Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 156             Today’s News and Views         Friday, June 2, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2472

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 296

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                                May 30, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq are Near:

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis on the day that the 2500^th American is reported killed to mark this tragic occurrence. The target date at the current rate of KIAs is on or about Tuesday, June 13^th, thirteen (13) days from today.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. If the number is reached on a weekday (Mon.- Fri.) the group will gather at 6 P.M and if the number is reached on a weekend the group will gather at 4 P.M. at Veterans Memorial Plaza  in downtown Indianapolis. (The Plaza is bounded by Michigan to the south, Meridian to the west, North Street to the north, and Pennsylvania to the west.) At that time, the assembled will a field of flags on Veterans Memorial Plaza. The group will reserve 64 flags to represent the Hoosiers that have been lost in Iraq and they will plant those 64 flags around the base of the obelisk. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

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Today's News and Views

June 2, 2006

Political Memo

War Handicaps Senators in '08 White House Race

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

With Iraq looming yet again over an American presidential campaign, senators considering a White House race are at a disadvantage over governors who might run, forced to explain their votes — and in some cases, alter their views — on an increasingly unpopular war.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, both prospective 2008 candidates, have encountered hecklers protesting their support for the Iraq war. Both responded with hints of recalibrations in the way they discussed the issue, with Mrs. Clinton telling Democrats who nominated her on Wednesday for a second term to "stand with me" in pressing the White House and Iraqis to develop a plan that would permit American troops to come home.

Two other prospective Democratic presidential candidates, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, say they regret voting for the war. Both have called for setting a deadline to withdraw American troops, a position that analysts say enjoys strong support among Democrats who are active in primaries and who were wary of both men for their pro-war votes in 2004.

"I think I was wrong to vote for the war," Mr. Edwards said in an interview. "Bush made this mess that we are in now. My view is what America needs to do now is make it clear that we are going to get out."

By contrast, governors are finding considerable maneuvering room when it comes to Iraq. And they are taking advantage of it for now, while realizing that their lack of foreign policy experience is a disadvantage in an election that could focus on international affairs.

Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a Democrat, declined to say in an interview how he would have voted on the war.

"I'm not going to get into that; this isn't about what happened in the past," Mr. Vilsack said. "If we're looking at the elections of 2006 and 2008, I think it's important to look to the future and learn from whatever mistakes we made in the past."

Mark Warner, a former Virginia governor and another likely Democratic presidential contender, said he did not support setting a deadline for troop withdrawal.

"We have been put in this extraordinarily difficult situation," Mr. Warner said. "My sense is going out without a plan is just as bad as going in without a plan. So I have not been one of those people who say that come heck or high water, we are going to leave by a fixed date."

Mr. Warner spoke empathetically of his potential rivals who as senators voted for the war.

"I don't think any U.S. senator, regardless of party, if they had known there weren't W.M.D., that we were going to get selected leaks, I don't think anybody would have voted for it," he said. "Second-guessing people who made a valiant attempt at judgment is not where I am at."

On the Republican side, Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts applauded the invasion and said the United States should stay until the situation was settled. But he was critical of Bush administration management of Iraq, including the lack of sufficient troops to help secure the country to and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

"As the president and Tony Blair said, knowing what we know today, would we have managed the postconflict effort differently?" Mr. Romney said, referring to the British prime minister. "Of course."

Asked if he had voiced those concerns before public opinion turned against the war, and Mr. Bush himself acknowledged the shortcomings, Mr. Romney responded: "I haven't spoken out on this topic until relatively recently. I can't pull you quotes back from that time."

The prospective candidates are planning now as if the war will be as big an issue in 2008 as it was in 2004. If anything, the politics surrounding the war are likely to become more volatile with disclosures about alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by marines in Haditha, a case that has prompted comparisons with the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War.

"I think it's going to get worse before it gets better," Mr. Kerry said in an interview.

As Mr. McCain saw when he was hooted down at a speech at the New School in New York, this issue could be a problem for candidates from both parties. Opposition to the war is no longer confined to Democrats; it is also on the rise among independents, who are the heart of Mr. McCain's appeal in a general election.

Both Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton have, to varying degrees, shifted their tone in talking about the war as they find themselves on the frontier of public opinion. Mr. McCain has given three speeches over two weeks affirming his support for the war, but he used conciliatory language as he noted its high costs and declared that "Americans should argue about this war."

When Mrs. Clinton was heckled by war protesters last week, she said that she stood by her support for the war, but added that she was beginning to see circumstances where the United States would be able to withdraw.

An adviser said this could prove to be the start of an evolution that would lead to Mrs. Clinton's increasingly distancing herself from the conflict.

Governors have historically had an advantage over members of Congress in presidential elections; no sitting member of Congress has been elected to the White House since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Some officials in both parties suggest that the 2008 contest could break that pattern if the debate focuses largely on the candidates' credentials to manage difficult foreign policy issues.

