On Writing on the Myth of the New Cold War

All these polemics are going to form part of the basis for a book I intend to write entitled The Myth of the New Cold War and The Revival of the Great Game. I reject all think tanks, "experts", those who espouse propaganda creeds instead of independent thinking.

Certainly, Lucas will loom large but his "arguments" will be judged under to rubric of those selling history as propaganda. I will also request Norman Davies whether he thinks his endorsement of the book was wise.

I want to make in clear that the advance of a homegrown Russian liberalism is a good thing as is more freedom: but it cannot be promoted given the facts we know about the NED trying to get unpopular oligarchs, Anatol Lieven's "Limousine Liberals" back into power.

Quite simply this will backfire. Dissidents are actually a protected species who fight for human rights but conflating Anna Politkovskaya's brave journalism with those like the repulsive FSB goon Litvinenko simply discredits the cause of freedom in Russia.

The Kremlin even if it really did so desire, is not going to assassinate Vladimir Bukovsky or other names going back to the Moscow Helsinki dissidents, who have spent too much time in the USA. They never mention the democidal effects of shock therapy.

There needs to be more genuine "dissident" thinking and less US funded political NGO propaganda, though human rights groups have an important role. But simply ignoring US crimes and global violations of human rights in the name of human rights ( some are less human than others) is no longer an option.

The idiocy of this amoral Market Bolshevism is shown in the fact Lucas refuses to condemn the fascistic National Bolsheviks of Eduard Limanov whose imagery is blatantly neo-Nazi and a part of the supposedly respectable coalition The Other Russia led by those like Garry Kasparov.

Moreover, the unquestioned creed of Euroatlanticism is misplaced and inexorable NATO expansion is dangerous. It will fuel nationalist irredentism in Ukraine if Western nations do not act carefully and diplomatically as Polish and Baltic diplomats have largely failed to do.

The US political system is simply not a beacon unto all humanity. It is deeply corrupt as is the way US foreign policy has continued dity tactics by the CIA, what Peter Dale Scott calls the "deep state", the support for "our terrorists" like the ethnic cleansing KLA in 1998.

Scott is correct to assert that regime change needs to begin within the USA: only then will the honourable aspects of the USA come to the fore, the charity work, humanitarian missions and philanthropy. It must embrace sensible conservatives, political liberals and social democrats.

The model of Solidarity offers a way forward here, though Scott's faith in Michnik in The Future of America is misguided: this post-Trotskyist propagandist and self promoting ideologue is unworthy of being honoured. He supported the Iraq War with craven subservience to Great Power-ant yet he once said totorure was wrong no matter which dictatorship right or left committed it.

It has never entered Michnik's mind that democracies like the US can also practice torture as well in imperial outposts. Michnik has forgotten the writings of Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness

Only genuine citizen power, real civil society activism, can work to reform the USA and other EU states should stop being unquestioning allies, find oil alternatives quickly through state action and support reforms of the US system of government.

Global Expansionism East & West Refutes the "New Cold War" Concept. A Comparison of the History of Russian and US Imperialism

In Europe: East and West, Norman Davies offered much of interest and as usual puts forth the view now quite common with the growth and expansion of the EU, that small nations can fare better than large ones. In The Isles he cities the high-tech "knowledge economy" of Ireland as outstripping the old remnant of Empire, the UK in GDP.

But Davies evinced a misguided optimism. Since he wrote that at the turn of the new century all these small "Tiger Economies" have since 2008 collapsed dramatically from Ireland to the Baltic States as they were based on inherently unstable forms of neoliberal economics.

Davies' belief in culture as the driving force of history is a noble one but flawed as he does not understand economics particularly well and remains somewhat contradictory in his view of Russia, another former rump state of a Greater Empire, first that of the Tsars and then as the largest part of the multinational Soviet Union which was categorically different.

The comparison between Britain and Russia in East and West, with comparisons between the mass transportation of prisoners in nineteenth century to Australia and Russians and Poles from Eastern Europe to Siberia. Davies also mentions Britain's role in helping to create the conditions that made worse the Irish Famine of 1845.

Yet there is not enough from Davies on the parallel expansion of the USA Westwards as Russia expanded Eastwards and was based on militaristic subjugation of the tribes and ethnic groups that had lived there. Moreover, Davies has nothing to say on the hear famine conditions created by neoliberal shock therapy in Russia in the 1990s and the demographic collapse caused by it.

Now at least Niall Ferguson in Colossus:The Rise and Fall of the American Empire has the merit of actually drawing such comparisons between US and Russian expansion in the nineteenth century. Ferguson claims that the USA self professedly termed itself an Empire from the time of the Founding Fathers.

In 1816 Jefferson announced "Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings. What a colossus we shall be" and called it an "Empire of Liberty".

From the original core of the Thirteen states that declared independence in 1776, it was always a matter of discussion whether America should thence expand Westwards. The idea that America threw off George III's "tyranny" was a nationalist piece of mythology.

When the draft Articles of Confederation in 1776, the notion that the Us would remain within those boundaries was rejected by those who not only owned negro slaves but also wanted expansion Westwards to appropriate the land of the Native Americans.

That was one reason for the reason British rule was rejected: it had prevented this expansion which would enrich the American settler states and allow the USA to roll Westwards and take land and resources. Not wanting be treated as mere colonials made many US patricians have the desire to be colonists.

The territorial expansion of the USA and the declaration of the "rights of man" were never applied either to the slaves nor to the Native indigenous peoples whom John C Calhoun in 1817 had decided would consist of removing "Indians" beyond the 95th line of latitude.

The "Indians" were expropriated from their lands by force , land hunger, religious zealotry and military force. After the War of 1812 between Britain and the USA, the native Americans, tribes like the Shawnees and Seminoles had no European ally.

By 1819 the delinearation of the British Crown dominions of what is now Canada were drawn along the forty-ninth parallel and from then on the words "Manifest Destiny" were used to annexing Texas in 1845 by war, thus ensuring it would later have this oil rich state.

The Native Americans increasingly were depicted as whooping savages with the narrative of Hollywood obsessed with the nationalist mythology of "How the West was Won", the martyrdom of Custer's Last Stand and so on.

Mark Twain satirised that thus when lambasting the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and his portrayal of the "Red Indians",

He is ignoble—base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent death can startle him into a spasm of virtue. The ruling trait of all savages is a greedy and consuming selfishness, and in our Noble Red Man it is found in its amplest development. His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts ... The scum of the earth!

The alliance made by Native Americans with Britain as early as 1791 always made them suspicious enemies within at first and then after European influence was removed politically the American Dream was created and sold to impoverished Europeans seeking land to settle.

Thereafter, throughout the mid nineteenth century the "Indians" were to be civilised in order for the American Dream to advance in accordance with the idea of Progress.

In 1872, the US Army pursued a policy to exterminate all Native Americans unless or until they agreed to surrender and live on reservations "where they could be taught Christianity and agriculture". As Paul Wellman wrote in The Indian Wars of the West, 1934,

The Indian [was thought] as less than human and worthy only of extermination. We did shoot down defenseless men, and women and children at places like Camp Grant, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee. We did feed strychnine to red warriors. We did set whole villages of people out naked to freeze in the iron cold of Montana winters. And we did confine thousands in what amounted to concentration camps.

The question is how many Native Americans were exterminated in the idea once proposed in "how the West was Won" compared to the expansion of Russia Eastwards, no matter that the USA was a Western democracy and Tsarism a system of absolutism with no democracy.

The fact is that there has been throughout US history a form of Jacksonian nationalism which continued with the Bush II administration after 2000 which identifies a universal crusade for civilising the world by the pursuit of war and violence.

Violence in the name of Progress, precisely because it denotes the triumph of a superior way of life, is, was and has been far more rapacious and exterminatory than anything dreamt up by the Tsars who took Asiatic peoples land by force but did not try to exterminate native people en masse.

Shifted on to reservations and humiliated, the Native Indians suffered a fate far worse than their Asiatic equivalents in Russia who were generally left alone so long as they offered no resistance and land was redistributed from tribal elders to lesser tribesmen to encourage a more Russian style of farming instead of nomadism.

The difference it is said is that the USA is, at least, a democracy ( which is questionable-it bears more resemblance to an oligarchy ) and that has states were the rule of law at least allows Native Americans to try to redress their grievances and treatment ( which is true ).

But at the same time as Lucas hypocritically cites the lack of representation and autonomy for its Asiatic peoples in Siberia and the Far East, citing Moscow's centralised dominance the USA, the Bush regime was attempting to roll back autonomy for Native Indians

In July 2000 the Washington State Republican Party adopted a ruling advocating that the federal and legislative branches of the US government terminate tribal governments . They were not alone in being the only party in this supposed beacon of democracy unto all humanity to do so

In 2007 a group of Democratic congressmen and congresswomen introduced a bill in the US House of Representatives to "terminate" the Cherokee Nation. The reason was the same as for the cross party support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003-grabbing natural resources.

As of 2004, various Native Americans are wary of attempts by others to gain control of their reservation lands for natural resources, such as coal and uranium in the West. As usual Lucas' hypocrisy and double standards are, to use a favoured neoliberal buzzword he likes "transparent".

Whilst Anna Reid wrote of the plight of the native indigenous tribes in Siberia in The Shaman's Coat, there is no comparative analysis of the condition of the Native Americans. As for those like Lucas it would prove that the USA can act as rapaciously, if not more so, that Putin's Kremlin.

As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights stated clearly on September 2004

"It has long been recognized that Native Americans are dying of diabetes, alcoholism, tuberculosis, suicide, and other health conditions at shocking rates. Beyond disturbingly high mortality rates, Native Americans also suffer a significantly lower health status and disproportionate rates of disease compared with all other Americans"

In the New Cold War, Edward Lucas only mentions the atrocities committed by Tsarist Russia and yet they were no were near as exterminatory as those pursued by the USA. Only under the USSR, with its version of Progress and civilising the natives, did this happen. Lucas opines with his devotion to one dimensional double standards,

"The Kremlin is particularly nervous about the twenty odd republics that are nominal homelands of the country's non-Slavic groups. It remembers how nationalism broke up the Soviet Union...Many of the country's minorities have ethnic cousins abroad, most of whom are Russia's historic or even current adversaries.

The Tatars and other Turkic minorities, for example look to Turkey, once a superpower that reached deep into Central Asia. Finno Ugric minorities in places such as Komi, Mari-El and Mordovia have linguistic and cultural ties ranging from the strong to vestigal with Estonia, Finland and Hungary.

