One would think that a coast guard vessel has a fairly straight forward task: patrol the littoral waters surrounding the country.

However, it appears that the US coast guard, like the national guard, has a history of being used in imperial warfare.  For instance, the USCGC Dallas, the largest coast guard ship currently in commission, has just made a pit stop in Georgia.  Not the Peach State, but rather in the Black Sea near the Caucasus.

And while the federal government officially states that the ship is conducting humanitarian aid, based on its previous history (active in the Vietnam war theater as well as Kosovo in 1999), one could surmise that its appearance is more than coincidence.

To give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, it should be noted that numerous coast guard vessels are perpetually deployed in forward stations across the globe.  However, this again illustrates the vast geographic expanse that the imperial state attempts to command and control.

Or are there a lot of Cuban refugees attempting to ford the Bosporus?  Is the Dallas practicing hurricane relief techniques from tropical storm experts in Asia minor?  Is someone really arguing that the USCG is actually protecting the shores of Corpus Christi and Mertyl Beach by tacking around in Russia’s bathtub?

See also:
Who Started Cold War II?
And None Dare Call It Treason
Is Not Western Hypocrisy Astonishing?
Does Bush Want War With Russia?

Listen to the great Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, interview John V. Denson, author of A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt, about the sort of World War revisionism that I would hope you’d have a chance to hear.

MP3 here. (10:00)

I was really surprised by the news, first reported by Laura Rozen on her blog on Mother Jones, that Michael Ledeen, who had been under Richard Perle’s wing at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for some 20 years, has moved to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) and taken his “Freedom” chair with him. I have no inside information on the reasons for the move (I was declared persona non grata at AEI five years ago and told I shouldn’t try to attend any of its events) , and don’t buy his own explanation, although his reference to a “rising” FDD suggests his association there might be more lucrative, particularly as FDD, which earlier this year suffered major Democratic defections, is competing strongly for Sheldon Adelson’s largess. (And I have no doubt at all that Ledeen’s obsession with Iran would definitely appeal to the multi-billionaire casino magnate who reportedly shares that obsession).

One possible explanation is that the AEI’s incoming president (as of Jan. 1), Syracuse University Prof. Arthur Brooks, is hoping that AEI’s public image on foreign policy — dominated as it has been for so long by hard-line neo-cons like Perle — might be softened somewhat. But, while Ledeen clearly belongs on the radical fringe (just read his latest article in the National Review Online (NRO) on how Russia has joined the “terror masters” in Tehran and Damascus and how China is about to invade Taiwan), he’s certainly not nearly as visible as someone like former UN Amb. John Bolton, a bona fide extremist (albeit more nationalist than neo-con). On the other hand, Bolton’s frequent op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph, if not his cachet as a Bush alumnus willing to denounce his former boss as an appeaser to the mainstream press, no doubt raises a lot more money for AEI. By contrast, Ledeen’s relative obscurity probably attracts only a few grateful donors.

Indeed, apart from National Review Online, on which he appears to be publishing less and less, Ledeen has become lincreasingly invisible over the last couple of years, rarely participating even in AEI forums, so his departure may be due to the fact that he’s simply not producing enough. (I understand that his colleague, Joshua Muravchik, has recently been complaining worryingly to friends that AEI management has been pressing him to publish more.) In fact, a quick review of Nexis over the past three years shows that his annual article output for NRO has fallen quite sharply from more than 40 in the Aug 2005-06 period to just 18 in the last Aug 2007-08 period, which is particularly remarkable given all the speculation over the past year about attacking Iran. His television appearances also declined over the past two years, while his latest book, The Iranian Time Bomb (Sept 2007), was all but ignored by the major newspapers (with the exception of the New York Times which predictably panned it).

I would think that FDD, while certainly part of the same Likudist network as AEI’s Middle East cadre, marks a major comedown in prestige and power for Ledeen, and I have a hard time believing that he would go there willingly unless he were offered significantly more money than he is able to earn from his AEI perch. In Time Bomb, Ledeen stressed what a “singular blessing” it has been to work at AEI “where I can find out most anything I need to know by walking down the hall and asking some brilliant and collegial person.” And he singled out for praise the outgoing DeMuth who, he noted, has “always supported my work…” So, was he pushed, or did he jump? Either way, it’s an intriguing development.

Something made me perk up this morning, going through the weekend’s news. After two weeks of reading about South Ossetia’s irregulars, the militiamen blamed for everything from looting to attempted genocide, in the periphery of news stories, this morning I read this in the Washington Post:

In Khetagurovo, housewife Ofelia Dzhanyeva said she had lost her brother during the war in the early 1990s when South Ossetia threw off Georgian control, and after the latest conflict nothing would induce Ossetians to accept Tbilisi’s rule.

“None of the Ossetians is even thinking of reconciliation with Georgia now,” she said. “In 1991 our children turned into refugees. Now they have grown up to defend their homeland.”

