Who's telling the truth on the Georgia crisis? Rick Salutin says trust no government.
When it comes to foreign policy, Noam Chomsky says, the rule is, all governments lie. There may be exceptions, but not among big powers. Does this mean a nasty retreat to cynicism? It seems counterintuitive to never trust anyone. But governments aren't individuals, they're institutions. You aren't giving up on "people," you're adopting a stand toward public bodies. Start from honest skepticism, and you might get somewhere.
This also provided useful perspective:
Russia supports autonomy in the ethnic regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but denies it for Chechnya. The U.S. backs separation for Kosovo, but rejects it in the Georgia cases. It praises democracy in Georgia, but in Iraq ignores a democratically elected government's call for it to leave. And Georgia's President is a democrat who suppresses protest in his streets. The claims about fighting the good fight are fig leaves, even Hitler mouthed them. South Ossetia's beleaguered 70,000 people? Barely table stakes for some real politics. What are the true stakes?
These tend to appear lower down in the stories and press releases. Georgia's leader, says Reagan-era official Paul Craig Roberts, is a "U.S. puppet." He studied in the U.S. on State Department fellowships, worked at a New York law firm, his government's election was subsidized by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros's Open Society Institute. He put a George W. Bush Boulevard in his capital. He admits this "is not about Georgia ... It is about America, its values." The U.S.? It wants to ring Russia militarily and move Caspian oil through Georgia so as to bypass Iran and Russia. Russia wants to assert itself in the 'hood, like any great power. It uses autonomy movements in Georgia as "daggers" to threaten the U.S. oil strategy, says energy expert Michael Klare. It differs from the U.S. mainly in that the U.S. considers the Caucasus, the Mideast and the rest of the world all as its "sphere" of "national interest." None of this involves confronting a new Hitler, it might as well be the Boer War or the Indian mutiny. Welcome to the 19th century.