No time for new Cold War, unless you’re a neo-con

August 25th, 2008 at 10:45pm Chuck Sweeny

I don’t comment a lot on international relations, but I’m concerned greatly about the utter distortion by the Bush regime and the mainstream media about what’s going on in South Ossetia, a province of Georgia that is not culturally connected to that country and wants to be independent, as a first step to becoming part of Russia.

With either the benign approval or the active encouragement of  Bush and his neoconservative empire builders, Georgian strongman Mikheil SAAKASHVILI sent his army into the breakaway province to reassert Georgian control. This did exactly what the neoconservatives hoped for when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin counterattacked with Russian tanks. Voila! a new Cold War was proclaimed, exactly the message the neocons wanted to send: Only John McCain has the experience and fortitude to put the Bear back in his box.

Now that Bush has come around to the Obama position on ending the Iraq war and bringing the troops home by 2011,  his neocons need desperately to create another conflict in order to keep Americans shaking in fear so that the Republican version of Big Government can protect them by taking away their freedoms in the name of Homeland Security.

If this all sounds very Orwellian to you, it does to me, too, and I’m not one of the black helicopter believers. I do think, however, that the neocon belligerants in Washington are the most dangerous people we have in this country, because they intend to keep us in a constant warlike state to force western-style democracy and no-tariff markets on the nations of the world, whether they want it or not.

Because they have been invaded from the west, first by Napolean, then by Hitler, Russians have historically sought a buffer zone to protect themselves. Yet the Americans and the EU have moved into that border area and sought to bring those post-Soviet republics into NATO. The US has also sought to put defensive missles there. The Russians say “defensive against who?”

I’m not clear why our government (remember how Bush said he wasn’t into nation building?) wants to flaunt its power around the globe, with 10 or 12 aircraft carrier groups and a $10 billion a month war in Iraq. But if we continue to let the neocons control foreign policy, we’ll be spending twice that much and be sending our sons and daughters to an endless series of battles to protect “Free Trade,” better defined as making it easy for American big box store chains to sell cheap stuff from China all over the world.

And meanwhile, the national debt continues to grow, soon to pass $10 TRILLION.

Entry Filed under: The new Cold War