Few remember the genocidal effect of Russian rule as it spread east two centuries ago: nor do they remember the especial severity of Stalin's repression of the Soviet Union's minorities

Nor clearly does Lucas remember the genocide committed by the USA against its indigenous tribes in the nineteenth century. After all, in a "New Cold War" these are only charges that can be made against Russia because, as Bruce George New Labour MP claimed "Russians are Russians".

Lucas' first error is to assume that Turkic minorities have close connections to Turkey or that Turkey, a NATO member, since the US invasion of Iraq has been interested in rekindling ethnic irredentism simply to faciliate Brzezinski's plan to carve up Russia and reduce it to a "Black Hole".

The oligarchs empowered by Lucas' fetish for IMF shock therapy did not care at all for the indigenous natives of Siberia, not least when Yukos under Khodorkovsky had district mayors assassinated in contract killings for opposing their appropriation of oil and gas there. So much for the propaganda that the only cynical investors are those investing in Putin's Russia

Secondly, the Russian expansion Eastwards and the cruelty involved did not amount to "genocide". Many of the leaders of the tribes were co-opted to serve the Tsars in the military and as Anne Reid writes in The Shamans Coat many Siberian tribes were killed by diseases brought by European Russians such as smallpox, , influenza and typhus ( page 48 )

In the nineteenth century one in three were killed by incompetently administered immunisation programmes involving botched vaccinations with dirty syringes in places such as Kolyma in 1884 and 1889 ( page 50 ). There is none of the intentionality which is behind the US extermination of Native Americans.

The Khant tribes were conquered but Russian bureaucrats like Speranky in the nineteenth century were concerned with giving native Siberians rights by Tsarist decree and who made a cameo role in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Whilst dissidents like Thoreau and Twain were complaining of the treatment of the Native Indians so too did Russian writers

The atrocities and incompetence of Tsarism were criticised far more in Russia than in the USA were Progress and the sheer scale of the mass settlements ensured there was little sympathy for most of the Native Americans. Not only Tolstoy but Alexander Herzen deplored his comtemporaries treatment of the "poor, miserable, timid" Finno-Ugric peoples of Vyatka.

Far more artists and writers in Tsarist Russia took an interest in the culture and traditions of indigenous minorities than in the USA.

Lucas's fundamentally bad grasp of history is shown by the fact that the Komi areas of northern Russia had been settled by Russian settlers for several hundred years and though forced into baptism to the Christian faith in the C14th, the Komi by the nineteenth century regarded themselves as ethnically Komi but religiously Russian Orthodox.

Nineteenth century philogists from Moscow were fascinated by the Finno Ugric tribes no less than British anthropologists and academics were with the lands and cultures of India and Africa. Kandinsky was one artist who took an interest in shamanistic art forms and incorporated it into his paintings.

Lucas also fails to mention, being a total philistine, that the Mongol invasions of Russia and Europe in the c13th had mixed with the Slavs during the "Mongol Yoke" which is why writers from Turgenev, Chaadaev, Berdiaev, Bulgakov were of mixed Slavic and Mongol descent. Whatever the cruelties of Tsarist autocracy, none thought of ethnic irredentism or atavism.

Lucas is simply promoting a false version of Russian history for pure propaganda purposes. The Native Indians were patronised, despised and put on reservation: that only happened in "Russia" under the Soviet Union with progressives like some Fabians and H G Wells espousing the sort of progressive creeds in which "primitive people" had no future.

In the New Republic, Wells, who predicted apocalyptic and messianic wars between alien races ( which Lucas as a missionary liberal is essentially promoting by advocating the break up and micromanagement and irredentism ) stated,

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races. How will it deal with the black? ...the yellow man....the Jew?....those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty white, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency ? Well, the world is the world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.....The men of the New Republic...will make the killing worthwhile".

The point here was the progressivist ideals of Communism and then the breakneck modernisation pursued by Stalin that aggressively suppressed the language and culture of tribes in Siberia or starved Tatars to death in collectivist farm enterprises. It was not something The Tsars had attempted to do, though they thought such people less civilised.

As regards Putin since 1999, the legacy is far from perfect but it is not a reversion to Stalinism: some of the iconography of the Soviet period is mere lip service designed to re-assure older generations that there will be order and that not everything under Communism was a total failure, even though most of it was. Politicians do use the past to consolidate authority.

But on Stalinist crimes, Putin has repeatedly repudiated them again and again whilst trying to restore a sense of purpose, dignity and the notion Russia is a Great Power. Every President of the USA repeats propaganda about the USA's role as Global Redeemer saving the World: it's guff but it is what leaders tend to do.

No respectable historian of Russia has levelled the charge of Russia committing "genocide" against Siberian tribes in the nineteenth century. There is no such mention of a "genocide" in Geoffrey Hosking's Russia and the Russians or Orlando Figes Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia.

For a start, Russia was just too inefficient to undertake the kind of genocide the USA was wealthy and powerful enough to commit against the Native Americans. The railroads made settler expansion easier in the USA and mechanised mass slaughter on a large scale possible. There was no railroad into Central Asia until the Trans-Siberian Railway finished in 1903.

The next fundamental piece of propaganda dressed up as history is the Finno-Ugric connection between Hungary and Estonia and Finland.

Hungarian is a very different language to Estonian with very few words in common as the tribes beyond the Urals that entered Europe in the ninth century and created what is now Hungary had veered south and developed an entirely different culture.

Lucas's history is so bad that he is simply trying to yoke together nations with very different cultures and traditions in order to fit the factst to promote pan-ethnic nationalism of a totally fictitious sort to create a community of fate ever threatened from a Neo-Soviet threat.

The Hungarians migrated to a presumed region called Magna Hungaria around 500-600 AD. Around 600 AD they created settlements in current day Ukraine called Levedia and Etelkoz after which these nomadic horsemen then settled the Carpathian Basin which is now Hungary.

As Miklos Molnar puts it in his A Concise History of Hungary,

"Proto-Hungarians did not emerge...as a distinct entity until the first millenium BC and their itenery is unknown until until the middle of the following millenium. A temporal desert of a thousand years or more reamains, during which time the ancestors of the Hungarians having parted company with their 'cousins', became a distinctive people"

The connections between Estonian and Hungary are slight in linguistic and cultural terms. Moreover, the fate of the Szekely Hungarians and other Hungarians in Romania was ignored as they were persecuted by Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator whom the West favoured in the 1970s

The reason was precisely the same as is the support for Mikheil Saakashvili and Greater Romanian nationalists who were behind the abortive Twitter Revolution of April 2009-Great Power politics and getting Romania and Moldova together to oppose Russian power, ignoring the anti-semitism of the photogenic rebels such as Oleg Brega.

So no "genocide" was committed by the Tsars. Only by the progressive USA. This is not some far left view. For as Alexis De Tocqueville, the French liberal conservative noted in Democracy in America, the United States was able to "exterminate the ...the Indian race without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world".

It is a pity , therefore, that Davies does not deal with these historic crimes which even Brian Brivati, a staunch Euroatlanticist has termed "genocide"whilst maintaining that the USA should have invaded Iraq in 2003 and that NATO is a sphere of ever expanding liberty and human rights.

The treatment of the Native Americans, the attempt to overthrow Hugo Chavez through a coup in 2002 for restoring land rights to darker skinned Venezuelans and using oil revenue for literacy campaigns and healthcare, should have acted as an indication that the US manipulates human rights as an expedient tool of realpolitik.

The reason for that, yet again, is that Venezuela contains some of the worlds largest reserves of oil after Iraq and Iran.

Moreover it is a tad ironical that the confusion of Britain with England is mirrored in the confusion of the Soviet Union with Russia which Davies does not look at when advocating the notion of a "New Cold War" argued by the Euroatlanticist proponent of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and even the Near East who is a shoddy propagandist peddling untruths.

Bibloigraphy

Edward Lucas, The New Cold War.
Niall Ferguson, Collosus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.
Anna Reid, The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia.
Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians.
Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia.
Norman Davies,Europe: East and West.
Norman Davies, The Isles.
Miklos Molnar, A Concise History of Hungary

The Kutaisi Monument Destruction was to Lucas a "Messy Business"

In addition to his monomaniacal hatred of Russia in the New Cold War, Lucas is so blinkered that he cannot even bring himself to use plain English to condemn Saakashvili's vandalistic destruction of the Kutaisi War Monument in December 2010.

On Jan 7th 2010 in The Economist he merely had recourse to a bland article that predictably starts off by trying to insinuate that Soviet War Memorials are symbols of oppression by drawing on the examples in Central Europe rather than deal directly with the fact Saakashvili's Georgia was part of the Soviet War against Nazi-Germany. Berlin and Vienna were not.

Instead he waffles on about "The messy politics of war memorials".

Yet, there is nothing "messy" about the politics of war memorials if it is accepted that those who died during World War Two had no choice but to fight, not least if they were conscripted in the Soviet Red Army. Lucas opines,

War cemeteries are poignant places, better suited for reflection than controversy. In Vilnius, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and others, all fierce foes in their day, rest in the same hallowed ground.

But, of course, Lucas has to make the facile point that Soviet War Memorials are less equal and deserving of respect than others

Some war memorials make no political statement. The Thiepval Memorial on the Somme, designed by Edwin Lutyens, bears the names of 72,000 fallen British soldiers from the 1914-18 war. It does not try to say anything about the origins of the war or who won it.

British memorials usually bear an epitaph on the lines of this: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, ‘for their tomorrow, we gave our today’.” That may strike the modern eye as a bit maudlin, but nobody could find it offensive.

This is true, but then Lucas goes on to suggest that the triumphalism of the Soviet Union's monuments is what makes them monuments to Soviet power and a claim to a Russian or Soviet "sphere of influence". Hence,

The Soviet war memorials in Vienna and Berlin, in contrast, are built in the hearts of each city with demonstrative and meticulous attention to Stalinist iconography and cliché.

“Eternal Glory to the Heroes of the Red Army, fallen in the fight against the German-fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of Europe” reads the inscription on the Viennese one, in Schwarzenbergplatz.

But the Vienna monument is different. According to Norman Davies in Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory, the inscription also reads " In Honour of the soldiers of the Soviet Army died liberating Austria from Fascism".

The fact is that this is what the Soviet Union did and it did not occupy Austria as it did East Germany where in Berlin the inscription is the same except the word "Europe" is omitted in favour of the words "for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union".

The distinction is small but it is an important small brass plate addition does make a difference. Lucas does not cite the Berlin Monument as it does make it clear that Germany's liberation was the Soviet Union's and not Europe's.

