Having failed to make a coherent case as to how it has been possible for the Kremlin to somehow divide NATO states, when the truth is that it was the rapacious actions of the Bush II administration that brought about the divisions between EU states, Lucas tries a new canard.
Anti-Americanism is not entirely a fiction but it is usually, as a comprehensive and cosmic loathing of everything to do with the USA, found amongst hard left oddballs who still seem to think the USSR was a Good Thing in the West.
Such imbeciles include the racous demagogue and leftist shock Jock George Galloway, whose absurd anti-war movement RESPECT was based on an alliance of hard core sympathisers with the USSR and those Islamists in the West who detest everything that atheist state stood for.
The simple fact is that NATO no longer has the raison d'etre it had during the Cold War which was the fear of the Soviet Union. The unnameable objectives of NATO activity now consist in becoming a pipeline protection security service with the USA in the vanguard.
As it is Russia that is reacting to NATO expansionism Eastwards, one of the few sensible things Galloway ever said when criticising NATO is that it seemed to have spread rather far from the North Atlantic. Apart from procuring oil and gas, it has no defensive role as such in 2010.
It is for that reason that NATO states are divided with regards Russia and careful and pragmatic diplomacy instead of the kind of messianic New Cold Warrior rhetoric shared by neoconservatives and propagandists such as Lucas would be the best way forward.
As the Missile Shield is a misleading, as it is designed to get around the Non-Proliferation Treaty along with the development of "mini-nukes" and the militarisation of space, it is the Atlanticists on the offensive. Not Russia.
Yet again Lucas circumvents such facts by trying to have things both ways as when he blandly states,
America's allies are already exposed by the catastrophic failure of the Bush administration's war in Iraq. For reasons of principle and pragmatism the ex-communist countries were among America's staunchest allies in Iraq
In actual fact, whilst some believed the USA was fighting the war for universal principles, they made the error of thinking, as Tony Judt points out, that Bush was fighting a war for
their cause rather than as primarily an oil grab.
Most Warsaw think tanks and "experts" who aided and abetted an illegal war which fulfils the Nuremburg Tribunal's definition of a war of aggression as "the supreme crime" did so as David Ost emphasised as they thought they would get a share of the reconstruction contracts.
There was ruthless pragmatism and those like former dissident Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel who saw "toppling a brutal dictator...as a
resonant cause" as Lucas puts it. But it hardly matters what they 'believed' or thought they believed.
Tony Judt in Reappraisals was correct in terming those like Havel and Michnik "useful idiots" for not even looking at the empirical evidence as to the reasons for war. Judt's demolition of the kind of thinking that animates New Cold Warriors is formidible and unaswerable,
They see ( ie the 'new' conflicts )as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism.
Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’."
"In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us."
In the European case this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action.
The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name – can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms.
In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar: self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude"
Yet all Lucas can complain about is that Bush's "mistakes", as if the administration did not know full well what was at stake and in being utterly ruthless in wanting the strategic prize of Iraqi oil, is that it seemed to vindicate Russia's portrayal of the USA as an aggressor state.
This is irrelevant. Lucas buys into the notion of "public diplomacy", the idea that what is really bad about the invasion of Iraq was not the John Hopkins study by Les Roberts which studied mortality rates of over a million dead Iraqis but the propaganda ammunition it gave Putin.
Ironically, this attitude is not so different from those fellow travellers of Stalin like Sartre who claimed that the existence of the Gulag ought to be ignored as it would only aid the propaganda of the bourgeois press against an extant and potentially reformable workers state.
By switching to Russia's ruthless crushing of Grozny in the Chechen War in 1999, Lucas is simply using the Old Cold War tactic used by the Communists which would point to rival superpower abuses instead of drawing comparisons, say between Grozny and Fallujah in Iraq.
The idea that Russia has maintained substantial military capability on the borders with Georgia is true but 70% of Georgia's budget goes on arms that come from Israel, the USA's key client in the Middle East and whose forces were one of the largest present in Iraq.
That was, of course, until Georgia attacked South Ossetia and triggered off the Russian strategical defence operation it had told the world it would implement if Georgia attacked the separatist zones of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. That was constant from Gorbachev to Putin.
Lucas reaches surreal proportions of Old Cold War paranoia when suggesting that the slowness of the Russian withdrawal from places like Transdnistria suggests Russian generals still wanted '
to retain a hard won military bridgeheads in Central Europe'.
