The Georgia Saga Continues

The Russia-Georgia conflict has been hard to understand on a day-to-day basis due to the unreliable narrators. Russia claims that Georgia firebombed South Ossetia and committed genocide in their initial attack; Tom Lasseter tours Tshkinvali and finds no evidence for the allegation. Georgia has been claiming repeatedly that Russian troops are advancing on the capital despite a cease-fire agreement, and while this one may be true today, it's not entirely clear. So you kind of have to be a detective and wait until all the facts are in to see where things are going.

But certainly, Russia is dragging its feet on withdrawal, and using the "genocide" of South Ossetia as a casus belli. The cease-fire itself has certainly stalled to some extent, and Russia bombed a Georgian bridge over the weekend that was a key east-west artery for the country. This may eventually serve Putin's goals of teaching its near abroad states a lesson, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia probably will rejoin the federation. But that doesn't mean this operation was an unqualified success for Russia:

The West was never going to actively approve of the Russian invasion, but if Putin had limited himself to a short, sharp clash in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, it would have been an almost unalloyed victory. The murky status of the provinces combined with the fact that Saakashvili sent in troops first would have kept Western reaction to a minimum, and Russia's message would still have been sent loud and clear: don't mess with us in our sphere of influence.

But then Putin got greedy — or just made a mistake — and sent Russian troops into Georgia proper. This was almost certainly militarily unnecessary, and it succeeded mainly in uniting virtually everyone in outrage against Russian aggression. Putin can pretend all he wants that he doesn't care about Western opinion, but he obviously does — and what's more, Western unity makes a difference in concrete terms too. Poland's quick turnaround on missile defense is probably just the first example of this. The U.S. has gotten lots of bad reviews for its handling of the situation, but in the end, the countries on Russia's border are more firmly in our camp now than they were even before the war.

I don't know if I agree with that last part. Georgia seems just as mad about our failing to intervene as they are about the Russian invasion. In addition, while Poland's missile defense turnaround is interesting, their pro-Western government has been firmly ensconced for some time. And I'm not so sure who needs who here - does Russia need the West as a market, or does the West need Russia's goods - particularly their energy resources?

Some smarter takes have been given by Joseph Galloway:

Although Vice President Cheney bravely rattled a sword or two and George Bush was talking a little tougher to his old soul mate Vlad the Impaler, the simple truth is that there's not a damn thing we can do about the Russian invasion and perfidy short of nuking them. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made it amply clear that we aren't going to do that, or much of anything else beyond sending some humanitarian medical aid and supplies for the Georgian refugees [...]

Washington can respond only with tough talk. We can threaten to punish the Russians by expelling them from the International Monetary Fund and the Group of Eight wealthy nations, but with a fat bankroll bulging with Arab-size oil earnings, the Russians don’t really need to care about this [...]

Things have truly come to a sorry pass when both our military and our diplomatic threats are as empty as our national treasury, and the Russians of all people can afford to laugh them off.

Bush and Cheney seven and a half years ago inherited control of the world's only reigning superpower, and in that short time they've squandered our military power, our international good name and our national treasury.

Julian Barnes:

WASHINGTON -- In the last week, two major pillars of President Bush's approach to foreign policy have crumbled, jeopardizing eight years of work and sending the administration scrambling for new strategies in the waning months of its term.

From the earliest days of his presidency, Bush had said spreading democracy was a centerpiece of his foreign policy. At the same time, he sought to develop a more productive relationship with Russia, seeking Moscow's cooperation on issues such as terrorism, Iran's nuclear program and expansion of global energy supplies [...]

Since the Georgia conflict erupted, Bush has repeatedly cited that nation's progress toward democracy as he promised American support. "The people of Georgia have cast their lot with the free world, and we will not cast them aside," he said.

Faced with a massive deployment of Russian military power, however, the U.S. response was confined to condemning Moscow's actions, pushing for humanitarian aid and pressing Georgia to accept a cease-fire agreement brokered by France that would leave Russian troops still inside Georgia's two breakaway enclaves.