She’s talking about the 1991-92 South Ossetia War, when the Ossetians declared independence from Georgian rule, and Georgia retaliated by invading the territory. The children who suffered in that conflict grew up internalizing simmering hatreds. When Georgia once again attacked this year, bombing South Ossetian villages, they finally had a chance to unleash their pent-up rage. The comportment of the official South Ossetian Army, some 2500-3000 men, was eclipsed by the rampaging of nearly 20,000 irregulars.

A cease-fire was agreed upon in the 90s conflict, but officials cannot sign away the damage done to a generation of young people by their policies. The latest conflict, with its thousands of refugees, may be setting the stage for the next generation of children obsessed with revenge. Official independence, especially if only recognized by Russia, isn’t likely to paper over those wounds.

Even though the scale of this conflict is relatively tiny, with “mere” tens of thousands of refugees, the entire world has been in some way affected. Western-Russian relations are at the lowest point since the cold war — and one shudders to think of the possibilities if Georgia had been allowed to join NATO.

Now consider the numbers we’re dealing with in Iraq. A “ripening,” so to speak, of the personal crises of every young Iraqi may be 10-15 years in the future. Barring a far-reaching patching up of grievances between Westerners and Iraqis, as well as between groups throughout that ethnic maze, the world might be in for another South Ossetia — times 1000.

“CIA More Fully Denies Deception About Iraq” - in today’s Washington Post.

The subhead should have read: “This Time We Are Not Lying Like Weasels - We Swear!”

The Post article on the CIA’s reaction to Ron Suskind’s revelations included this tidbit from the CIA’s prepared statement:
“To state what should be obvious, it is not the policy or practice of this Agency to violate American law.”
Obvious perhaps to some of the bootlickers in the DC press corps.

I’m still on vacation but, like everyone else, have been quite amazed at the ongoing Georgia crisis, particularly the failure so far of the administration and the campaigns of the two presidential candidates to absorb its potential significance and the need for Washington (and the West more generally) to fundamentally reassess its global position and how over-stretched it has become. (Remember that Georgia was one of Rumsfeld’s first foreign destinations after 9/11 and was followed by a significant deployment in early 2002 of U.S. Special Forces — over Russian protests — there in what was clearly part of a much larger strategy to use the “war on terror” to build the military infrastructure for the “New American Century” in and around Eurasia.)

Two articles — both quite provocative — have appeared in the mainstream press since the crisis broke that have underlined the potential historic significance of the ongoing crisis. While they are not completely convincing, they nonetheless are well worth reading and meditating over. The first is Paul Krugman’s “The Great Illusion” which appeared in the NY Times August 15. It suggests that the latest events may herald the curtain’s fall on the second great age of globalization, the first having taken place from the end of the 19th century to August, 1914. Of course, the comparison of the two ages — with respect to terrorism (then anarchism), vast social dislocations caused by industrialization and imperialism, as well as the high degree of economic integration — is hardly new, but Krugman’s thumbnail analysis is, as I noted, thought-provoking.

“By itself, …the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically,” Krugman writes. “But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.” The article brings in a number of pertinent examples of rising nationalism in the economic, as well as the strategic and political spheres, that today’s policymakers, politicians and publics might well consider before reflexively taking Georgia’s side. Serb nationalists had a pretty good case against the Austro-Hungarian Empire back in 1914, too.

The second article, by former Singaporean diplomat and veteran provocateur Kishore Mahbubani, appeared in yesterday’s Financial Times under the headline “The West is Strategically Wrong on Georgia.” Mahbubani, who notes the hypocrisy of U.S. outrage (and how it appears to publics in Latin America and the Islamic world, in particular) over Russian actions, is particularly succinct about the strategic choices faced by the U.S. and the West at this juncture and argues for a fundamental strategic reassessment based on an understanding that the West can no longer “dictate terms” to the rest of the world as it has assumed it could do since the end of the Cold War. In fact, he argues, both the U.S. and the West have become terribly isolated from what the Bush administration loves to call “the international community.” His analysis of what strategic choices are now available to the West –it can afford only so many enemies and so should be much more discriminating in its choices — is particularly acute. Interestingly, Mahbubani, author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (2008), ends on a more optimistic note than Krugman (although I, presumably like Krugman, believe that nationalism in Asia is as likely to undermine the burgeoning “Pacific Century” as U.S. over-extension and arrogance have wreaked havoc with Bill Kristol’s and Bob Kagan’s cherished but chimerical “New American Century”.)

While the notion that the Georgia crisis takes us back to the end of the Cold War and the “return of history” has become a cliche among most of the commentariat (while some neo-cons predictably compare it to the Sudetenland, Munich and 1938), both columns see the present moment as signaling much deeper historical and even epochal challenges to U.S. and western hegemony in what is now, ever more clearly, a multipolar world that rejects Pax Americana. And, if U.S. leaders, actual and imminent, continue to insist on a hard line toward Russia, that rejection will very likely extend to Europe, as well. Indeed, western (or “old”) Europe, in particular, has some major strategic decisions of its own to make, having seen where its habitual deference to Washington has gotten it.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

The big news yesterday was the death of 10 French soldiers in Afghanistan. They called it the worst Taliban attack on NATO forces in three years.