The reason Lucas cites it is that he wants to make it clear that the Soviet Union or now Russia has always claimed that it's part in "liberating Europe" is one that gives it still the right to have a central interest in Central Europe. And further,

Given what actually happened in the Soviet-occupied part of Europe after 1945, views may differ on the merits of that inscription. Some Austrians, ungratefully, nicknamed it the “Looter’s memorial” or the “Unknown rapist”.

But that was back in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when feelings about the Red Armies banditry were high, In the era of neutrality it has long been forgotten as such by the Viennese who just call it the Russendenkmal ("Russian monument").

What Lucas is attempting here is to show how the Soviet Union is still regarded as some threat in Vienna no less than it is in Estonia or nations liberated from Soviet domination in 1990. It is using history to make a current propaganda point.

As indeed where those French far right desecrators who wrote on Commonwealth Graves in Normandy "Rosbifs Go Home" few saw that as typical of prevalent French opinion either now or after the war.

Lucas is trying to dredge up old fears in the heart of Central Europe and by implication connect it with the "Neo-Soviet" threat posed by Putin and to get Austria, a non-NATO member, to be remembered as somewhere the liberation of Europe meant totalitarianism for the Eastern half.

Rape is common during war and happened on the Allied side too but not on the scale of the Soviet army whom Stalin encouraged to rape German women to "let them have their fun".

So Lucas has it that it's still an unwanted symbol of tyranny when most have actually forgotten or do not care much for it.

Some have tried to blow it up or otherwise vandalise it. But it is protected by law, dating from the 1955 treaty in which Austria regained its independence from the liberator-occupiers.

Lucas leaves it open whether it "should" be protected by law and offers no condemnation of those who had tried to demolish it. The simple fact is that not all those who fought in the Red Army were rapists. This insinuates collective guilt.

Yet it suits Lucas to assume it is a prevalent opinion in Austria which remained neutral during the "Old Cold War". To assert that the words on the Austrian memorial are the same as the one in Berlin shows the only "mess" being made is by Lucas.

For the main fear of Lucas is that the option of "neutrality" in unthinkable when Putin is a "Neo-Soviet" threat trying to strike back and regain its "sphere of interest" in Central Europe and thus rid Europe of that notion in the New Cold War.

This view chimes with Brzezinski who is scathing about "Finlandisation", as Finland was another state that opted to remain neutral and prospered and, like Austria, could be an alternative to to the "you're either for us or against us" attitude of New Cold Warriors like Lucas in places like Georgia.

Clearly,

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the former Soviet republics were under no such legal requirement to preserve or protect war memorials. That gives them more freedom of manoeuvre, though whether they use it wisely is another matter.

What Lucas means by "freedom of manouevre" really means that the assumption of collective guilt can have free reign in lands which as he puts it in bellicose rhetoric in The New Cold War lie "On the Front Line". ( page 169 )

In 2007 Estonia abruptly moved a Soviet war memorial from a conspicuous position in the centre of Tallinn to the military cemetery on the capital’s outskirts, provoking riots among local Russians who saw the move as blasphemy towards past generations’ sacrifice and heroism.

Those Russians had every right to be outraged by this desecration. But as Lucas can only ever see atavistic nationalism in operation if it emanates from Russia, he has to rationalise it by claiming,

Though the government’s tactics and timing were indeed questionable, the motivation was understandable—for Estonians the statue epitomised their country’s 50-year occupation, during which its own military memorials had been obliterated.

By those standards then, the Iraqis have every right to break up and demolish, or move to some junkyard, the Commonwealth Graves of British soldiers killed in Iraq during the 1920s. More so, as a majority of Iraqis regard the British now not as "liberators" but as "occupiers".

It is doubtful whether Lucas, having venerated British War Memorials, would agree that this would be an "understandable motivation". Not least, as the US-UK invasion led to the sacking and destruction of ancient artefacts from Baghdad Museums.

Lucas' craven recourse to euphemism was evident when he rationalised Saakashvili's decision to blow up the Kutaisi War Memorial to the 300,000 dead Georgian soldiers who had to fight in the Red Army of Stalin, himself a Georgian.

... Georgia took things a step further when it demolished a colossal 46m-high Soviet war memorial in Kutaisi, the country’s second city. Bungled use of explosives killed two bystanders, a mother and child.

The idea it was "bungled" is an understatement as Saakashvili was in such a hurry to do this before his birthday on 21st December that officials went against mass opposition to it in Kutaisi itself.But ordinary Georgians opinions don't count if they go against the notion that Saakashvili was on a "bumpy ride" to modernisation before his regime, suffering economically before his nationalist attack on South Ossetia in August 2008 was crushed by Russia.

Lucas waffles on blithely,

The official, somewhat contradictory, explanation was that the monument needed restoration and in any case stood on a site needed for a new building to house the country’s parliament.

The question is whether Lucas believes that was the motive or whether it was really just an act of total hatred designed to curry support by conflating the Soviet Union with Russia as Mr Lucas himself regularly does for propaganda purposes,

It is easy to see why Soviet monuments are resented in places that see themselves as former captive nations of the evil empire. Railing against them may win votes.

But they did not "win votes" and it was precisely because Saakashvili was losing popularity and was threatened by mass opposition in 2007 to his repressive regime that he acted in such a dictatorial and arbitrary manner ( or "hotheaded" as Lucas likes to say ).

The soft peddling and damage limitation to Saakashvili, so lauded and celebrated in the New Cold War by Lucas reaches more euphemism and inability to call and spade a spadewhen he blithely generalises

But vindictiveness is not a good policy. Relocating monuments to neutral locations, preferably with proper consultation, no haste, and all due decency, is one thing. Cheerfully destroying them is another.

Well, it would be if Saakashvili had contemplated that. He did not. Thus meaning that Saakashvili is a petty, vicious and nasty atavistic nationalist, an irony confirmed by the fact that he launched his Rose Revolution outside Stalin's statue in Gori.

The bland tone of exculpation, of totally ignoring internal protests of hundreds of thousands of Georgians in Kutaisi against it is simply skimmed over when Lucas warbles on with his usual neoliberal generalisation and abstract waffle.

Respecting different approaches to the past is a hallmark of a free plural society just as forcibly rewriting it is a hallmark of totalitarianism. That does not make monuments sacrosanct (you will search in vain for a German military cemetery with a swastika).

But going to Estonia will reveal that collaborators with the Waffen SS in Museums are now lauded as "freedom fighters", a curious direction for a "plural society" such as Estonia to take.

As there is, of course, no alternative to NATO expansion in Georgia, a key strategic ally of the Baltic States who clearly enjoys rewriting history by obliterating it or churning out "revisionist" history of the sort David Irving would approve.

The last sentence is meant to stake out Lucas's "moral stance" when he ponders that,

"But the dead deserve to be treated with respect, however flawed or horrible the cause in which they died".

After all, if the double standards are revealed, the Iraqi example being a case in point as a rapacious oil grab waged by Blair and Bush, then clearly Iraqi's might be "understandably motivated" to smash British War Graves there.

That would not be good form for Lucas as these graves are decent ones. Forget the reason why British troops were there and why Bomber Harris and the RAF was bombing them-oil. Earlier David Lloyd George had written of the necessity of "bombing the niggers". Bomber Harris strafed entire rebel villages as a "pacification campaign".

The decaying War Graves in Iraq are in a style that is not bombastic as Soviet War Memorials were but it is the substance of the history behind propaganda myths that needs to be interrogated and the same standards have to be applied to the Soviet Union as they are to the USA. "Style" is no alternative to the substance of what these invasions meant.

Now in "soft power" terms US War Memorials in Europe are more dignified but Museums and Memorials in the USA do strike a rather different tone as the fight against Nazi-Germany is rolled over into one seamless monumental struggle against Russia during The Cold War, Vietnam and Iraq.

The radical journalist John Pilger points this ot when he writes with his customary with ( though his political conclusion on many matters are misguided ) that he went to the,

.......the American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”.

It was holiday time and lines of people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were dispensed.

These ­included tributes to the “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam, where they were “determined to stop communist expansion”.

In Iraq, other true hearts ­“employed air strikes of unprecedented precision”. What was shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission.

“History without memory,” declared Time magazine at the end of the 20th century, “confines Americans to a sort of eternal present.. They are especially weak in remembering what they did to other people, as opposed to what they did for them.”

Ironically, it was Henry Luce, founder of Time, who in 1941 divined the “American century” as an American social, political and cultural “victory” over humanity and the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit”.

Despite the prominence of the Holocaust Museum, the USA was simply not that interested in the fate of Europe's Jews until the 1960s when Israel became a key strategically in preserving the USA's hegemony in the Middle East. Before then , ironically, it had been the Soviet Union that had supported Israel up to 1955.

So if there is a "New Cold War", then that form of history as propaganda needs to be critically judged as well, not least in light of the double standards when at the same time as the Auschwitz sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" was stolen the press in the West featured it as a major news item.

Yet when Saakashvili blew up the Kutaisi Monument there was no mention in any of the daily newspapers. There was total silence almost apart from the Irish Times and, of course, Edward Lucas.

By contrast Putin's response, irrespective of what Lucas thinks of him, was dignified and ethically the correct one as reported by Russia Today on May 10 2010.

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and Georgian opposition leaders have laid a stone to a future monument to Georgian soldiers who gave their lives for the victory over Nazism.

The monument will be erected on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow and will replace a giant monument in the town of Kutaisi in Georgia which was demolished last year by the country’s government.

“The new obelisk on Poklonnaya Hill will be built using voluntary donations,” the Russian premier said at the ceremony on Saturday. “It will be a symbol of respect to the Great Patriotic War soldiers, a symbol of the inviolability of the monuments erected to celebrate their heroic deeds.”

There is nothing here about celebrating Stalin. The Great Patriotic War is a part of Russia's history and as Davies says it is one of history's ironies that it was primarily the Soviet Union, of which Russia was the largest part, that defeated Nazism and liberated Auschwitz in January 1945.

Which nation does not celebrate sacrifice in war and why are Russia celebrations seen as so much more bombastic than the USA's "revisionism" as present at the Smithsonian Institute ? Putin is an astute politicians and needs to make sense of Russian history in a way that will restore pride. The USA as a Great Power does exactly the same thing.

The disparity reflects the fact that Israel remains a geostrategic ally of the USA in the Middle East and a prime driver of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and overreacted to it claiming it was part of an anti-semitic plot and not a perverted memento collector's scheme hatched in Sweden.