"What freedom strategy?" asked David L. Phillips, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of a report on Georgia. "It is scorned worldwide. Afghanistan is backsliding. The bar has been set low in Iraq. Georgia is in ruins."

And Michael Dobbs:

It soon became clear to me that the Ossetians viewed Georgians in much the same way that Georgians view Russians: as aggressive bullies bent on taking away their independence. "We are much more worried by Georgian imperialism than Russian imperialism," an Ossetian leader, Gerasim Khugaev, told me then. "It is closer to us, and we feel its pressure all the time."

When it comes to apportioning blame for the latest flare-up in the Caucasus, there's plenty to go around. The Russians were clearly itching for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic and provocative. The United States may have stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to believe that he enjoyed American protection, when the West's ability to impose its will in this part of the world is actually quite limited.

This is the truth of the matter: Ossetians identify with the Russians more; the Georgian invasion was scandalous, though not as bad as the Russians advertised; the Russian incursion into Georgia was deeply wrong; the West was fairly powerless to do anything about it; US-Russian policy on key issues like nuclear proliferation and the Iranian question is in tatters; the cease-fire agreement allows for continued security operations inside Georgia by the Russians, so it's not even clear they're dragging their feet or taking advantage of a bad agreement; Georgia is ruined, America is exposed, and NATO has little recourse.

I agree with Scarecrow - this is good news for John McCain.

How Does Regime Change Feel On The Other Side?

This has the feel of unintended consequences.

Putin criticized the United States for viewing Georgia as the victim instead of the aggressor, and for airlifting Georgian troops back home from Iraq on Sunday.

"Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages," Putin said in Moscow. "And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection."

Look, there's no doubt that Russia's response, to incur far into sovereign territory and bomb civilian airports and empower separatists, appears disproportionate. But so did the bombing of Baghdad as a response to a terrorist attack they had nothing to do with. The President's denunciations and stern warnings just sound totally hollow. And to hear the Russians tell it, the initial assault on South Ossetia by Georgia has the earmarks of a genocide.

NOTE: It's not completely clear what's happening over there. Georgia is claiming that they're enforcing a cease-fire and yet there are reports of their troops firing on Russian positions. Each side is accusing the other of ethnic cleansing. The Georgians claim that the Russians have taken Gori but there are conflicting reports on that. So all reporting there has to be met with skepticism.

What is clear is that something was offered by the West to Georgia if they chose to blitzkrieg South Ossetia, and the Bush Administration failed to carry through, resulting in an almost impotent response.

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It's heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times—officials, soldiers, and citizens—wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It's infuriating because it's clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia's separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions—for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia—with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

Georgia has American and Israeli weapons, a long history with the President, troops in Iraq (until yesterday) and an ally in their quest for NATO inclusion. That they received nothing for all that just shows the limits of cowboy diplomacy and a belligerent foreign policy. We cannot back up the tough talk with action everywhere in the world, and by promoting militarism and aggression, people die. Furthermore, the unnecessary war in Iraq eliminated any claim to the moral authority of saying that Russia invaded a sovereign state.

No wonder Russian "expert" Condi Rice isn't coming off her holiday to get involved. This is a disaster.

FWIW, Anatol Lieven has a good backgrounder. And here's Obama's statement today, which is not cribbed from Wikipedia, to my knowledge. Obama's in a tough spot, because the failed foreign policy of the Bush years has made this crisis almost impossible for us to help manage.

Puppet Picked For Putin

They're "voting" in Russia tomorrow (some of the polling in the easternmost portions of the country has already begun) to anoint a successor to Vladimir Putin, and all relevant polls show that it's likely to be his former campaign manager Dmitry Medvedev. That's probably due at least in part to some helpful nudging by the party in power.

The Kremlin is planning to falsify the results of tomorrow's presidential election by compelling millions of public-sector workers to vote and by fraudulently boosting the official turnout, the Guardian has been told by independent sources.

Governors, regional officials and even headteachers have been instructed to deliver a landslide majority for Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's first deputy prime minister, whom President Vladimir Putin has endorsed as his successor.