But hold the presses…

AFP and al-Jazeera are reporting that the French army refuses to comment on a report in Le Monde that the 10 French soldiers actually were killed by a NATO airstrike responding to the initial attack by militants.

The soldiers told the newspaper they waited for four hours for back-up after being ambushed. But when NATO planes finally arrived they hit French troops after missing their target, the newspaper quoted the soldiers as saying. The report added that Afghan soldiers sent in as backup also mistakenly targeted the French soldiers.

A NATO official said on Wednesday: “I have nothing substantive to confirm or deny this particular suggestion. “We are aware of the media reports and therefore we have to look into it.” The official said the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) “would probably defer in the first instance to the French authorities,” in the investigation.

Junior Defense Minister Jean-Marie Bockel, asked to comment on Le Monde’s report, said: “this is not the time for polemics, this is a day of compassion, of national unity around our soldiers.”

Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, the new Haitian prime minister, is having some trouble getting ratified by parliament — and the Haitian Constitution is no help in pointing the way to a resolution. It’s about time Haiti had a female kleptocrat — it’s quite progressive. No but seriously, Ms. Pierre-Louis seems a lot better than former president Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who hoodwinked the significant and comparatively wealthy Florida Haitian community into rooting for him, only to pull off the angelic democrat mask and reveal his true diabolic dictator face. He’s now in exile in Central African Republic, one of the only places on earth worse than Haiti. Pierre-Louis split with Aristide’s party seemingly over its promotion of mob violence. Not a fan of the Père Lebrun, I guess.

Here’s to hoping Haiti, that could-be Caribbean paradise, can finally liberalize and knock it off with the mud-eating crap already. Communist Cuba has a better standard of living, to give you an idea of how wretched Haiti is.

UPDATE: I have picked the wrong blog for flippance. I don’t have the time or inclination to debate with most of the offended commenters, mostly because I actually agree with most of you. I was not placing all the blame on the Haitian people for the centuries of political tragedy that continue to befall them, just making silly observations in poor taste. I simply wish to apologize for any misunderstandings and hurt feelings and promise to be more serious and substantive in my future contributions here.

Justin Raimondo was on al Jazeera yesterday, with Christopher Hitchens and Nazar Janabi from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Riz Khan was the host.

The show was about al-Qaeda: after 20 years of existence, what is it’s future? Is it recruiting? Those were the questions we were supposed to address. And yet the idea that Al Jazeera was actually having Hitchens on – a militant atheist, who wants to invade practically every country in the Middle East, and has nothing but disdain for the religious and cultural ethos of the region – answers the question of why al-Qaeda is still around, albeit unintentionally.

Here it is in two parts:

Al-Jazeera’s report on the South Ossetia invasion and the Russian response on al-Jazeera English. The interview was conducted late last week.

On Friday August 15, Antiwar.com featured a front page template with the images of John McCain, Barack Obama, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader below the caption, We are holding their feet to the fire: Without fear or favor. Some of our readers expressed a concern that by not including Cynthia McKinney we were deliberately ignoring a prominent woman of color.

If you note, we did not include Chuck Baldwin either. The reason is simple. Former Representative McKinney and the Reverend Baldwin are unequivocally antiwar.

We apologize if that was not explicit.

The US military recently accused Iran of training “death squads” whose primary goal is carrying out assassinations.  The information is being made public to supposedly “pressure” Iranian leadership into halting these operations.

So if Iranian assassins are called “death squads” what are similarly trained operatives from the CIA or Army called?

Perhaps the euphemisms that Pentagon officials use are: customer service representatives, safety patrol officers, personal assistants, and make-over specialists.

While the actions of both sides are essentially premeditated murder, the CIA and Army special forces should also come clean about their decades old operations involving the execution of foreign nationals.  Come clean on operations in Guatemala, El Salvador, Vietnam, and even Iran itself.

Contemporaneously, after deafening calls to reinstate the official sanctioning of assassinations, the legacy of director Richard Helms continues unabated,as the Pentagon continues to fund and operate the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning which has trained hundreds of foreign nationals with assassination tactics.

Furthermore, despite being banned in the 1970s — after revelations disclosed by the Church and Pike committees — with the assistance of Israeli Defense Forces, the US Army has been actively training “hunter-killer” squads in Iraq under a program called Operation Gray Fox.

And the latest act of bellicosity: this hypocritical condemnation comes a month after an exposé showed that last year, Congress appropriated $400 million for the CIA to conduct clandestine operations in Iran.

While the exact nature of the operations are undisclosed, it is difficult to fathom that the funds are financing more plumbers, carpenters, and electricians in a covert attempt to build new homes and infrastructure for local residents.