Compared to that the major embarrassment of Saakashvili, who claimed that Georgia was a "victim nation" just as Israel and Poland were, blowing up an entire monument was just not considered news in the West, despite being a vulgar act of aggressive nationalism. For pointing this out in the "liberal" British Guardian newspaper in December 2009 I was censored.

Given that Norman Davies actually aims in Europe At War the debunking of history as propaganda mythology, being critical of it also in Europe : East and West, it is curious that he made the error of putting his distinguished name to Lucas's 'New Cold War' which erects history as propaganda into its principle objective.

Davies is scathing about the role of "ideology" in the US invasion of Iraq but he tends to marginalise the blatant fact this war was planned for years by circles in Washington years before the neoconservatives came to power in 2000 under George Bush. Davies is right to stress 'ideology' but the question is whether this was the rationalisation of an oil grab.

This lead Davies into the error of tending to see the US and UK invasion of Iraq as "however" well intentioned" as one that was based on a "liberation" that, knowing the history of Iraq and the resistance against colonialism between 1917-1932, would never be welcomed as such. In other words, it was not intentional to invade Iraq only for its oil.

This tends to be the viewpoint of liberals too inhibited in calling a spade a spade because they are afraid of the apolar anarchy that may result from the destruction of the world's sole remaining "hyperpower", at least until the huge financial crash brought the era of US hegemony and the prime preo-currency to an end.

Timothy Garton Ash, once so magnificent in writing of the struggle for freedom in Poland against a repellent Communist regime in The Polish Revolution 1980-1982 could only manage to rather pathetic weasel words of condemnation of the way the US invasion of Iraq was handled or rather mishandled.

Criticism of the fact the USA did not actually have strategy to nation build in Iraq and outsourced construction work to private contractors backs up the known facts that the Invasion of Iraq was about access to oil. And the scale of the death in this "New Cold War"
of 2003

Ash, a “liberal interventionist”, wrote on 9 April, 2003 “America has never been the Great Satan. It has sometimes been the Great Gatsby: 'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things...'. Britain's duty, he earnestly opined, “is to keep reminding Tom and Daisy that they now have promises to keep”.

This is a pure delusion. Blair's support for Iraq was welcomed by Bush IIfor propaganda reasons but in neoconservative circles he was slightly looked down upon for trying to get the second UN Resolution passed when the US had decided it was going to invade whether Hans Blix found Weapons of Mass Destruction ( WMD's ) or not.

This again point back to the flaws of Lucas' thesis of a "New Cold War". The point is not whether people in the West are free to demonstrate against Iraq, as they haven't tried in Chechnya ( mostly because Chechens have resorted to terrorism and bombing and murdering Russian civilians ), but that the protests mean nothing.

Irrespective of public opinion in the West or investigations into the Iraq War, every enquiry has been as Establishment whitewash. The documents which Blair and Bush persused at Craford in 2002 about Iraqi oil are unmentionable. The invade a nation to appropriate and take its resources is a major international crime.

So to go back to the issue of War Memorials one things is clear: the bodies of US troops can these days be easily flown back to the USA by rapid air transportation. There will be no memorials for Iraqis to smash down. But in Lucas's view, the destruction of the Kutaisi Monument was a "messy business". Just like Iraq is to Timothy Garton Ash.

On Turkey and Irans's Uranium Swap Deal.

The Hindi Reports,

Tehran: Iran on Monday agreed to swap a major part of its low enriched uranium stocks on Turkish soil for an equivalent amount of uranium enriched to 19.75 per cent, potentially ending a stand-off with the U.S. and Europe that threatened to spiral into sanctions.

Iran needs the higher grade enriched uranium to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor, used by it to produce medical isotopes.

The deal was reached after 18 hours of negotiations ending 4 a.m. among Iran, Turkey and Brazil, leaving Washington and its allies red-faced. The U.S. and Europe are pressing for the punitive route and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had predicted last week that the Brazilian-Turkish attempt at mediation would fail.

American sanctions on Iran are more concerned with the Great Game for the oil and has of Eurasia and the IAEA has not found conclusive evidence that Iran is actually building an atomic bomb.

Washington has consistently exerted pressure on Turkey not to buy gas from Iran, so either Russia, in the form of Gazprom offers itself and Turkey uses its geostrategic position to get oil and gas from both.

This thwarts US designs to encircle Iran and use its control over Central Asia gas that is to come from the TAPI pipeline from Turkmenistan to block of the rival IPI pipeline to the East.

Firstly, it means that being nuclear sufficient, Iran has more control over its supplies of oil and gas which the "humanitarian war" in Afghanistan is now about stopping throught TAPI.

The TAPI pipeline is due to be complete by 2011, when the "surge" is supposed to have worked its magic and when the pipeline was scheduled to be completed according to petro-economist John Foster.

Secondly, Turkey is no longer a committed NATO member in being pre-occupied with Euro-Atlanticist designs, primarily those of Zbigniew Brzezinski to ensure global hegemony by dominating Eurasia.

The catastrophic war against Iraq has backfired, as shown when Turkey refused in 2003 to allow its airbases to be used for US strikes on Saddam's regime.

As Mark Almond puts it,after the decline of the Soviet Union and its threat,

"Turkey's most sensitive border is with the US ally, Iraq. Kurdish guerrillas launch terrorist attacks from havens in northern Iraq into southeast Turkey. The American-backed Iraqi Government has mixed success in controlling them. Syria and Iran have made sure that their Kurds don't complicate relations with Ankara".

The break up of Iraq, never a real "nation" in the first place but an oil protectorate set up after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, let loose what Ankara feared would be irredentist Kurdish forces.

The new geopolitics of Turkey's strategic position between energy- poor Europe and energy-rich Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East has led these nations to be prime cusomers for its export goods.

In this sense, the deal between Turkey and Iran reflects a total rejection of the US's Eurasian strategy as Turkey already has markets with the EU without EU membership and can have the best of both world's economically-that of the West and the Near East.

As Turkey modernises it needs access toto oil and gas for it;s energy-hungry industries and that has led to a reapprochement with the ancient enemy Russia. Trade with the EU is dependent on maintaining good relations with Moscow.

What Turkey needs least from this perspective is states like Georgia causing trouble with its neighbours, not least as Azerbaijan, a human rights abusing dictatorship on "our side" keeps hostile attitudes towards the Arminians.

Turkey requires stability in these ex-Soviet republics and not the USA stirring up the cauldron on of irredentist tendecies as it has done consistently to gain control over oil and gas which Turkey can get from Gazprom.

As Almond puts it, "today it is business opportunities, energy resources and other practical matters, rather than ethnic unity, that are creating a loose Turkic "commonwealth." Shoddy US realpolitik masquerading as humanitarian concern is just throwing a spanner in the works.

As Turkey is a NATO member, these facts and the return of the Great Game blow Edward Lucas' asinine and inflammatory rhetoric about a "New Cold War" away completely. There is no "New Cold War".

Turkey's links with Israel have also come under strain by Israeli investment in Kurdistan and in Georgia, whence much of its weaponry and training used by Saakashvili when he attacked South Ossetia derives.

Edward Lucas on President Yeltsin and "Mr Putin".-How Russia is to blame for the failure of Russia and not Neoliberalism.

The hallmark of a professional historian is to use correct terminology and Edward Lucas' bitterness and hatred of Russia for rejecting the IMF reforms of the 1990s, despite the fact they were imposed by dictatorial means by Yeltsin, is inexhaustible.

For a start throughout The New Cold War , Lucas shows the petty mindedness of a person for whom the "world process" is not going the way it was supposed to in Russia by continually referring to President Putin or PM Putin as "Mr Putin".

This contrasts vividly with Lucas' references to President Yeltsin, the alcoholic and incompetant leader who steered Russia towards "Katastroika" by introducing US style market reforms on a society wholly unsuited to them.

Chapter Two of the New Cold War follows on from the first by personal insults that are as infantile as those who disliked US foreign policy by calling Bush a "chump" ( Harold Pinter ) or a "cowboy" or an "imbecile".

Lucas continues to degrade the level of a sensible discussion by resorting to the abuse that he also promotes when advocating a website called La Russophobe which promotes ethnocentric anti-Russian racism.

It is one thing to criticise Putin's regime. It is another to besmirsch a whole ethnic group by using terms such as "most Russians" were simply defective human material during Yeltsin's "shock therapy" experiment.

The only good real Russians were the bien pensants who supported the elites contempt for the sluggish masses. After all, there is a history of xenophobia even amongst enlightened liberals like Vaclav Havel who in the Power of the Powerless wrote of Russians "blind serf mentality"

In accounting for Putin's rise to power and growing popularity the intense human suffering endured by ordinary Russians is never the fault of the IMF's policies and Market Bolsheviks such as Chubais and Gaidar.

Instead in Chapter One of The New Cold War, Lucas stresses the fact that Putin's origins lay in the KGB and then as the head of the FSB. True, but Litvinenko was also an ex-FSB member who supported Berezovsky. No problem there.

Nearly all those who maintained the levers of power in Russia came from the KGB/FSB and the oligarchs who thieved Russia's resources under Yeltsin became privatised mercenaries with a penchant for contract killing.

Whilst that the process of recreating Russia as a hybrid of hyper modern capitalism and a security state did increase after 2000 with Putin trying to restore Russian pride and dignity, however wooden Putin's manner, Lucas omits any mention of "shock therapy" as such.

Putin is portrayed in schlock-horror terms as a throwback to the Cheka, the Tsarist Okhrana and even Ivan the Terrible's sixteenth century Oprichniki. This is a crude and essentialist version of Russian history.

Putin's regime is a Neo-Soviet threat, a New Tsarism, a hideous amalgam of Russian despotism, tyranny and totalitarian trappings rolled into one. His greatest crime for Lucas, though, is to have defied the West.

For there is no historical context that shows why "most Russians" supported Putin after 2000 and that lies in Lucas' view partly with the Russians as an ethnic group being what they are.

Lucas opines there was nothing wrong with the IMF "reforms" themselves. Their failure was due to inherent Russian failings. Not least their odd fears that terrorist attacks emanating from Dagestan and Chechnya meant they "were under sustained attack".

Well, the story was contemporaneous with the same terror threat in the USA where 9/11 was used by the Bush II administration to push through not only a curtailment of civil liberties, the suspension of Habeus Corpus and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

What Lucas omits to mention is that the destabilisation of these southern parts of Russia were stimulated by CIA trained squads of the mujahadeen in the early 1990s when Baku was used to get what emerged as Al Qaida as proxy fighters in Azerbaijan to help get Aliev into power.