Officials have been told they need to secure a 68-70% turnout in this weekend's poll, with about 72% voting for Medvedev. Independent analysts believe the real turnout will be much lower, with 25-50% of the electorate taking part.

The Kremlin is planning to bridge the gap through widespread fraud, diplomats and other independent sources have told the Guardian. Local election officials are preparing to stuff ballot boxes once polls have closed, they believe, with regional officials giving inflated tallies to Russia's central election commission.

It's clear that Russia has backslid massively on democracy over the last eight years, so the fact that this is a Potemkin village of a vote does not surprise. Medvedev was likely to win anyway (Putin isn't an unpopular leader, at least not in public), but a landslide would confer some sort of legitimacy, so it's being mandated.

Seeing both Clinton and Obama struggle with a question about Medvedev in the last debate, it's obvious that both of them could have answered it by saying "It doesn't matter who this guy is, Putin will remain in power, he's isolated himself from the democratic process, and George Bush looking into his soul and seeing a friend didn't exactly help."

Media Looks Into Pootie Poot's Soul, Sees Wrong Thing (Again)

Yesterday's Washington Post: "Dmitry Medvedev, a 42-year-old deputy prime minister known as a rare moderate in a hard-line Kremlin, was put on track Monday to become Russia's next president when President Vladimir Putin endorsed him. The surprise announcement, all but guaranteeing Medvedev victory in an election next March, ends years of speculation about Putin's succession aims."

Moderate? That sounds good! This Putin's all right!

Yesterday's Washington Post op-ed page: "Under Dmitry Medvedev, whom Vladimir Putin nominated yesterday as his preferred candidate to succeed him as president, Russia might have a serious chance to embark anew on a course of political liberalization and democratization. His selection may also provide an opportunity for Western governments and organizations to improve relations with Moscow."

Improving relations! Liberalization! Democratization! We caught a break with this one!

Today's New York Times: "The longtime aide tapped by Vladimir V. Putin to be his successor as president of Russia declared Tuesday that he wanted Mr. Putin to be his prime minister, offering the clearest indication yet of how Mr. Putin plans to maintain firm control over the Kremlin after his term ends next spring [..] As prime minister, Mr. Putin could very well overshadow Mr. Medvedev, turning him into the kind of figurehead president found in parliamentary systems like Germany’s or Italy’s."

Seriously, how stupid are you guys? You really thought that Putin was going to willingly give up power after rigging the elections? You actually thought that a hand-picked successor would usher in a new era of liberalism? I feel like that moment in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray notes "Maybe God's not that smart, maybe he's been around so long that he knows everything." Have these reporters and pundits just stepped out of J-school? How could they not see this one coming?

(By the way, Medvedev is the chairman of Gazprom, the state-run energy firm. Sound familiar?)

Who's The Dictator?

So in common American parlance, Hugo Chavez is the devious dictator while Vladimir Putin is the establishing G8 leader. Yet yesterday, both of them held elections, and that alone is enough to upset that conventional wisdom. Even more so when you realize that Chavez' election was a legitimate balloting which he could lose, while Putin's election was grossly unfair.

Now, Chavez is barred from running for President again in 2012, but of course he can use similar means to Putin by trying to install a puppet government that he controls behind the scenes. The point is that he'll have to try. And his concession speech sounded almost humble.

Humbled by his first electoral defeat ever, President Hugo Chavez said Monday he may have been too ambitious in asking voters to let him stand indefinitely for re-election and endorse a huge leap to a socialist state.

"I understand and accept that the proposal I made was quite profound and intense," he said after voters narrowly rejected the sweeping constitutional reforms by 51 percent to 49 percent [...]

"I wouldn't have wanted that Pyrrhic victory," he said, suggesting a small margin wouldn't have been enough of a mandate.

I'm not trying to be a propagandist for Chavez, but the distinction between him and Putin here is stark. By contrast, the Russian dictator dismissed all charges of a stolen election:

But Putin and his allies praised the result as an overwhelming endorsement of his leadership and policies.

"Of course it's a sign of trust," Putin said in televised remarks. "Russians will never allow the nation to take a destructive path, as happened in some other ex-Soviet nations."