Lucas's notion of geography is somewhat odd. Moldova is not "Central Europe": most accurately it might be considered to have lain in Eastern Europe or , at best, Central-Eastern Europe. It is not as if it is near Vienna or Krakow.
The idea that Russia would be prepared to invade Romania is so ludicrous as to defy belief that Lucas is seen as an authority in Central and Eastern European affairs. He is a bad historian and perhaps would have been better advised to stick to economic analysis.
Russia is lambasted by not abiding by the CFE treaty whilst the USA went on after 1999 ripping up and circumventing nearly every international law existing, creating a lawless world in which it became easier for states to act in a more ruthless
realpolitik fashion.
Lucas complains that Russia menaces the security of the Baltic states and Poland when it transparently does not. Russia was hardly going to withdraw its forces from Moldova or Georgia in 2008 when the US allowed Kosovo to declare independence.
Many analysts said that the declaration of Kosovan independence would trigger off secessionist demands and, though Russia was prepared to exploit that with regards the issue of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it did not
cause these long running ethnic enmities.
If anything the failure of the Western signatories to ratify the CFE in Vienna in 2007 on the basis that Russia would not withdraw from Moldova ( by which Lucas and New Cold Warriors mean Transdnistria ) and Georgia was based on these double standards.
Contrary to what Norman Davies asserts, there was nothing at all shocking or surprising to astute observers of Georgian politics that Saakashvili would use the Kosovan precedent to claim that Putin was following in the footsteps of Milosevic in Kosovo.
Yet Putin outwitted Saakashvili as Anatol Lieven made clear: Putin dug a hole for Saakashvili and said repeatedly that any attempt to violate the ceasefire agreement would be met with a swift and decisive military defence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Saakashvili, who came to power promising to reincorporate the breakaway states without their consent was in fact more like Milosevic and Zviad Gamsakhurdia who ethnically expelled thousands of South Ossetians in the war in the early 1990s ( not mentioned in Lucas's book )
Cravenly Lucas depicted this repellent ethnic cleanser with a talent for poetry as "swaggering and eccentric ethno-nationalist", the same could be said of Bosnian Serb killer Dr Radovan Karadzic.
Apparently after stagnation under Edurd Schervardnadze who did not institute 'reform' i.e neoliberal IMF shock therapy yet again, the situation that could only be made better by the advent of Saakashvili who depicted himself as an heir to Gamsakhurdia.
There was nothing prior to the Rose Revolution of 2003 that depicted that Schevardnadze was "increasingly authoritarian": he had actually won several prizes from the USA such as the Enron Prize for public service from James Baker .
What went wrong was that Schevardnadze simply was not pro-US enough and tried a balancing act between Russia and "the West" which was intolerable for New Cold Warriors in the neoconservative administration of George Bush II.
With unintentional irony Lucas then chimes that salvation was at hand from a clan oligarch who was just the man for the job "an American educated , Economist reading lawyer, determined to reform Georgia at warp speed, with Estonia as its explicit model".
Naturally this
Market Bolshevism led to fabulous new fortunes in Tblisi whilst the rest of Georgia became poorer, one reason why social discontent welled up there in opposition as Georgia's lucrative wine and tourist trade with Russia shrivelled away.
The exact reasons for the initiation of the Georgian attack on Russia in August 2008 awaits a specialist historian with a degree of objectivity that Lucas lacks and Norman Davies has but not when applied to a situation in the Caucasus that he is not that sharp on.
But certain factors are clear: it certainly was not a Russian attack on Georgia in the sense of Russia just arbitrarily invading Georgia. The war was insanely initiated by a crazed and authoritarian leader, the Economist reading Saakashvili, as he thought NATO would back him.
So too does Lucas share the view of a shrill chorus of Russophobes who bleated like David Cameron about the "big Russian bully" and numerous other neoconservatives and fellow liberal travellers who remained ignorant of the reality in Georgia.
As Anatol Lieven, a liberal who challenges liberal illusions and was deeply critical of neoconservatism and inflammatory New Cold War rhetoric points out, it is deeply unethical to deeply hint that you will support an ally like Saakashvili to the hilt when you will not.
Such brinkmanship and "swagger" was a major factor in the loss of life both of Georgias and driven out of villages by South Ossetian militias looking for revenge after their capital city Tskhavali was bombed by grad rockets, killing 400 civilians.
The Kosovo Precedent is a real one no matter how much logic chopping was performed by Western lawyers and "regime change" proponents of the inexorable progression of NATO expansion eastwards.