Aliev himself was ex-KGB but was politically OK as he supported the creation of Azerbaijan as a pro-US client state in preparation for the BTC pipeline that was to run through that state from the Caspian to the Black Sea.

Lucas tries to portray both Putin and his populist appeal as vulgar and crude as the entire race of semi-barbarian hordes he despises, apart from a cocooned elite of pro-reformist "liberals" who are in reality anything but.

When Putin said in 2000, in response to the murder of 94 people when a nine storey Moscow block was blown up by terrorists, that he would "wipe out" the culprits even in "the shit house" this is "gangster slang".

Presumably Lucas has heard the tape scripts of Richard Nixon or Alexander Haig served under successive Presidents and said to Reagan in 1991 in the White House referring to Cuba: “Give me the word and I will turn that island into a fucking parking lot”.

After 9/11, Senator. Orrin Hatch who snarled "We're going to find out who did this and we're going after the bastards". The latter was a public statement but few like Lucas would think the USA was run by gangsters or the mob due to intemperate outbursts.

The bombings could well have been planned long in advance. Men and materiel had fallen into the hands of Islamists long before the Moscow bombings and it was the West's favoured candidate Yeltsin who invaded Chechnya. Not Putin.

Lucas provides no coherent historical evidence on page 31 for why these bomb attacks happened. All he can claim is that it helped Putin to claim that Yeltsin's oligarchs like Berzovsky might have been implicated.

Curiously Litvinenko was pro-Chechen and the clash in Moscow, irrespective of the bomb attacks whose explanation remains murky, between Putin's supporters and those ousted was dirty and brutal.

Yet it is one sided partisan propaganda to single out Putin's brutal rhetoric as portraying him as somehow categorically worse than those crooked oligarchs who were in the Yeltsin circle.

The reality is that Lucas just did not like the way Putin clawed back power to the state from those oligarchs who robbed Russia at the behest and without any disapproval of IMF "reformers" at the time.

Essentially, Yeltsin had carried out a coup in October 1993 when he got the security forces to protect oligarch power and the new class of the super rich. Lucas' own The Economist had called for a Russian Pinochet. So much for "liberal values".

Foreign investors ripped off some $300 billion worth of Russian assets under Yeltsin, reduced swathes of the Russian middle class to selling their family valuables on the street. None of that matters to Lucas. They are "unpeople".

Not only that the strategy of turning Russia into a semi-colony was envisaged and encouraged by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives ( 1997).

Brzezinski wanted the economic subjugation of the former superpower. His creed is almost the same as that of Mr Lucas.

As the Soviet Union had collapsed,the assets were not only stripped but the currency destabilised meaning that a weakened Russia would have no alternative but to look westward to Europe for economic and political revival, rather than south to Central Asia.

Lucas airbrushes all of that out of history because they are inconvenient facts. He opines,

"Most Russians were ill-placed to judge Yeltsin's policies. The market model was a mystery , and one they had to unravel overnight. Nothing in their past lives had prepared the population for rapid economic change....They retained a lingering Marxist belief that one man's profit is necessarily another man's loss".

Actually, many educated Russians were very well placed to assess these policies unlike the well fed and comfortable armchair theorists like Mr Lucas. The fact is they never had time to "reform" in their own way because of the speed and scale of the destruction of Russia's industries and asset stripping.

Nor were "many Russians" in any sense "Marxist". The communalist traditions of mutual aid and association long predated this second attempt following on from Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution, to frogmarch Russia to modernity by militarism.

Staunch conservatives like Solzhenitsyn understood the connection and the nihilism involved in the crude utilitarian notion of treating people as though they were part of an ideological experiment that was based on theoretical abtractions of Harvard Economists.

Nor was Yeltsin going to be 'judged' by Russians as , contrary to Lucas' assertion, Putin gave the legal immunity that Pinochet had from criminal persecution whether it was for facilitating mass corruption or his security forces murdering pro-democracy activists outside the Duma in 1993.

By praising Yeltsin as the man who modernised Russia, in spite of the Russians, Lucas is essentially endorsing mass murder, political repression and warmongering authoritarian rule to allow IMF "reforms" to be imposed.

Whilst the repressive nature of Putin should not be lauded nor rationalised, the absence of historical context or the fact that Putin has not used mass violence to blow up his Parliament or murder protesters makes Lucas a canting hypocrite.

Famine was avoided precisely by the initiative and guile of Russians in growing their own vegetables and co-operating in the face of "shock therapy" as by 1998 80% of Russian farms had gone bankrupt.

Whilst the Soviet Union's collapse was brought on by Communist incompetence, the IMF "reforms" deepened and accelerated the speed and scale of the disaster which is why the Yabloko neoliberals even in 2010 have zero chance of power.

After all, they have consisted of US NGO funded organisations that want to reverse "statism" and "Putinism" and turn the clock back to the 1990s. By any realistic assessment, these "Limousine Liberals" have not got a chance. They are hated.

The statistics ignored by Lucas, who is supposed to be competent at statistics as one who works for the Economist, are plain. In 1989 before shock therapy 2 million people were living in poverty on $4 a day.

By the mid 1990s, after the "painful reforms" and "bitter medicine", some 74 million Russians were, according to the World Banks own reports, living in poverty. "Reform" meant the impoverishment of 74 million people in just 8 years.

Though being overdependent upon oil and gas was not a long term option, under Putin's rule, some improvement in the fight against corruption and a new burgeoning middle class in Moscow and St Petersburg, millions have been pulled out of poverty.

The simple fact is that without the state ensuring minimal protection, the impact of unleashing shock therapy was always going to be chaos and the reaction to that was going to be a longing for stability which Putin has provided.

Blaming the failure of IMF neoliberal "reforms" on the Russians themselves is to blame the victims of this Sadean economic experiment with a people rather than those who literally got away with far more murder than Putin.

Lucas is only obsessed with a geopolitical grudge match with Russia as well as blinkered by neoliberal ideology. Russian dissident economist Boris Kagarlitsky writes,

'Globalisation does not mean the impotence of the state, but the rejection by the state of its social functions, in favour of repressive ones, and the ending of democratic freedoms.

Kagarlitsky is half right. Globalisation has actually benefited Russia as it simply means the continuation of its integration into 'the global economy. What he means is that the neoliberal model was a deliberate and flawed Utopian experiment to make Russia like the USA. It was never going to happen.

Under neoliberalism Lucas so admires, alcoholism doubled, drug use went up 900% between 1994 and 2004 and led to an AIDS epidemic, mass prostitution, the sale of Russian women as brides for the pleasure of inadequate Western men.

The suicide rate had doubled by 1994 under Yeltsin and pathological crime and murder went up under neoliberalism more than 4 times. As Vladimir Gusek, an academic at Moscow University stated "the years of criminal capitalism killed off 10% of our population".

Mass demographic collapse was the result and is gloated over by websites that Mr Lucas links too such as La Russophobe which laughs at little children smoking with titles such as "Russian barbarians smoke themselves into the grave". How humane.

Instead of concentrate on that, Lucas is simply not interested in what was done to Russian people and his support for human rights an expedient fraud as he supports The Other Russia, a motley coalition including explicit Fascists such as Eduard Limanov.

Instead of condemning Limanov, whose National Bolsheviks or "Natzbols" once condemned Putin for not defending ethnic Russians from the discriminatory retaliation suffered in the Baltic States, he fails to condemn them. Thus condemning himself as an immoral fraud.

To be concluded and added to tomorrow

Edward Lucas "How Eastern Europe Sits on the Front Line of the New Cold War"-A Dissection of History used as Propaganda

Not only is Edward Lucas' account of some mythical "New Cold War" full of Orwellian euphemisms and the soft peddling of atrocities as "mistakes" from the Iraq War of 2003, his rhetoric is inflammatory in stoking up the very atavistic nationalisms that were unleashed by the fall of the Soviet Union.

The same rhetoric of "appeasement" and of Vladimir Putin being a "new Mussolini" are the same propaganda tropes that were used by the neoconservatives when applying a version of history for propaganda purposes in in the run up to this catastrophic invasion of this oil rich nation.

In Chapter Six of The New Cold War, Lucas uses militaristic terminology to describe "How Eastern Europe Sits on the Front Line of the New Cold War". The word "front line" indelibly invokes the image of conflict or the potential for conflict that was true between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia.

Yet the ahistorical and bogus parallel between Georgia and Russia being similar in Russia's case to Stalin's swallowing or re-incorporation of the Baltic Republics after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is mendacious propaganda. Not only that he gets his facts fundamentally wrong.

There is absolutely zero similarity between Putin's support for the Abkhazians and South Ossetians with Hitler's break up of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by supporting the Sudeten Germans. This propaganda was put forth by Brzezinski at the time of the Russo-Georgian War in Die Welt.

In perpetuating this view Lucas is doing precisely what he accuses Putin of doing, using history for propaganda puposes and to rationalise expansionist designs in Eurasia, all of which is set out in Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard ( 1997 )

Firstly, the Benes government was a liberal democratic regime and not aggressively nationalistic. In 1938 Benes was ready for an attack by Nazi Germany but he did not fire rockets at the Sudeten Germans nor did the Czechs have a history of mass ethnic cleansing in Sudetenland.

Yet that is precisely what Mikheil Saakashvili did in August 2008 and Russia had no plans to dismember Georgia but made it clear that if Saakashvili attacked, then they would retaliate and bring hostilities to an end once the security of their southern borders were secure.

It is precisely this kind of bad history that ramps up atavistic nationalism and the myth of the New Cold War, proclaimed by Dick Cheney in Vilnius in 2006, was of the kind that motivated Saakashvili to believe the West would back him forcibly if he took what the neoconservatives called "pre-emptive measures".

Secondly, to euphemise Saakashvili's blatant act of aggression against civilians in Tskhinvali, where he murdered 400 civilians on the night of August 7-8 2008, Lucas lamely rationalises somewhat pathetically as "ill-judged". There is no context given as to why Saakashvili took that decision.

Thirdly, Lucas resorts to the absurd opinion that,

"The Georgian drama played itself out in the main theatre of the New Cold War-the countries bordering Russia, starting with those covered by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact-the Baltic States, but reaching round the Black Sea to the Caucasus".

In actual fact this Nazi-Soviet Pact had no impact on Georgia whatsoever. It stretched down to Romania where the area of Bessarabia ( current day Moldova ) had been disputed for centuries between Russia and the Ottoman Empire and then swallowed up by the Soviet Union.

