The recent troubles in the Georgia, with the Russians
invading what is supposed to be a sovereign country, have
very disturbing geopolitical implications.
The reason is that, the day after the attack started, Iran
announced that it would, essentially, ignore any efforts to
make it slow down or stop its centrifuging of weapons-grade
uranium. And make no mistake, that is indeed what it is doing.
The Russian movement is aimed at destroying the pro-western
and pro-US regime in Georgia, the purpose of which is to
prevent the US from using bases in Georgia for an attack on
Iran. The Turks probably will not allow the use of their
bases by the Americans, as they did not during the early
phases of the Iraq war. So Georgia was going to be a crucial
staging point.
The United States will not unilaterally attack Iran. George
Bush is too weak politically. He must either attack jointly
with as many of our traditional allies as possible, or use
Israel as a surrogate. However, the Russian move is not
meant to do anything to slow Israel down. If anything, it
will force Israel's hand, goading them into early action on
the theory that the US will now never be able to support
them openly, and the longer they wait, the more dangerous
Iran becomes to them.
And make no mistake: Iran does want to destroy Israel. It is
not bluster. What they want to do is to attack Tel Aviv with
a small nuclear weapon that will devastate the city,
destroying Israel as a coherent state for the foreseeable
future. Ideally, they will do this in such a way that their
involvement will not be possible to prove. They will use a
terror surrogate to actually deliver the bomb.
It's really a very problematic goal, in large part because
it takes a lot of U-235 to make a bomb. Smuggling the
substance into Israel would be very, very hard, but not
impossible if you were patient, sending it in bit by bit.
The advantage is that the substance, contrary to popular
belief, is not terribly radioactive in its raw form, which
makes it quite hard to detect.
Nevertheless, the Russian invasion of Georgia is not
entirely to serve Russian interests. It is to serve Iranian
interests, also.
There are many people on the left in the US--you can easily
find their websites--who have abandoned Israel because of a
dislike for the Jewish state's aggressive efforts to
preserve itself. At the same time, it has unhealthy allies
on the American far right, who support it in hope that a
radical regime there will start a war that will turn into
the Battle of Armageddon and thus induce the rapture.
Obviously, the right wing religious allies, while powerful,
are insane, and the left wing ones, while rational, also
unwilling to face the truth, which is that the destruction
of Israel, despite all of the country's flaws, would be a
catastrophic blow to the power and prestige of the west.
Israel represents the deepest penetration of the first
world, with all its promise for the human future, into the
world of our past, which seeks to return to an ideal that
never existed and is deeply and profoundly bankrupt. The
failure of western democracy, western ideals and the western
economic system will lead only in one direction, and that is
to a new dark age, darker and longer than the last, that
will emerge, gradually through uncounted years of repression
into some kind of sputtering future renaissance, but one
that none of us living now, and not our children down
however many generations, will know.
Of course, Israel is hardly a paragon of the west. It is,
however, the best front-line defense we have against the
primitive cultures and brutal tribal societies that, for the
most part, surround it, and its ruin will lead to the same
sort of destruction in the west that followed the fall of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was the precursor to the
destruction of the age-old Byzantine Empire by the Turks. (I
might add, here, for those who don't know much history, that
western Christiandom never invaded any Muslim countries, but
only sought to re-establish itself in areas that had been
Christian until they were conquered by Muslims, such as the
Levant and Palestine, and, in fact, most of the northern
part of the middle east.)
Make no mistake: the Russian Bear is on its way back to the
center of the world stage. Fortified by vast oil wealth,
Russia has the potential to re-estabilish itself as a
superpower, and Vladimir Putin does not intend to miss that
chance. I will never forget how horrified I was when I heard
George Bush say that he had looked into Putin's eyes and
seen his soul. These were the words of a dreamer and a
child, and must have given Putin quite a burst of
confidence, to know that his American adversary was such a
simple man.
It's no wonder that Russia feels no need to restrain its
aggression. It has no effective counterforce anywhere in the
world. The United States has exhausted itself on a vastly
expensive but geopolitically trivial war. It should have
pacified Afghanistan first, then worried about developments
elsewhere. Instead, it viewed Afghanistan as a secondary
theater of war, and made its own progress there impossible
by attempting to interdict the poppy trade instead of buying
the poppies to make into much-needed morphine, which is in
short supply worldwide.
So desperate Afghan farmers are forced to support the
Taliban because they will, at least while NATO is present,
allow the growing of poppy which, like it or not, is the
foundation of the Afghan economy. (Of course, if they take
over again, they will forbid its growth, just as before, you
can be sure. But hungry children are here now, perhaps not
tomorrow.)
An additional reason the Russians have for taking over
Georgia, either by outright invasion or by imposing a
pro-Moscow regime on the country, is to gain control of the
pipelines that are snaking through the country, bypassing
Russia itself and ensuring both a degree of autonomy for the
new states in the region, and giving Europe some sort of
alternative to buying its oil from a dangerously
imperialistic and despotic Russia.
Now is the ideal time for the Russian strike. It hammers the
US in the region, it changes the balance of power in the
area, and there is little NATO dares do about it, for fear
of losing Russian oil.
The situation can only deteriorate for the Russians from
here, and their pragmatic and intelligent foreign minister,
and their canny prime minister (the president is a cipher)
have seen this quite clearly.
I have a novel coming out in January called "Critical Mass"
about nuclear terrorism, that will make quite clear the role
that Vladimir Putin is playing on the world stage. He is,
arguably, the most dangerous world leader presently in
power. He is to be watched, but who will be the watcher? We
find ourselves in a power vacuum created by the man who saw
into his soul. He saw nothing, which says everything.