America might want to re-think the labels it puts on other world leaders.

Checkmate

Earlier this week, Gary Kasparov, the chess champion and a leading critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was detained by authorities after an opposition rally protesting the upcoming Parliamentary election. He was later released after a five-day sentence, but he immediately spoke out against the creeping loss of democracy in the country.

Mr. Kasparov said his coalition, Other Russia, would continue its protests against the Kremlin in order to spotlight what he described as a government that has grown increasingly repressive.

“We’ve entered a very dangerous period because we don’t know where this is going to stop,” he said at an impromptu news conference outside his home in Moscow shortly after being freed. The failure of the government to abide by its own laws and Constitution, he said, “could result in a catastrophe for the whole country.”

Basically, the Kremlin is rigging the election, using their official government power to disrupt the opposition parties, destroying campaign literature and signage, arresting and beating opposition campaign workers, and intimidating civilians to vote for United Russia, Putin's party.

This could be the most dangerous legacy of the Bush Administration. The President looked into the soul of Pootie-Poot and saw a kindred spirit. He ignored the blinking red lights warning that democracy in Russia was on the brink. Putin will eventually run the country from a Prime Minister post after being termed out as President. He's never going to give up power and we are impotent to effect any kind of reforms. Putin has outfoxed the President at every level, and now he's suspending the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, which could lead to a major military buildup on the Russian border. There's really a lot to worry about regarding the future of Russia. They can use petrodollars to finance whatever they want in the short term, and they are increasingly becoming a despotic regime. So much for that freedom agenda.

Take A Hint From Vlad Putin, Democrats

On foreign policy issues, you just divide and conquer:

President Bush said yesterday that a missile defense system is urgently needed in Europe to guard against a possible attack on U.S. allies by Iran, while Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates suggested that the United States could delay activating such a system until there is "definitive proof" of such a threat.

The seemingly contrasting messages came as the Bush administration grappled with continuing Russian protests over Washington's plan to deploy elements of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The Kremlin considers the program a potential threat to its own nuclear deterrent and has sought to play down any threat from Iran.

From the moment that the White House announced this European missile defense system, Putin went to work. He would not be persuaded in a series of meetings. He gave the option of placing the missiles in a country he controls, Azerbaijan. He showed up in Tehran talking with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And generally he threatened a return to the Cold War if Bush moved forward. Now he's got the Defense Secretary wobbling and the White House in disarray.

Obviously Putin is impervious to the type of demagoguing Bush routinely does to the Democrats, claiming that they are invting terror or would rather see attacks on America or so forth. But those simply don't have the force that they did in, say, 2002. Russia has plenty to fear from a hostile United States. None of the leverage points worked. And they shouldn't work with the Democrats, either. In fact, they have some allies inside the inner circle.

The new chairman (of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Adm. Mike Mullen, expressed deep concerns that the long counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have so consumed the military that the Army and Marine Corps may be unprepared for a high-intensity war against a major adversary.

He rejected the counsel of those who might urge immediate attacks inside Iran to destroy nuclear installations or to stop the flow of explosives that end up as powerful roadside bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan, killing American troops.

With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region “has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.” The military option, he said, should be a last resort.

Now, Mullen's going to be asking for large military spending to offset the cost of equipment replacement and restoring the armed forces after two long wars. There's an opportunity there to make some agreements.

My point is that you stand firm. Putin's obviously a shady character, and emulating his kind of anti-democratic style is not advisable. But he absolutely played the Bushies on this missile defense thing. For want of a backbone, the Democrats could do the same thing.

The Iran Debate Just Got Serious

Vladimir Putin is delivering the kind of warning that hearkens back to the Cold War.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart Tuesday and implicitly warned the U.S. not to use a former Soviet republic to stage an attack on Iran. He also said countries bordering the Caspian Sea must jointly back any oil pipeline projects in the region.

At a summit of the five nations that border the inland Caspian Sea, Putin said none of the nations' territory should be used by any outside countries for use of military force against any nation in the region. It was a clear reference to long-standing rumors that the U.S. was planning to use Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, as a staging ground for any possible military action against Iran.