Georgia lies across the Black Sea in the Caucasus which anybody with a basic knowledge of geography knows is territory occupied by Bulgaria and "reaching round the Black Sea" southwards is Turkey. Georgia was not in any sense affected by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

The only reason Lucas sticks in this phrase about the countries ceded into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence "reaching round the Black Sea" is because it has been NATO that has been advancing into places such as Georgia to protect the BTC Pipeline negotiated in 1995.

Lucas then moves on blithely to connect the Velvet Revolutions in Central Europe of 1989-1990 with the inexorable spread of Progress into places like Georgia where Saakashvili's "Rose Revolution" of 2003 was a coup d'etat disguised as a People Power Revolution.

It is simply a fact that the Bush II administration had decided that Schevardnadze's attempt to remain relatively neutral with regards both the USA and Russia called for a carefully choreographed form of "regime change" in which Saakashvili got 97% of the vote without a murmur of election rigging.

That then led to a total deterioration of trade between Russia and Georgia as Georgia became even more of an oligarch ridden mafia clan based regime where all the parlance of "good governance", "cleaning up corruption" was a total myth which a supine CNN style global media village parroted as pure fact.

Within months in Georgia the inevitable happened as absolute power, however much it is concealed by Potemkin style propaganda portraying it as a "liberated" nation led to internal squabbles. By 2007 Ex-Defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili declared,

“I want to tell you… recent developments in the country, the fascist tendencies and the steps taken by the authorities against the Georgian state, have made us [the new political party] come together before the public in this team…”

“The style of Saakashvili’s governance … has made dishonesty, injustice and oppression a way of life. Everyday repression, demolition of houses and churches, robbery, ‘kulakization’, and murders, I would stress, murders, have become common practice for the authorities.”

After setting up his own political Movement for a United Georgia, Okruashvili was arrested by Saakashvili, in keeping with the spirit of "the Rose Revolution" engineered by the USA, and incarcerated in Tblisi's Isolator No 7, a place notorious for torture since 1991.

As Mark Almond reveals further with his customary Swiftian bent for satire,

"When he was asked in mid-October on RenTV whether he had ordered the arrest of his “old friend” Okruashvili, Saakashvili roundly declared, “I don’t issue such orders, I have never done so, nor will ever do.

In our country such issues are decided on the basis of supremacy of law. Very often I learn news from television, this is very normal.” But other evidence suggest that Mr Saakashvili’s years studying the US constitution at Columbia did not clarify the separation of powers quite as much as he suggests.

When Ilan Greenberg of the New York Times interviewed the Georgian President in 2004, he recorded an interruption to their conversation: “On the phone, Saakashvili hesitated for just a moment and then shouted, ‘To jail!’ and slammed down the receiver.”

More than that Saakashvili was faced by Friday 2nd November, 2007, in the centre of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, by a massive protest demanding the resignation of President Saakashvili. It was met by tear gas and bullets.

The best Lucas can do in order to get round these unmentionable facts, ones that led Saakashvili to increasing authoritarianism, nepotism and corruption is to fall back on euphemisms

Such gems such as "Euroatlanticism is not an easy ride", numerous abstract neoliberal theories about how "New Europe" was a success story in the Baltics and "the expansion of the EU has been a great success".

So just vague waffling banality about EU "success stories" and nothing about the actual real life conditions of Georgians or the fact that Georgia's election was fraudulent and was bound to lead to a backlash

Certainly, as in Georgia, in the crisis of 2008, the Baltic Republics "success" under Friedmanite neoliberal theories unravelled as the entire debt fuelled consumer booms supported by Lucas had collapsed catastrophically.

As Naomi Klein reported on November 9 2009,

"Latvia, whose economy has contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the government is teetering on the brink.

For weeks the capital has been rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on January 13....Latvians are appalled by their leaders' refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)..

In Latvia, much of the popular rage has focused on government austerity measures--mass layoffs, reduced social services and slashed public sector salaries--all to qualify for an IMF emergency loan (no, nothing has changed)".

This deepening poverty within Georgia and domestic discontent was one reason why Saakashvili did what leaders in the Baltic States did-recourse to ethnocentric anti-Russian racism.

This is why Lucas cynically promotes on his New Cold War computer site a blog termed "La Russophobe" which has such charming titles as "Russian barbarians smoke themselves into the graves" with regards under age smoking in Russia.

When challenged with why Lucas promoted racial hatred he said airily he did not approve of the tone but thought it contained useful material: useful if promoting one dimensional hatred of "the Russians" is a necessary means to discredit what the inherently doltish and deranged Kim Zigall terms "Putlin".

That such hatred was brewing up was clear even before the global crash of 2008 caused by neoliberal forms of capitalism which are inherently unstable but touted by Lucas as a universal panacea as a Utopian solution that should be enforced by US/NATO power.

Rationalising the failures of the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the "Tulip Revolution" of 2005 in Kyrgystan as "dispiriting reality" is simply juxtaposed with the usual visceral bile against Russia as it "showed the failure of Russia's approach to its neighbours".

So rather than lay the blame at the feet of Bush II's neoconservative regime, within it's "Purple Revolution" in Iraq achieved by 2005 according to President Bush, Lucas switches the subject to Uzbekistan where he writes

" The Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov , after a brief flirtation with America in 2001, is now one of Mr Putin's most dependable allies".

This arrant nonsense is belied yet again by the hard facts of the wrangle over control of Uzbekistan's oil and gas, two words not mentioned in Lucas' analysis of the geopolitical situation and Great Game being played there.

When the USA asserts realpolitik in supporting Uzbekistan it is mere "flirtation". When Putin does it, it is hideous sinister Evil which the Western nations would never dream of being so cynical of being a "dependable ally" with.

That is belied by the fact that in May 2005 Karimov carried out widescale massacres of political opponents and, though condemned by EU states such as France, were overlooked by the USA who were concerned with 'anti-government violence'.

The reason was that Washington was covertly trying to "flirt" with Karimov and supported Karimov's crackdown on opponents, which included such practices as murdering dissidents by boiling them alive.

The whistleblower here was a British diplomat Craig Murray who described Karimov as "George Bush's man in Central Asia". In 2002-2003 it was the USA and not Russia who was "praising Karimov "to the hilt". Writing to London, Murray wrote,

"Us plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism...As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not so much focused on democracy or freedom. It is all about oil, gas and hegemony"

The State Department curried Karimov by giving Uzbekistan a glowing human rights assessment in order to free up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. On March 18 2003 as Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, Murray wrote,

"Last year the US gave half a billion dollars of aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally.

Yet this regime has at least several thousand prisoners of conscience: it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices the most hideous torture on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions analogous with medieval serfdom".

It was only the failure of that realpolitik that then led Karimov to be vilified as an Evil Dictator. Putin's realpolitik was no less cynical than that of the USA. So this was not a New Cold War. Just old style Kissinger style cynicism, the "dirty wars" of the Old Cold War rebranded but without the ideology-except on Lucas' side.

All of that happened after 2001 when Lucas dates Putin's support for Karimov and supports the dictator for supporting the War on Terror, as repression generates Islamist reactions that endanger both Russian and US plan to control the oil and gas.

Even Lucas has to admit that criticism of Karimov from the UK and USA had been "muted". Yet again this soft peddling over the reality in order to fulfil the prescriptions of the propaganda creed: that there is a New Cold War and not a reversion to the Old Great Game.

By the time Lucas deals with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, it is clear that the "Front Line" of the "New Cold War" extends very far from "Eastern Europe". Neither of these states is even in Europe. Only the oil and gas the EU and USA needs.

But on returning from messianic fantasies of US global hegemony, Lucas makes a series of excuses for the fragility of Georgian statehood, though already seeing it as part of the axis of influence stretching down from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Lucas terms the mass murdering Zviad Gamaskhurdia in the civil wars of the early 1990s "erratic" for his ethnic cleansing of 25,000 South Ossetians who voted for independence. The ironies though extend further.

Whilst at the beginning of his chapter on "Eastern Europe", Lucas claims that "Russia had ruled the Caucasus for a century before the Bolshevik Revolution. It snuffed out the infant republic in 1921".

Lucas dissimulates again, as he fails to mention that the Georgian Republic was snuffed out by the infant Bolshevik Republic in which Georgia was to be re-incorporated by what had become by 1923 the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was categorically different from Russia. It was not Russia that re-incorporated Georgia.

Moreover, the current borders defended by "the West" in Georgia are the ones not defended in the Baltics: that is the borders created by Stalin, a native of Georgia from Gori, who 19 years later would then re-incorporate the Baltic Republics. The Baltic Republics established their own borders. Georgia did not. Stalin did.

Moreover, it was in November 2003 that Saakashvili, who worshipped Gamsakhurdia, who assembled at the foot of the statue of Stalin in Gori, which still stands, and set out to carry out the US backed coup.

As Mark Almond puts it,

Western media like The Economist and so-called human rights watchdogs like the Council of Europe have a lamentable record of fellow travelling with successive corrupt and cruel regimes in Tbilisi since 1991.

It is not too much to say that there isn’t any bad situation which the nexus of Western intelligence agencies, media and human rights agencies cannot make worse, while singing their own praises as the proponents of a new dawn of human happiness.

Bibligraphy.

Edward Lucas, The New Cold War. Naomi Klein, All of Them Must Go. Mark Almond, Black Roses: Georgia's Reformers Fall Out. Mark Almond, In the Shadow of the Bronze Soldier.
Noam Chomsky, Failed States.

Edward Lucas calls Guantanamo Bay a "Legal Black Hole"

When Edward Lucas terms Guantanamo Bay "a legal black hole" in his abysmal The New Cold War ( a kind of anti-Russian version of Melanie Philips' Londonistan ) it appears he is using what Steven Poole terms Unspeak for that which must be elided lest his view that only Russians and Putin ever violate human rights be maintained and not challenged.

After all, in the "New Cold War", the USA is, just as it was in the Old Cold War, a Shining Beacon to All Humanity in which inconvenient facts, such as Guantanamo Bay being a place of torture, of the hooding and shacking prisoners, use of 'stress positions' and sleep deprivation and other techniques that were used by the Soviet Union, are routinely omitted.

It is curious that in a "legal black hole", such notions as the Geneva Conventions and the UN Declarations prohibiting torture have all fallen into a murky abyss where nothing was clear as day.

Things just disappear into black holes, even legal ones, a term taken from English contract law but can hardly be said to apply to a place where pictures of hooded and shackled prisoners appeared on numerous photographs such as at Camp X-Ray.