Lucas denies that Kosovo can be compared to Georgia: of course it can if Saakashvili is compared to Milosevic whose Kosovo is Serbia mantra was similar to Saakshvili's South Ossetia is Georgia, though his claims were weaker than even Milosevic's claims.
Whilst Transdnistria is criticised as an illegal and mafia ridden slither of territory between Ukraine and Moldova, Lucas does claim that Kosovo suffers from similar problems, though its de jure status as an independent state is legitimate.
Lucas states on Kosovo that,
'It is badly governed, a haven for organised crime and unable or unwilling to protect the rights of its remaining Serbian minority. Independence might be a way of forcing the Kosovar leaders to face up to their responsibilities'
But the choice of the word remaining ignores the fact that the reason Serbs are 'remaining' in Kosovo is that the NATO bombing campaign in 1999, justified as a "humanitarian intervention" exacerbated the ethnic cleansing on the ground-some 250,000 Serbs fled.
That was not simply the result of the KLA's revenge strategy against ethnic Serbs: it showed the flaw in Richard Holbrooke's strategy of training and arming the KLA, a corrupt bunch of ex-Maoist Albanian nationalists and drug smugglers, to attack Serb police stations.
There was a brutal ethnic conflict egged on by Milosevic as a divertionary war as the Serbian economy collapsed and most cosmopolitan Belgraders wondered why miserable Kosovo was worth such a fuss. But Agim Ceku's KLA were brutal ethnic cleasers no less than Arkan's Tigers
The fact that Kosovo is a failed state is the result of US foreign policy under Albright who wanted to bring closure to the Third Balkan Wars and opined that the NATO bombing of Serbia was about "credibility". If the USA had the military hyperpower, it should be used.
These are not hard left or anti-American opinions. They are to be found in Misha Glenny's criticism of the NATO bombing in 1999 and Tom Judah's excellent
Kosovo: War and Revenge. Independence sent out the signal that ethnic nationalism is fine if it works for US interests.
Just as in Georgia, so too in Kosovo the geostrategic aim was oil politics as the subsequent creation of Camp Bondsteel was within striking distance of the AMBO pipeline built from Albania to Bulgaria where oil and gas can be transported from the Black Sea.
All such mention of facts in Lucas's New Cold War are airbrushed out of this sententious moralising account of the reality of ethnic nationalism and power politics in the Blakans and the Caucasus. So then absurd opinions are offered as a post-ex fact rationalisation,
'America want to hurry up. It's fears that if the outside world does not recognise Kosovo, it will lose its remaining ability to influence events there'
The fact is the US did not and still does not have control over what happens in Kosovo any more than it does over events in Afghanistan where most of Europe's heroin is trafficked through a New Silk Road leading directly through Bulgaria, Macedonia and, above all, Kosovo.
Yet in terms of geostrategic control it has Camp Bondsteel, complete with all mod cons, McDonald's, gyms and existing as a world apart from the immiserated Kosovan population who now detest the UNMIK sponsored regime with its drugs trafficking, contract killings etc
The "Stalemate in Kosovo" as Lucas terms it was created by the the fact Kosovo's independence was brought into being by the wrong means justified by cynical adherence to the rhetoric of "human rights".
Russia had nothing to do with that though vetoing US plans for conditional statehood for Kosovo for it was to lead to what the Russian's expected as Bush II's way of doing business anyway-
unilateralism-which was confirmed by the January 2008 declaration of independence.
The arguments for NATO expansion have been consistently self serving, intricately connected to energy security and arguments from enlightened self interests usually , when stripped of the rhetoric, are a Utopian gloss on hard headed realpolitik and all the more dangerous for that.
This is epitomised most ridiclously when Lucas summarises Russia's approach as old style "spheres of interest" thinking, as if the USA did not really operate on that model as well, and dismissed the idea that Russia is being encircled by NATO ( or at least the US seeks that ).
'Though the Kremlin insists that NATO expansion is encirclement, a better way of looking at it is that Russia has wifully cut itself off from the European mainstream. Switzerland and Austria are entirely surrounded by NATO members, but do not worry that they are encircled'
In actual fact , it was the USA led and influenced by hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski who wifully cut Russia off by terming it in Chapter Two of The Grand Chessboard as
"A Black Hole" and providing tidy diagrams proposing the break up of Russia into three zones of interest.
Apart from the innate idiocy of comparing Switzerland with an oil, gas and metal ore rich Russia, Lucas totally omits Brzezinski's 'Eastern Card', the one he has been playing since the mid 1970s in wooing China over to turn first against the Soviets and subsequently against Russia.
