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TechnoratiAmerican Secretary of War Robert Gates knows a real leader when he sees one. "Clearly, as far as I'm concerned," he said, Vladimir Putin, and not President Dmitry Medvedev, "has the upper hand right now."
Well hell, Gates should know. After all, he deals on a daily basis with the same peculiar situation here in the US, where the president also is a figurehead and the real power lies in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney.
But Gates doesn't speak with such clarity and directness in other matters. "I think that there is a real concern that Russia has turned the corner here and is headed back toward its past rather than toward its future, and my hope is that we will see actions in the weeks and months to come that provide us some reassurance," he said, speaking on ABC and CNN, claiming that the country was returning to the authoritarianism of the old Soviet era.
Ahem.
It might also be noted that the US is heading increasingly towards an authoritarian future, no? Certainly over the course of the last seven years we have seen the executive branch in the US claim that it no longer needs to enact or adhere to laws passed by Congress or to terms of international treaties approved by the Senate. We have also seen this administration refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas for information and testimony from White House officials, effectively establishing the presidency as a dictatorship, have we not?
As for Gates' condemnation of Russia for resorting to force in Georgia, one need not defend Russia's actions there to note that such tactics have long been deemed fully appropriate in the US. Only recently America used force to depose an elected government in Haiti, hustling its elected president off into exile. The US has also been working assiduously through covert means to overthrow the elected government of Venezuela, even supporting (and probably helping to organize) a temporarily successful military coup there. Then of course there is the decades-long effort by the US to overthrow the government of Cuba, which has included everything from invasions and embargos to multiple assassination attempts against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Russia is clearly moving in an authoritarian direction at home, and is reasserting its influence and control over some -- though hardly all -- of the states that were formerly part of the USSR. But in all of this it is merely aping the behavior of the US government, which is becoming more authoritarian also, and which has always been a bully in its local neighborhood.
If Gates has anything legitimate to complain about it is that the American military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its preoccupation with drumming up conflict with Iran, have rendered the Pentagon almost impotent when it comes to threatening Russia.
All that is left for Gates to do is huff and puff about Russia backsliding to the bad old days when it was able to stand up to the US as an equal.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
23 Comments so far
Show AllHP here
some one asked about US troops running. As was suggested on another thread get a different source of info other than this site or even the internet.
100% of the internet goes through the USA. I will repeat what was posted on another thread.
Where did you learn of the truth about Georgia attacking Ossetia and not Russia doing the attacking? Was it on main line media TV/radio or the internet. If your answer is the internet then the US Gov can shut down any site it wants and guess what guy you are then in the dark on the truth.
Find a person who lives OUTSIDE the US that can phone,write a letter, or E mail info when it is cut off in America.
We have a "American Secretary of War" now? Huh, where was I? Defense Secretary maybe....... that WAR title went away years and years ago.
Ooooops, I forgot - we are ruled by the "Crazy Bunch", left over rejects from the Nixon Administration - The Neoconites, The Bushites, The Shiteaters, The Military Industrial Shit Complex, and all those other Republicrats who are still in denial that their OWN Party had been hijacked by a bunch of freakin lunatics.
Coffeelover,,,,,
Hollow point August 20th, 2008 6:13 am
Where was it you saw US troops drop their guns and run? For my own curiosity.
The American media IS the government.
Bernice:
Why isn't anyone saying something? Gee because the media in America is controlled by the GOV. Just look at German history to see what the Bush/IS will do next. It will be interesting when Russia walks into Poland and the US/IS runs away like they did in Georgia.
You see Bush found out the hard way. It is very costly to fight a war half way around the world. Russia on the other hand drove their tanks a few miles down the road.
Lots of US made M16 forsale on the street markets in Ossetia. Georgia , US and Iraeli troops run faster after they drop their guns.
Why isn't Obama hitting McCain hard on his chairmanship of the International Republican Institute, through which the State Department funnels "democracy building" funds to support (and foment???) the destabilization of the democratically elected governments and presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia, and probably coming up, Ecuador?
In Europe, the McCain-led Institute worked for the election of President Saakashvili in Georgia. The neocon U.S. then beefed up and heavily armed his military. McCain's aide, Randy Scheunemann, worked as a paid lobbyist for Georgia until after switching jobs to work for McCain.
Now, the administration and McCain shout pejoratives about Russia's "aggression" while praising the "democratic" Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia's capital city and its killing of between 1,000 and 2,000 defenseless civilians. (South Ossettia has no army.)
win for the corporate state.