Calling Guantanamo Bay a "legal black hole" is curious given its proximity to the Castro regimes extant Old Communist state

For if this is part of a New Cold War then its hardly morally edifying, not least when in the New Cold War battle fronts of Central Eastern Europe or Rumsfeld's "New Europe", Lucas has nothing to say about the fact that pro-US allies such as Poland consistently lied about CIA "extraordinary rendition" centres being used as part of the "Global War on Terror".

As Steven Poole maintains in Unspeak,

"the location of Guantanamo Bay had been specifically chosen because the US had been able to argue that Cuba had sovereignty there, thus circumventing domestic laws about what it was able to do on its own territory"

That's really a great way to fight an New Cold War by copying incarceration of prisoners as "enemy combatants" instead of POW's that is more reminiscent of Fidel Castro's methods of disappearing people into dank black holes of Communist prisons, given the fact that not only was torture used at Guantanamo but also many were merely innocent people swept up by the US military without being given a trial and dubbed "terrorist suspects".

It's clear that torture is against International Law. There is no hole for the law to fall down into.

The Smolensk Air Crash and the Idea of Martyrdom

The term "A Second Katyn" has been used to describe the Smolensk Air Crash. The use of the word "catastrophe" tends to sound extreme in English ears but in Polish it is used in the same sense as "disaster" or "terrible accident ", so there are no grounds for the belief that in Polish eyes the Smolensk Air Crash was not a catastrophe

However, words do matter. The loss of many in the Polish Establishment was based on their attempt to get to a commemoration the NKVD's mass execution of Polish reserve officers was a massacre not a "genocide" as the IPN keeps maintaining and the word "tragedy" and "catastrophe" could well describe the doomed yet heroic uprising against Nazi occupied Warsaw in 1944.

It was a great loss for Poland to lose such decent and brave men as Ryszard Kaczorowski as the last President-in-exile in London, one maintained by the survivors of the Armii Krajowe who maintained correctly that the Stalinist regime proclaimed in Lublin in 1945 was not a legitimate government. It was a totalitarian regime imposed by force, fraud and terror.

As for Lech Kaczynski, the fact his father in law fought in the Warsaw Uprising and that he did much to get a museum dedicated to it really means he should not have been buried in the Wawel but in Warsaw, as Norman Davies correctly suggested, without endorsing the hullabaloo in Krakow greeting that decision.

If anything can be described as a "catastrophe" it has to be the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 which, according to Lancet, a conservative British medical journal, that has reached mortality rates reaching 1.3 million and that was supported by Kwasniewski. former "dissidents" such as the lousy Adam Michnik and, of course, the supine Lech Kaczynski.

Being buried in the Wawel next to men such as Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Wladislaw Sikorski and Josef Pilsudski seemed like an insult to many Poles but not to others who might have made a better case for Kaczorowski to be buried in the Wawel as he actually did fight for Polish freedom and independence in the AK.

In contrast to Lech Kaczynski, Kaczorowski did not espouse atavistic hatred and nationalism nor had a spin doctor called Michal Kaminski who made statements such as the Poles would apologise for the Jedwabne Massacre of 1941 if the Jews apologised for supporting Communism, an anti-semitic myth with its roots in the Endecja politics of Roman Dwowski.

The fact is that Lech Kaczynski was not a "national hero": he just died in an air crash on his way to Katyn as did many others. Fetishising the image of Lech simply to make the political statement that he was some 'moral guardian' of Polish national integrity is absurd. His style of fanatical witch hunting for collaborators, including Lech Walesa was foolish and idiotic.

Lech Kaczynski and his twin bother Jaroslaw were a disgrace to the Polish nation: they degraded it by their lack of diplomacy, emotional and undiplomatic outbursts and did not reflect the liberal, truly conservative or liberal inheritance of the AK. They were opportunists and fanatics who played on the "victim nation" status to retard Poland's progress as a state.

This victim mentality was yet again demonstrated by the fact some Poles started complaining that "1940-2010:Poland is alone again Where in Sarkozy? Berroso? Obama ?" on placards.

Perhaps their appetite for martyrdom would have been appeased by another potential air crash caused by the sheer bad luck that all flights were cancelled that week by the volcanic eruption in Iceland.

Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, himself not immune to making victimhood comments about the Russian-German Nordstream pipeline deal that bypasses Poland being like the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, at least made one sensible comment when he claimed

"We don't want to be a nation that only finds its pride in martyrdom. We want to take pride in being modern and prosperous state"

Unfortunately, the cost of that seems to come at the expense of Iraqi lives in an war for oil supported by Sikorski and his Washington Times columnist wife Anne Applebaum who made bogus claims that Iraq under Saddam most certainly had concealed weapons of mass destruction.

Now there will grow up in Iraq sectarian Islamist militias with a taste for martyrdom, killing and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East.

Edward Lucas is a Propagandist for National Resource Wars.

One central propaganda mechanism is the one common to all those who project their own geopolitical designs on to the "existential" enemy which is clearly how Lucas regards Putin's regime.

The fact that Russia is often responding to EU and US geopolitical plans to expand its influence in Eurasia to control vital fossil fuels , as was clearly a cause of conflict between Georgia and Russia is rationalised by referring to only sinister Kremlin designs.

The line taken is that "the West" has every right to expand into Eurasia because they are real democracies whilst Russia is not but little mention is made of how in this New Cold War, the USA has propped up repellent dictatorships.

This makes a fraud of the liberal idealism that Lucas espouses which comes down to defending those like Khodorkovsky who ran Yukos and whom Putin removed from power and hence negatively affected the interests of Western investors. Yet Lucas pretends to be against cynical businessmen who do deals with Putin's regime.

No mention is made that when Putin speaks of "the dictatorship of law" the aim was to reverse resources that has been thieved under the pro-Western regime of Yeltsin. No mention of the contract killings ordered by Yukos then.

The claim therefore that Putin and Medvedev's use of energy as a political tool of leverage only supported by cynical Western investors and historians like Corelli Barnett who see Russia as a realpolitik power is a fallacy.

In foreign policy the USA has been no less ruthless than Russia in trying to use pipelines and control over them as a way of gaining the upper hand. Lucas speaks of the failure of Russia to upgrade Russia's creaking infrastructure.

This means that only Western investment and a regime run by oligarchs that genuflect to the USA's gamble for global hegemony can provide the way forward, never that the damage done by Yeltsin is to be mentioned.

Lucas continually the fact that Putin's regime has based its power on the oil price spike and trying to build up a rival non-aligned block in conjunction in 2008 with buying oil concessions in Nigeria, Venezuela ,Bolivia and Vietnam.

This double standard ignores the fact that the EU has also been waiving concerns about human rights in order to secure better relations with Colonel Gaddafi to gain access to gas and oil production.

Moreover, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was unquestionably based on the ideology of the Bush II administration in thinking that liberating Iraq would lead to an American style secular democracy and to control the oil supply.

One reason for that was the USA no longer wanted to be so reliant on Saudi Arabia as the massive population growth and rentier regime supported by the West as fears for its stability had grown as a US client.

Moreover, the growth of Centcom in the Middle East and Central Asia to protect US oil supplies in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of 1980 has expanded as fears over China's inroads into the competition for oil has increased.

Lucas cannot and will not address this history which was central to the old Cold War and why radical critics of US foreign policy like Noam Chomsky also sees it from his perspective also as " The New Cold War".

Yet there is no "new" Cold War: simply national resource competitions with the USA prepared to act precisely in accordance with the "moral relativist" ideas that any group of oligarchs or counter-elites should be funded to control oil.

When Lucas cites Russia reducing its gas supply to the Czech Republic in July 2008 in response to the decision to base the missile defence radar there, it was responding to US attempts to circumvent the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The "Star Wars" programme was never clearly explained by the US administration which had as its aim Iran but which could also just as well be used against Russia as part of a geopolitical scheme to detach Russian from alliances with Iran.

The "missile shield" was intended and still is, despite the new Democratic President Barack Obama's promise to drop it, to contain and isolate Iran whose nuclear programme is feared as much for the fact it would increase its bargaining power over its oil.

Moreover, the missile shield, recently revived in "New European" NATO satellite states such as Romania where its proximity to trans Central Asian and Black Sea pipelines is intended to drive a wedge between Russian and Iran.

That despite the fact that even though Russia has sold nuclear technology and expertise to Iran, the IAEA has still found no conclusive evidence that Iran is or has got close to building a nuclear bomb. Even if it did this would be a reaction to the fact the USA proved that non nuclear defended states can be subjected to "shock and awe" invasions.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, which Lucas calls merely "bungled and blood soaked aftermath", the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghairab " and the "legal black hole" of Guantanamo Bay is cited only as a negative PR and not for its flagrant illegality and rapacity but just because it allowed the Kremlin to use it as a "propaganda weapon".

Presumably then, the Iraq War is simply just bad PR for an essentially benign power and just because Putin termed the USA as a "pernicious" force in world politics does not mean the claim is simply incorrect just because it had to be Putin who said it on the international stage.

The line here is that though the USA makes "mistakes", the Kremlin intentionally uses that to suggest an intentionality of the assertion of US global power in an irresponsible way. But the truth of that statement is borne out by US practice no matter what Russia does. Iraq was an oil grab with catastrophic results but Lucas will not admit that openly.

The elementary principle ethical principle here is that two wrongs do not make a right and it is a basic fact that all US led wars with NATO allies ( in Serbia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 ) have been as opportunist as anything that Russia has done which is why so many conservatives who supported the USA in the struggle against the USSR are its most incisive critics.

Meanwhile Lucas meanders and blusters his way in a logically contradictory and wholly unethical way by at once asserting that as regards Russia

"unlike the Soviet Union ....is not riven by economic discontent and failure, investment in pouring in an d living standards are rising. Most Russians have never had it so good and Mr Putin's approval rating is well over 80%".

That was written in 2006 but in the revised edition Lucas fulminates against the fact that "inflation rocketed to 15% in 2008, with food prices up by 25%" as if there was not in fact a systemic crisis of capitalism going on across the globe and that the USA's Imperial overstretch had led to a massive debt fuelled banking crash and trillions of dollars of war debts.

Not only that Russia's opportunism is a sort of revenge for the imposition of the IMF Washington Consensus by which it used debt and strict "conditionality" criteria and cuts to social welfare programmes that impoverished nations after the first crash of 1998, so that the weakening of the dollar meant that Iraqi oil concessions were being snapped up by the Chinese.

It also meant more power to the leading oil producing nations of which Russia is one and hence the bilateral ties with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, a nation that is hardly communist in that the rich have not been expelled, shopping malls still exist for them and oil wealth used to raise the standard of living for ordinary people, something impossible when US clients ruled.