"We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state," Putin said [...]

Putin has warned the U.S. and other nations against trying to coerce Iran into reining in its nuclear program and insists peaceful dialogue is the only way to deal with Tehran's defiance of a U.N. Security Council demand that it suspend uranium enrichment.

"Threatening someone, in this case the Iranian leadership and Iranian people, will lead nowhere," Putin said Monday during his trip to Germany. "They are not afraid, believe me."

This is but another of the many consequences that would arise from a sustained bombing campaign on Iran. There's still going to be an Iran after any strikes, and their retaliatory capability would be greatly strengthened by having a nation like Russia on their side. Not to mention that a nuclear-armed country like Russia could provide the bomb and make irrelevant all of the US efforts to denuclearize the Persian Gulf.

The point is that when people talking about the Iranians being such-and-such time period away, or some bombing effort taking them back x number of years, they're talking as if progress toward a nuclear weapon proceeds at a constant pace. In practice, one of the factors that determines how quickly you can proceed is the international context. Right now, things are pretty tricky for Iranian nuclear scientists. Military action that doesn't reflect a firm, UN-backed consensus grounded in some reasonable interpretation of international law (military action that does reflect such a consensus seems very, very unlikely but in principle it could happen) could dramatically alter that.

In other words, our threats are making it easier for Iran to obtain and sustain nuclear technology, and we see the same phenomenon with our efforts at democracy promotion which are killing pro-democracy reform factions in that country. American policy in Iran over the past 50 years has sought to control the country and its resources, stalled political and economic growth, and pushed out the only actual reformers, men like Mohammed Mossadegh, upended in the 1953 coup. Akbar Ganji, one of the leading political dissidents inside Iran, who has demanded that the Bush Administration STOP supporting him, explains:

In the very first years after the Islamic revolution, a group of Iranian citizens occupied the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took its diplomats hostage. These radical forces cited American policies toward Iran to justify their conduct. In fact, radical forces in Iran—especially some of its security and military forces—have always used accusations of “enemy conspiracies” to justify repressive policies. Today, politicians with close ties to the military establishment have taken control of the Iranian government and are trying to manage the cultural and political arena in the style of a police state. These policies are, in turn, aggravating hostilities and allowing the Bush administration to justify its belligerence. Thus the vicious cycle continues [...]

We can already see this dynamic at work. After the 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami as president of Iran, civil society, human rights, and political freedoms became the dominant concerns in Iranian political life. The current U.S. military threat has given the Iranian government a freer hand in repressing Iran’s budding civil society in the name of national security, provided a pretext to entrust key political posts to military and security officers, and so eclipsed democratic discourse that some Iranian reformists see themselves caught between domestic despotism and foreign invasion.

I think Peter Galbraith put it best in a fantastic NY Review of Books article detailing how Iran has emerged as the victor in the Iraq debacle. Right now America has two policies toward Iran; removing the nuclear threat and regime change. But they act as cross purposes to one another. Removing the nuclear threat through air strikes would only rally popular support for the regime, and negotiating with the regime to stop their nuclear program is also impossible as long as the stated goal is their destruction; it's akin to saying "Come out and throw your weapons away so we can negotiate what jail to throw you in." Furthermore, funding "pro-democracy" groups merely brands them as puppets of US policy, and this fear of being overthrown only forces government crackdowns AND makes them seek the bomb to build up a deterrance.

Even though they can't accomplish it, the Bush administration leaders have been unwilling to abandon regime change as a goal. Its advocates compare their efforts to the support the US gave democrats behind the Iron Curtain over many decades. But there is a crucial difference. The Soviet and East European dissidents wanted US support, which was sometimes personally costly but politically welcome. But this is immaterial to administration ideologues. They are, to borrow Jeane Kirkpatrick's phrase, deeply committed to policies that feel good rather than do good. If Congress wants to help the Iranian opposition, it should cut off funding for Iranian democracy programs.

Right now, the US is in the worst possible position. It is identified with the most discredited part of the Iranian opposition and unwanted by the reformers who have the most appeal to Iranians. Many Iranians believe that the US is fomenting violence inside their country, and this becomes a pretext for attacks on US troops in Iraq. And for its pains, the US accomplishes nothing.