Well when the rockets red glare we will see who has won.
Lets see, I put 50 feet of cement 8 foot wide 6 inch thick drain pipe under 10 or 20 feet of rock and earth. Put in 3 years of tinned beans to supply heat ....you are all fucked GB wants to be the last president of the world.
This administration is irony-challenged.
Another Cold War is a win for our corporate state.
Gates said to stand up to the US as an equal. I feel that Russia has the upper hand in that. One it isn't trillions in the hole. Two Russia is flush with cash and can move the military around the globe in the snap of a finger. Russia said, and the US media keep away from this "an attack on Iran is attack on Russia". Well guess what george, you push a bear into a corner and the bear is the only thing walking out.
As for the DOD , the US knows only one thing offence first.
Contributors to this discussion show almost total ignorance of the the responsibilities of the DOD and pentagon.
This author is a nut.
Defense Spending Continues To Decline
June 13, 2008: In the past decade, global defense spending has grown 45 percent, to over $1.3 trillion. That's about 2.5 percent of global GDP. After the Cold War ended in 1991, defense spending declined for a few years, to under a trillion dollars a year. But by the end of the 1990s, it was on the rise again. The region with the greatest growth has been the Middle East, where spending has increased 62 percent in the last decade. The region with the lowest growth (six percent) was Western Europe.
About a third of global defense spending is in weapons and major items of equipment. The rest goes largely for payroll and maintaining troops and equipment. Western Europe, for the most part, maintains armed forces more to keep people employed, than to provide any credible military forces.
The Pentagon is huffing petrochemicals, and puffing Cheney's dick
As I see this Georgia event unfolding, we on the left ought to feel encouraged by the sound of American sabre rattling becoming tinnier an tinnier by the day.
Vlad Putin! Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Cawmunist Pahty?
Many thanks for calling Robert Gates The Secretary of War. After all, there was a time when the DOD was called The Department of War. Consolidated Rice-A-Roni is The Seretary of Imperial Affairs and Wholesale Murder of Dark Skinned Non-Christian Peoples. Henry Paulson holds the Charles Ponzi Chair as Distinguished Professor of Abracadabra and Secretary of Now You See It Now You Don't. And George Wanker Bush has just been offered the chairmanship of the Political Science Department at Yale where he will teach alongside Tony Blair who will soon be a professor of religion at that august center of higher learning. Bush has locked himself in the Oval Office bathroom, as he does every day at about this time, and put 15 fat lines of cocaine on the counter top next to the sink. He has a tightly rolled $100,000 bill in his right nostril and is scarfing up the blow as fast as he can breathe it in. That is the only higher learning that shit weasel has ever done.
I wonder if Russia lied to it's citizens as to the reasons for going to war??? The hypocrisy of our leaders and MSM is incredible.
I'm glad someone here - jlocke123 - has remembered that the other side of the Cuban missile crisis was the US's stationing of ICBMs in Turkey. Quietly removing them was the quid pro quo for the USSR's removal of its missiles from Cuba.
Toss in this factor as well. US policies in the middle east, along with the US free market or else economic viewpoint, have caused the price of oil to spike to very high levels. Russia is a major exporter of oil and natural gas, which means the Russian economy is much healthier today. Back in the 90's, they couldn't afford the military they had. Now they have plenty of money to spend on the military and ops like this.
So, not only has the US gov weakened its own military through silly mis-adventures, they've also contributed to one of their largest rivals being much more prosperous.
Brilliant strategy guys.
Even better, the Pentagon has hijacked a lot of functions outside the military. Like for instance, the local military commander is likely to be involved in regional diplomacy. Tasks the State Dept or the intelligence agencies used to take on are not the realm of the Pentagon.
The problem is that the Pentagon has hijacked the use of our military. And worse, they have given them an impossible job to do. And then the military and soldiers will be blamed for not bringing about a political victory for the White House. What a country.
Hoa binh
Dave Lindorff, I remember the behind the scenes negotiations around the missiles in Turkey and Cuba in the sixties. Perhaps we are witnessing a similar interlude vis-Ã -vis US missiles in Poland and Russian missiles in Georgia?
I appreciate the author's perspective but this article tells us nothing that we had not already figured out a while back, long before Putin's latest adventure.
Many of us predicted years ago that Bush's weakening of the US military in pursuit of neocon fantasies would embolden both China and Russia. As it turns out, it's also encouraged Iran to become more belligerent.
jj