That in turn has led Russia, which in many circles in the Kremlin actually fears Chinese dominance and the exertion of it's influence over Siberia, to try to counter Brzezinski's strategy by co-operating with China on strategic military manouevres in Central Asia.
Lucas mentions that as if Brzezinski and US diplomacy had actually had nothing to do with a shifting series of temporary alliances that recalls in 1984-with NATO as Oceania, Russia as Eurasia, and China as Eastasia.
The Shanghai Treaty Organisation seems ominous to the USA but it is as much primarily about trade, as Lucas mentions the fact China invested $500 million in Rosneft, presumably to be independent from the West, only to find China is making inroads there as in the West.
Lucas resorts to Orwellian doublethink when criticising the Russo-Chinese
reapprochement as if it represented the hardening of some New World Order dominated by those who reject democracy. True, but in Russia's case it has little domestic similarity to China.
Such hyperbole about the joint threat of Russia's notion of 'sovereign democracy' and China's nominal 'communism' is a retort to the fact that both no longer accept Washington's IMF imposed domination of the global economy, imposing shock therapy and undermining stability.
The biggest encouragement and stimulus to China's colossal growth is the fact that the USA imposed stringent shock therapy programmes on nations across the globe-neoliberalism-whilst ramping up trillions of debt fuelled consumerism within the USA.
The sleight of hand that neoliberal ideologues such as Lucas use with their usual squint eyed myopia have is to ignore the way public debt expenditure and living beyond ones means was simply shifted from the state to the global banking sector and property bubble booms.
That, and allowing a decadent consumer economy that has undercut the moral foundations of Western civilisation, has led to a decline in political standard, a culture of greater organised lying in politics and a disturbing growth of authoritarianism in the USA and UK.
If anything market authoritarianism and "socialism" for the bankers and giant corporations would appear to be some form of emulation of Russia and China instead of a challenge to it. The world Lucas has inhabited is disintegrating. New Cold War rhetoric cannot be helpful.
(
The last part of this series of polemics against Lucas will appear soon. Followed by a more concise essay on the Myth of the New Cold War which will go beyond dissecting the illusions, propaganda mechanisms, Unspeak, euphemism and omission this book alone depends on )
Bibliography
Edward Lucas The New Cold War.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard.Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge.
Misha Glenny, The Balkans,
Misha Glenny, McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime.
Tony Judt, Reappraisals.
John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism.
Mark Almond, Selected Essays
Noam Chomsky, What We Say Goes.
George Orwell, 1984
Anatol Lieven, Ethical Realism.
Professor Roger Scruton warned the nascent Krakow Conservation movement Cravovia Urbs Europaea about the impact of the concept of post-war German architectural design being imported into Krakow. It is wholly out of place to throw up German designs into very heart of Krakow.
The interesting thing about Berlin was that numerous building have been copied on a minature scale in Krakow. Geartner's M65 Meduza building is a direct mini-replica of plate and steel glass erections in Berlin especially around Potsdamer Platz, an atrocity exhibition of grotesque kitsch which was once the heart of Berlin's cafe and night life in the 1920s.
Krakow is not Krakau and was not destroyed during World War Two as was Berlin. Gaertner has no right to impose these designs on a very different city and in the process despoiling it. Geartner is one of the biggest potential threats to Krakow since Nazi Wartime Governor Hans Frank who, unlike Gaertner, did not have the time to destroy Krakow.
The problem comes from what Scruton terms the "culture of repudiation" whereby in Germany "Stunde Zero" in 1945 mean that a wholly new modernistic Germany should arise from the ashes not merely of the Third Reich but also the Second Reich which ended in 1918 ans whose buildings were mostly destroyed as well.
Poland preserved it's culture and sense of Polish identity through Krakow. It would be ironical that German capital and architecture was able to ruin the harmony of the city in a way that the Nazis were not able to do during their occupation of Krakau as part of the GG, a sector of Poland nor directly incorporated into the Third Reich.
And that, of course, was equally if not more so in East Germany where pure Communist functionality, Stalinist momumentalism and a repudiation of the German imperialism that had led to 'Hitler's War' meant all the more erasing the past under Ulbrich and Honecker's DDR police state.
This never happened in Poland as Krakow survived, Wroclaw as Festung Breslau in what was then then Germany and even Warsaw were extensively rebuilt according to pre-war plans. Ironically, Polish Communist authorities helped rebuild what still looks like an essentially German city, as it was for 800 years.