What we have right now is the Defense Department as one of the last remaining checks on this deeply misguided policy toward Iran, as practically the only thing standing in the way of military action. That's a frightening thought, and Gates certainly isn't getting the kind of backup from a Congress that, at least on paper, still holds the power to declare war. Those who are adamant that Iran must not have nuclear weapons must understand that the vehicle to ensure that is not in belligerently stating "all options are on the table" over and over again. Only through constructive engagement, not hawkish and reckless rhetoric and votes which up the ante by declaring a foreign army a terrorist organization, will me meet anything close to the objectives that would increase regional and global stability. We have to understand that our bungling in the Middle East has resulted in us losing all the leverage in the debate with Iran. Military strikes would be insane. Negotiations may not produce results. Would-be allies are allying against us. Our policies have put us in this difficult position, and the same kind of policy is not likely to get us out.

Substantial Cuts

Some agreement.

World leaders agreed on Thursday to pursue "substantial" but unspecified cuts in greenhouse gases and pledged to reach a United Nations deal by 2009 on long-term measures to fight global warming.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, hosting the summit of the Group of Eight (G8) in the seaside Baltic resort town of Heiligendamm, had hoped to gain commitments from member countries to slash emissions by 50 percent by 2050.

Instead, the club of industrialized nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- agreed that "resolute and concerted international action" on climate change was urgently needed.

It's an agreement to have another meeting to have another agreement. It's a death by a thousand cuts. Substantial cuts.

And then, apparently Vlad Putin got sweet-talked into accepting the American missile defense plan that doesn't work.

U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian leader Vladimir Putin met for the first time following a series of diplomatic clashes that some analysts said heralded a new Cold War.

At the meeting, Putin proposed using a radar system in Azerbaijan to develop a missile shield as an alternative to a disputed U.S. plan to base it in the Czech Republic and Poland.

"We can do this automatically, and hence the whole system which is being built as a result will cover not only part of Europe but entire Europe without an exception," Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.

So if you funnel money into a Soviet satellite state, we cool. That's the message there.

If you read between the lines at this G8 Summit, you see that the rest of the world continues to get rolled by the Bush Administration. At least the Democrats aren't alone...

I Know, Let's Get The Whole World Mad At Us

January 2009 really can't come too soon, and it may be too late. It's bad enough that this Administration ignored its allies and pushed through into a disaster in Iraq, a disaster they'd like to prolong for the next 50 years. Apparently they want to reconstitute the Cold War as well, restarting conflict with China and Russia.

Apparently the idea before 9-11 was to push Taiwan toward independence and provoke a shooting war with the largest country on the planet.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials....

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

This would be literally unsane (the opposite of sane), but the neoconservative project has always been predicated on finding an enemy, and after the Cold War ended they were openly looking for a new enemy until 9-11 cemented the question.

Not only were these provocations made with respect to China, but currently, Russia is being provoked mightily over installing new missile defense sites in Eastern Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe would force Moscow to target its weapons against Europe.

The threat, in an interview published Sunday in Italy's Corriere della Sera and other foreign media, marked one of Putin's most strident statements to date against the U.S. plans and came just days before he is to join President Bush and other leaders at a Group of Eight summit in Germany.

In the interview, Putin was asked whether the proposed missile defense shield would compel Moscow to direct its own missiles at locations and U.S. military sites in Europe, as during the Cold War.

"If the American nuclear potential grows in European territory, we have to give ourselves new targets in Europe," Putin said, according to Corriere. "It is up to our military to define these targets, in addition to defining the choice between ballistic and cruise missiles."

I didn't think it was possible to get worse, to actually combine all of the accumulated threats of the 20th century at the same time. Is there somebody shouting in the beer halls in Bavaria as well, talking about a putsch?

This is a terrible development. We know Putin has been consolidating power into a very anti-democratic model, and now he's pointing missiles at Western Europe again. So the difference between him and, say, Leonid Brezhnev, is what, exactly?

