Obama Snubs Putin-- McCain And Graham Smell A Chance To Spill Young Blood

In their report on the snub, Time doesn't even make a passing reference to Russian homophobia or the Olympics. Ed Snowden and international power politics is why, they say, Obama is traveling to St. Petersburg for aG-20 Summit and skipping Moscow and a planned visit with Putin. (And in his press conference yesterday, Obama suggested Snowden turn himself over to the American gulag system he's allowed his administration to become identified with; as for boycotting the Olympics over Russia's treatment of LGBT people... Russia's gays can suck wind for all Obama cares. The games must go on!)

The assumed cause of the cancelled visit was Russia’s decision last week to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, who is wanted in the U.S. for leaking the secrets of American intelligence agencies. “It’s clear that this decision is linked to the situation we did not cause, [the one] reguarding the former American special services employee Snowden,” said Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, adding that the Kremlin was “disappointed” by Obama’s decision. “The U.S. is still not ready to build relations on an equitable basis,” Ushakov told Russian news agencies.

Putin has not yet replied to Obama’s snub, but most experts found it hard to see how he could spin it in his favor. “He can again say that he did not bow to American demands, that he did not obey,” says Alexander Konovalov, an expert on U.S.-Russia affairs at the Moscow Institute of International Relations. But that message has grown hackneyed over the past year of bickering between Moscow and Washington, so it will not earn him many points with the domestic electorate, adds Konovalov.

The only ones who seemed to be celebrating Obama’s snub on Wednesday were some of Putin’s harshest critics. “Putin thrives on these joint appearances to show his cronies that he’s an equal on the global stage despite his lack of credentials, and that he can protect their interests abroad,” says Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who helped lead the anti-Putin protests last year. “I’m glad Obama is finally showing some spine with regard to Putin,” he says. “This cancellation is a welcome start.”

But other opposition leaders were less sanguine. Leonid Gozman, a liberal politician, said Obama could have done more for the opposition’s cause by showing up in Moscow as planned. “He could at least have met with activists, spoken at a university, explained his message in an interview to the Russian press,” Gozman says. “Back in 1972, our country was like a concentration camp without fences, and Nixon still came to meet Brezhnev. They ended up talking through their problems. Everybody won.” But those were the days of detente between Moscow and Washington-- a word that hardly applies to the current state of affairs.

It goes without saying, of course, that GOP warmongers-- think especially McCain and his sidekick Lindsey-- want Obama to do more... much more. The two jack-offs are already calling for sanctions, although I haven't heard anything about no fly zones yet. They are calling for Obama to do something overtly provocative though-- like expanding a missile system into Georgia on Russia's southern border. The two jack-offs-- presumably the third stooge, having been burned once and seeing her popularity in New Hampshire plummet, is avoiding them lately-- issued a joint statement that said "Now we must move beyond symbolic acts and take the steps necessary to establish a more realistic approach to our relations with Russia. That means demonstrating to the Russian government that there will be consequences for its continued actions that undermine American national interests." This isn't the first time McCain and his crazy neoCon allies have tried using Georgia to stir up trouble with Russia. And no, McCain and his closet case amigo don't have homophobia in mind either. These two authoritarian scumbags want Snowden's head on a platter.

McCain and Graham are urging Obama to set in motion a new expansion of NATO, the post-World War II alliance establish to guard Europe against Russian aggression.

In recent years, former members of the Warsaw Pact-- Russia’s answer to NATO, composed almost entirely of its satellite states -- have broken free of Moscow and joined the Western group.

Since 1999, Eastern European nations on that list include Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and Croatia.

Now, McCain and Graham-- who both met for two hours with Obama on national security matters-- say the president should “move expeditiously on another round of NATO expansion, including the Republic of Georgia.”

Such a move likely would rile Putin.

Russia and Georgia fought a five-day war in August 2008 over South Ossetia, a separatist Georgian province. While Russia and several other nations followed the 2008 conflict by recognizing South Ossetia’s independence claims, Georgian officials did not. Instead, Tbilisi considers the region as occupied by Russian military forces.

Back in the late summer of 2008, when it was obvious McCain was going to lose his presidential bid-- and lose big-- he thought using a Georgia-Russian conflict as an electoral talking point would be a good idea-- and a cool source of right-wing cash. At the time, I wrote about a saber-rattling OpEd written by McCain's chief foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann but credited to McCain in the Wall Street Journal. Scheunemann, aside from being a deranged neoCon, is a lobbyist and one of his clients just happens to be... Georgia, although he claimed he "stopped" lobbying a couple of months before when he came on board the Double Talk Express but a few days before the OpEd the government of Georgia-- which has been getting a great deal of taxpayer dollars lately-- sent the lobbying firm that Scheunemann owns another $600,000. Anyway, the Journal OpEd by McCain and Scheunemann is called Guardian expressed a very different point of view. Referring to McCain, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, Seumas Milne wriote that the problem in Georgia has more to do with American expansionism on Russia's border than with Russian imperialism.

The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered." George Bush denounced Russia for having "invaded a sovereign neighbouring state" and threatening "a democratic government." Such an action, he insisted, "is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied-- along with Georgia, as luck would have it-- the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives?

...You'd be hard put to recall after all the fury over Russian aggression that it was actually Georgia that began the war last Thursday with an all-out attack on South Ossetia to "restore constitutional order"-- in other words, rule over an area it has never controlled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor, amid the outrage at Russian bombardments, have there been much more than the briefest references to the atrocities committed by Georgian forces against citizens it claims as its own in South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. Several hundred civilians were killed there by Georgian troops last week, along with Russian soldiers operating under a 1990s peace agreement: "I saw a Georgian soldier throw a grenade into a basement full of women and children," one Tskhinvali resident, Saramat Tskhovredov, told reporters on Tuesday.

Might it be because Georgia is what Jim Murphy, Britain's minister for Europe, called a "small beautiful democracy." Well it's certainly small and beautiful, but both the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and his predecessor came to power in western-backed coups, the most recent prettified as a "Rose revolution." Saakashvili was then initially rubber-stamped into office with 96% of the vote before establishing what the International Crisis Group recently described as an "increasingly authoritarian" government, violently cracking down on opposition dissent and independent media last November. "Democratic" simply seems to mean "pro-western" in these cases.

The long-running dispute over South Ossetia-- as well as Abkhazia, the other contested region of Georgia-- is the inevitable consequence of the breakup of the Soviet Union. As in the case of Yugoslavia, minorities who were happy enough to live on either side of an internal boundary that made little difference to their lives feel quite differently when they find themselves on the wrong side of an international state border.

Such problems would be hard enough to settle through negotiation in any circumstances. But add in the tireless US promotion of Georgia as a pro-western, anti-Russian forward base in the region, its efforts to bring Georgia into Nato, the routing of a key Caspian oil pipeline through its territory aimed at weakening Russia's control of energy supplies, and the US-sponsored recognition of the independence of Kosovo-- whose status Russia had explicitly linked to that of South Ossetia and Abkhazia-- and conflict was only a matter of time.

The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq-- hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.

But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defense secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.