CIA. Widespread protests, led by Mikheil Saakashvili, a provocateur who had been trained by Washington sponsored NGOs, culminated in demonstrators storming parliament with red roses, demanding Shevardnadze’s resignation. The latter occurred in November 2003 followed by new elections.
Backed by by U.S. and European support, including millions from USAID for voter mobilization and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Saakashvili won the January 2004 presidential election. In turn, this ushered in a pro-Western agenda, seeking NATO and EU integration and aiming to restore Georgia’s territorial integrity over the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Accordingly, his government then massively increased military spending (from 0.8% of GDP in 2003 to 8% by 2008) and conducted operations to reassert control over these separatist regions, resulting in the 2004 clashes in South Ossetia and the 2006 Kodori Gorge operation in Abkhazia.
These breakaway regions depicted in the map below were distinct ethnic enclaves that spoke an Iranian dialect different from the main population of Georgia. During Soviet times, in fact, these two provinces had been administrated independently from the Georgian Republic because even the communists could see that the populations weren’t compatible. So when the Soviet Union fell, both provinces declared their independence and operated thereafter on a de facto separatist basis.
However, escalating tensions in South Ossetia between the large Ossetian majority and minority Georgian villages led Saakashvili to launch a military offensive on August 2008, targeting Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital. A latter EU report on the conflict condemned Georgia’s “indiscriminate artillery barrage” as the cause of the war’s inception.
As it happened, there was also a significant Ossetian population in North Ossetia, which had remained within Russia after the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. Consequently, Russia responded to the Georgian offensive with a massive counterattack that repelled the Georgian army from South Ossetia and led to a Franc-brokered truce that left South Ossetia and Abkhazia occupied by Russian forces.
Subsequently, these two breakaway regions were recognized by Moscow as independent states and have remained outside Georgian control ever since. Even then, however, Saakashvili’s miscalculation in launching the 2008 war on South Ossetia and ongoing economic failures in Georgia led to his own downfall in 2012. In October of that year the pro-Russian Georgian Dream (GD), led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, came to power through a democratic victory in parliamentary elections, winning 55% of the vote and defeating Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM).
Still, the purely local ethnic dispute of 2008, in areas so tiny that they would barely amount to a pinprick in the black box depicting the location of Georgia in the upper right hand corner of the map, has become the basis for the neocon claim that Russia is a dangerous expansionist power that must be stopped at all hazards.
And that’s just crazy. In the global scheme of recent history, the 2008 South Ossetia conflict in this obscure corner of the planet that led to but 228 civilian casualties and 169 military deaths was a nothing-burger. It as among the dozen of broken “nationalities” omelettes that were scattered around the Russian borderlands when the Soviet Union fell and centuries of Czarist and Communist territorial expansion came suddenly, and often, violently undone.
Stated differently, there were no universal principles at stake in the manner in which the bits and pieces of the Soviet Empire were sorted out after 1991. That was just a one-time accident of history that had no bearing whatsoever on the Homeland Security of America.
Accordingly, it was simply the ideological aggression of the Washington War Party and its MIC (military-industrial complex) paymasters which made it so. And that occurred especially through obsolete institutions like NATO and the so-called Helsinki Commission of the US Congress – the later being the actual instigator of this absurd piece of busy-body legislation.
Yet and yet. Washington has not stopped its efforts to provoke an anti-Russian posture in Tbilisi even when its own government since 2012 has elected to remain friendly with its Russian neighbor and historic suzerain and to eschew any effort to join NATO.
This is all clear enough. The MEGOBARI Act is blistering idiocy. Nothing that has transpired over the last three decades on the map above pertains to the homeland security of America 10,000 kilometers away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.
Yet the fact that an overwhelming majority of the US House this week saw fit to enact this foolishness tells you that Washington has indeed become the War Capital of the World. Instead of getting down to the true business at hand – stanching the nation’s vast flow of budgetary red ink via sweeping entitlement reform and slashing American hideously bloated $1.0 trillion military budget by 50% – the UniParty majority clings to the delusional business of a failing Empire.
Moreover, there is no mystery as to why. After decades of Warfare State and MIC (military-industrial complex) domination of Capitol Hill there are few elected officials left who even experienced the real Cold War before 1991. So they cling to its now wholly vestigial institutions like NATO and globe-spanning alliances when none are needed in today’s multi-polar world.
Indeed, examination of the careers of the four main UniParty sponsors of this utterly absurd piece of legislation tell you all you need to know. They are careerist politicians who have collectively served in Congress for 65 years, and have spent 128 years between them on the public teat.
Naturally, careerist time-servers are ever on the look-out for missions and projects to justify their existence and for occasion to throw their weight around. But attempting to enlist the no-count state of Georgia against the will of its own electorate in Washington’s absurd crusade against Putin and Russia surely sinks to a level of mendacity that is just downright embarrassing.
Source: AntiWar.com.