There are days like this where I want to crawl into the cushions of my couch and hide for 18 months.

UPDATE: Mikhail Gorbachev:

The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has blamed the US for the current state of relations between Russia and the West.

In a BBC interview, Mr Gorbachev said that the Russians were ready to be constructive, but America was trying to squeeze them out of global diplomacy [...]

In an interview with Radio Four's The World This Weekend, Mr Gorbachev said relations between Russia and the West were in a bad state.

"Well, it's worse than I expected," he said through a translator.

"We lost 15 years after the end of the Cold War, but the West I think and particularly the United States, our American friends, were dizzy with their success, with the success of their game that they were playing, a new empire.

"I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire, we know about empires, we know that all empires break up in the end, so why start again to create a new mess.'"

There are a lot of reasons for going into Iraq, but empire-building is almost certainly one of them. A new kind of empire, to be sure, but empire nonetheless, one where the arms of military and economic power have influence worldwide.

I hate to praise Chris Hitchens...

But this is a riveting five minutes of television that lays aside all of this pretension that we have in our society that we're supposed to venerate anyone who simply says they're a man of the cloth, regardless of their deeds. There are very few people in America today who would have the fortitude to say this publicly, at least not among the class of those who are regularly allowed to speak on television. Credit where due.

HITCHENS: The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this -- of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality, and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men [...]

HITCHENS: How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present among us and is an adult male Jew, while, all the time, fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendoes into American politics, along with his friends Robertson and Graham? ... encouraging -- encouraging -- encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of was holy land to the people who already live there, undercutting and ruining every democratic and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God?

(CROSSTALK)

HITCHENS: This is -- this is -- he's done us an enormous, enormous disservice by this sort of demagogy.

We are a nation that has a large segment with receptiveness to demagogues, sadly. It's why we are where we are in the White House. And the invisibility cloak of faith - this piece of fabric that you can place around yourself and make yourself supposedly immune to any criticism. It's out of courtesy, we're told. So the biggest monsters walking the Earth, who pervert the minds of Americans too blinded by faith to know the difference, who use the authoritarian nature of the church to line their pockets and get rich off of wholly imaginary enemies they construct, end up being treated as the second coming of Mother Teresa because they decided to be a thief with a pulpit instead of a thief with a gun.

HITCHENS: ...the fact is that the country suffers, to a considerable extent, from paying too much, by way of compliment, to anyone who can describe themselves as a person of faith, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Chaucerian frauds, people who are simply pickpockets, who -- and frauds -- who prey on the gullible and...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Do you believe he believed what he spoke?

HITCHENS: Of course not. He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I have got away with it again. [...] Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man, and because of the absurd way that we credit anyone who can say they're a person of faith.

Jerry Falwell was a charlatan, and despite the fear to call a spade a spade, at least there are some with the courage to do it. Look, I don't like what Hitchens has become on the war, and I think he distorts and takes things on faith as much as any preacher to justify his absurdities on Iraq and the war on terror. Yes, he has a shtick which relies on being a contrarian for contrarian's sake. But in a way, there IS some internal consistency to what he's saying, which comes forward in his new book God Is Not Great It comes from a belief that religion has been used as a tool to confuse clear-minded people, to set them upon enemies they didn't know they had, and to incite them to hatred and violence. This is behind the adversarial nature of Hitchens' rhetoric against Islamic fundamentalism, and it's behind his vivisection of carnival barkers like Falwell. And it informs this crucial point that just saying you're close to God doesn't make it so.

HITCHENS: Look, the president endangers us this way. He meets a KGB thug like Vladimir Putin, and, because he is wearing a crucifix around his neck, says, I'm dealing with a man of faith. He's a man of goodwill.

Look what Putin has done to American and European interests lately. What has the president said to take back this absurd remark? It's time to stop saying that, because someone preaches credulity and credulousness, and claims it as a matter of faith, that we should respect them.

If a man can be credited for one vital contribution to the discourse, I would wish Hitchens' would be this idea that liturgy does not automatically communicate respect, rather than his less factual pronouncements about how America is such a beacon of freedom in the Middle East.