Indeed it is hardly surprising that Latin American nations such as Venezuela have continuously elected Chavez in free and fair elections and the people detested the Sumate, a collection of oligarchs and far-right pro-US politicians in a way that plays into the hands of those claiming that economic money power and control over the oil and not real democracy is paramount.

As Mark Almond stated,

Chávez rides a wave of popularity because he is the first Latin American leader to mix anti-gringo populism with making life better for ordinary people. But booming oil prices are a mixed blessing, even when the money isn't diverted to offshore bank accounts. Certainly Chávez has redirected a great proportion of revenue into projects that help the majority. This infuriates the opposition, which feels housing, doctors and education are wasted on the poor with darker skins.

The rhetoric about "statism" is not entirely unfounded nor is Lucas' concern for the convergence of authoritarian power with capitalism. Yet the fact he praises Stolypin under Tsarist Russia shows the concern is that the really about fears over Western economic dominance, something exacerbated by the question he fudges: what can the West do to avoid over dependence on oil ?

The cant about humanitarian intervention is little more than a fig leaf for geostrategic economic and oil interests then the perception and the actual reality of the double standards of the West actually undermines the cause of liberal democracy at home and abroad.

Lucas is right though in his analysis that oil dependency is not good for economies like Venezuela which is buying Russian weaponry such spending its copious oil wealth on $3 billion worth of equipment such as 53 military helicopters, 24 advanced Sukhio SU fighter jets but states which feel their sovereignty threatened by the USA will do so.

Not least in a Latin America that since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 has regarded the USA as "it's backyard" and which supported various coup attempts against regimes since the Second World War

Yet oil dependency does not benefit the West as well and Lucas has no answer to that as a crude neoliberal ideologue. Think of the case in Iran where the democratically elected Mossadeq government was overthrown by Eisenhower in 1953 leading to the Shah's breakneck modernisation and the Islamist reaction that brought about the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

That itself was a result of the USA developing a high octane economy in the 1950s and rapidly using up the domestic oil reserves it had and seeking new sources in areas riven with ethnic and religious divisions such as the Middle East as Michael T Klare reveals in seminal works such as Blood and Oil: How America's Thirst for Petrol is Killing Us

That in turn led to Zbigniew Brzezinski's belief that Islamists could be used rather like the US trained death squads to get rid of governments that denied it access to its oil in the Central Asian Republics. Brzezinski's career was started as a strategic thinker paid by the Rockefellers of Standard oil.

With regard Russia Mark Almond has asserted,

"The fiasco of Russia's gas blockade of Ukraine suggest he ( Putin ) is no poker player. If he thought possession of gas and oil reserves would give Russia the whip hand, he miscalculated basic realities.

Iraq's bitter experience before and since 2003 shows that fossil fuels are no use if you cannot export them. Export or die is the watchword of energy-rich states. Insurgent attacks on pipelines in Iraq reminded America that Kiev, not the Kremlin, controls the bottleneck of Russian energy exports.

That was in 2006 and the paranoia of New Cold Warriors is that Russia really poses a threat to the world ( i.e the West ) is as ludicrous as insisting that human rights have anything to do with the USA's global pursuit of expansion through appropriating and controlling global oil supplies. Furthermore, in contrast to Lucas' absurd New Cold War thesis, Almond states,

"The west is making the running in global pipeline politics, not the Russians. In reality, the west advances as Russian troops retreat from the Caucasus and central Asia. Gazprom is upping prices to ex-Soviet republics to compensate for Moscow's loss of geopolitical clout".

Since the oil grab has led to as much "economic blowback" as Brzezinski's led to terrorist blowback in supporting the mujahadeen against the Soviet Union to give it "it's Vietnam", the USA now finds itself in two Vietnam like situations. The first is obviously Iraq where the USA has sunk trillions of dollars and caused , according to Lancet, 1.3 million deaths.

The second is increasingly in Afghanistan where all mention of opportunist motives in constructing a pipeline were termed "conspiracy theories". That was a curious way of screening out from public perception or what is called now "public diplomacy" the fact that in 2008 the TAPI pipeline was decided upon as a means of reducing dependence on Russia.

This pipeline is not mentioned once in Lucas' The New Cold War but he does mention the vital role of Liquified Natural Gas in the West's pursuit of "energy diversification" and that is what TAPI is providing and why states emboldened by Lucas' propaganda in Poland have been so willing so send troops to Afghanistan as well as plain hatred of Russia as a "Neo-Soviet threat".

This is why otherwise intelligent Polish conservatives such as Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski endorse, along with his American wife and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, that Russia under Putin is a return to Soviet era style politics and not a rerun of the Great Game played by the European powers in the late nineteenth century.

Sikorski is, after all, a member of the American Enterprise Institute, a dedicted neoconservative who was a journalist in Afghanistan and still respects the policies of the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher of arming those Afghan fighters against the Soviet Union and makes foolish comparisons between the Nordstream pipeline that bypasses Poland to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

But with Iraq turning into a "bloodsoaked aftermath" of an invasion to control existing oilfields and concern that sanctions were preventing extant oil wells from working should Saddam Hussein be removed as had long been mooted by neoconservatives in the AEI like Richard Perle, John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz.

As David Strahan, an investigative journalist who deals with hard facts instead of New Cold War propaganda riffs as Lucas does, revealed in The Last Oil Shock that in January 2000 US experts working for the Security Council of the USA found " that sanctions had reduced the supply of spare parts that "would severely damage oil containing rocks and pipeline systems

Far from their being a New Cold War there was a Great Game, a scramble for Iraq, the third largest oil producer in the world in which the USA was but one player who would dominate but in which the tapping of new oil fields in the south of Iraq, conveniently divided into 8 blocks by Dick Cheney's Energy Taskforce in 2001, had Russia's LUKoil as a suitor down for a production sharing contract ( PSC) in the West Qurnah oilfield.

The New Great Game is the reality and the illusion is the New Cold War which the neoconservatives had a vacillating stance as they thought Russia's co-operation in "The War on Terror" made Putin a useful ally so long as he did the USA's bidding and permitted US airbases in Central Asia to operate against the Afghan Taliban.

So it is surprising that as messianic as the neoconservatives Republicans were the hawks in the Democrats who represent US oil interests no less do nothing to avoid being overdependent upon oil but want Russia just knocked out of the Great Game by first dealing with it before China, a far worse regime that Brzezinski has always encouraged business and partnership with.

If the same standards were held by Lucas with regards China than are towards Russia, then the New Cold War would be as much directed towards it as towards Russia: the difference is that Russia is a remnant superpower whilst China by rejecting neoliberal reforms has prospered and boosted it's stranglehold over the West economically.

For the states the USA does business with in its quest for global hegemony in which Afghanistan is a key geostrategical pivot is prepared to deals with any dictator no less that Russia: it's merely that Russia seeks security as a regional power through its use of energy as a political tool whilst the USA desires the same as a world hegemon.

That's where Afghanistan comes in and why Obama's "foreign policy brain" Brzezinski remains a key player in openly advocating the TAPI pipeline as a means of blocking off the rival IPI pipeline from Iran which would lead off into a rapidly industrialising China.

Iraq was a mistake for Brzezinski because the real way to ensure US control of global oil supplies is to use Islamist proxies to destabilise states from becoming too powerful to control the lions share of oil and gas in ex-Soviet republics and there's nothing "new" about that: he has advocated it since the mid 1970s.

That means not only his staunch support and personal support for Georgia and the BTC pipeline he helped personally negotiate in 1995 but also support for the very kind of ex-KGB goons like Aliev in Azerbaijan who both he and Lucas berate if they are, however, Russians for their attempt to use transit fees to prop up the power of Gazprom.

That makes a black farce of Lucas' idiotic statements about Russia being prepared to do deals with Islamists just to "tweak America's nose" when he opines with his characteristic refined absurdity,

"the Kremlin approach seems to be to draw a rather arbitrary line ( indeed, probably fictional ) between 'good' and 'bad' Islamic militants....'good' Muslims attacked Israel and America. 'Bad ones' attached the Soviet boys in Afghanistan".

In fact this is no different from the US approach which is even more sinister and dangerous, given that it has involved covert operations chiefs like Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholdt and Ed Dearborn, veterans of CIA operations in Laos, arranging for mujahadeen mercenaries from Afghanistan to be sent to Baku to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies in 1991.

These Azeri Islamist mercenaries were behind the coup that in 1993 removed President Abulfaz Elchibey from power and installed Aliev in 1993. As Peter Dale Scott, a staunch supporter of Solidarity in Poland and friend of the famous Polish Milosz, has shown, the Islamists under the name of MEGA OIL "helped supply the muscle required to stand up to the former Soviet Union"

At stake Scott points out was "an $8 billion dollar oil contract with a consortium of oil companies headed by BP. Part of the contract would be a pipeline that would, for the first time, not pass through Russian-controlled territory when exporting oil from the Caspian basin to Turkey"-a nation that denies the Armenian genocide of 1915.

How principled that stance was was hardly edifying as according to the 9/11 Commission, Osama bin Laden had established his first NGO in Baku bringing Al Qaida into the Caucasus and providing for the Islamist driven irredentism that spread across the borders into Dagestan and Chechnya and helped ignite the conflicts there.

Indeed former Congressional terrorist expert Bodansky reported in 2000, on the eve of the "blowback" of 9/11, that the US government had continued to be involved in "yet another anti-Russian jihad" and "was equipping the mujahadeen from the Caucasus" and saw the Chechen jihad as a way of "depriving Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiralling violence and terror"

In short, Lucas' concept that Russia instigated some New Cold War is a monumental piece of myth making founded on omission of key fact, selective evidence and fitting the facts to the prescriptions of a power political creed no less than the crudest Orientalists do with regards the Middle East.

Most of the ethnic and religious conflicts in the Caucasus were precipitated by the USA's crude triumphalism and hubris, as well as callous disregard for the lives of those caught up in oil and pipeline struggles, as additionally proven when Aliev hired 1,000 Islamists from Afghanistan in a war against the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Despite the lack of democracy in Azerbaijan, Donald Rumsfeld, a key figure in providing the dual use helicopters in 1988 that Saddam Hussein used to exterminate Kurds in the north of Iraq, congratulated Aliev's sucessor-the next one Ilham Aliev who came to power in a rigged election. No mention of Lucas of any of this.

As Mark Almond puts it,

"Someone is still fighting the cold war, but it isn't Russia. The chill wind that has been blowing towards the Kremlin for decades is still coming from the west".