Some of the highest-profile governors and former governors who are thinking of running for president, including Mr. Romney and Mr. Vilsack, have in recent months made trips to Iraq.

Mr. Vilsack said in an interview that he thought it was a mistake to set a deadline for troop withdrawal, but that the United States had to make clear to Iraqis "how they should not rely on the United States."

Democratic analysts said Mr. Warner and Mr. Vilsack had more flexibility in resisting party members' pressure for withdrawal because they lacked the baggage of having supported the war in the first place.

On this issue, Mr. Warner and Mr. Vilsack are closer to some of the probable Republican candidates than to Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards. "We should stay in Iraq until the Iraqis are able to maintain their own security," Mr. Romney said, rejecting the idea for a deadline.

In calling for a deadline, Mr. Kerry said that having one would give Iraq the impetus to take responsibility for dealing with a war that had devolved into an unmanageable civil strife.

"There's nothing that our troops can do — nothing — to resolve the fundamental differences between the factions," he said.

Mr. Kerry derided Mr. McCain for his continued support for the war, saying: "He's dead wrong. I think it's the wrong war in the wrong place. We've paid a huge price for this in the Middle East."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Instead of simply parroting the Administration's latest pieties, they actually allowed themselves to smell a rat. And what a putrid, bloated, rotting-in-a-flooded-Manila-gutter rat odor it was! You'd have to have been literally brain dead not to have smelled it.

The rat of course was the insane hypocrisy of a foaming fascist like Dick Cheney suddenly getting all Amnesty International righteous over a bad regime that does bad things. The fact that Cheney flew straight to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan right after squirting over Russia's human rights problems turned the rank hypocrisy into a bad black comedy routine, barely fit for even a Tom Green. Kazakhstan is a country where opposition politicians and media aren't merely jailed, exiled or cowed as they are in Russia, but are shot and dumped in forests, Miller's Crossing-style, on behalf of a despot whose family runs the country like its own fiefdom.

Azerbaijan is even worse, if such a thing can be imagined not only because the Azeri authorities brutally suppress pro-democracy protests, but because it is the first and only post-Soviet state to officially create a despotic family dynasty. After former leader Heydar Aliyev died in office, he passes power (along with control over the country's vast oil wealth) to his son, Ilham Aliyev, in 2003, a dynastic transfer that was then "legimitized" by rigged elections that the Bush administration somehow manages each time to view as a democracy cup 1/100 full rather than 99/100 empty.

Incredibly enough, a few members of the mainstream American press were shocked into action by Cheney's crackpipe hypocrisy. On May 9th, the normally anti-Putin New York Times published an editorial titled, "Cheney as Pot, Putin as Kettle," tepidly calling into question Cheney's bizarre meta-irony act: "spearing Russia while flirting with its even more undemocratic neighbors confuses the message, especially when done by a vice president identified with oil interests." Tepid, but at least a rare acknowledgement of Cheney's insane logic.

The hypocrisy was so bizarre and brazen that even bland newswire agency AP got in on the outting bandwagon, with a May 8th article, "Analysis: Cheney promotes democratic reform everywhere but oil-rich Kazakhstan." You'd almost think that the American media actually questions its leaders' motives!

Even the pro-Cheney Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Andrew Kuchins, although in a clever ruse he tried to diffuse it by pointing out how obvious it was: "Alert the media: We've identified double standards in U.S. foreign policy!" he sneered, before moving on to the "real" issues raised. As if obvious evil is somehow less pernicious than the kind of evil you have to look for.

Cheney's speech raised a lot of questions and a lot of debate, but no one asked one of the most obvious questions of all: Why did Cheney choose to flaunt his hypocrisy in everyone's faces? Why not try faking it, the way most Western leaders operate when they mix righteous words with rapacious policies? Why didn't Cheney choose to put a bit of space in between his speech attacking Russia's record on democracy and his visits to the despotic Central Asian states?

Or put another way, what if it wasn't a mistake. What if the blatant, insane hypocrisy was the real message... and always has been all along?

The best way to answer this is to go back and retrace how Russia and America wound up in this once-unimaginable situation. It would seem to be a massive policy failure, allowing Russia to become a Cold War enemy again, perhaps the greatest American foreign policy failure of our time. Unless, of course, you put all the blame on Putin's evil little authoritarian shoulders, which is the natural tendency of nearly every American commentator.

They say Americans' memories are short, but that's like saying a Nazi's sense of compassion was fleeting. Americans literally rewrite their memories over and over. Case in point: Just four-and-a-half years ago, Vladimir Putin was treated as a rock star in America. You probably forgot about it, so I'm going to remind you because it's not a pretty memory.

After 9/11, Putin became our biggest, bestest friend in the world when he made his famous first-to-the-phone call to Bush and green-lighted American forces entering Central Asia for the war against the Taliban. I was in America at the time, and I remember all too well how happy Americans were to have the mysterious, morally ambiguous yet effective evil guy joining our side.

In fact, I can say that I've never, ever in my lifetime seen a foreign leader more adored than Putin was in that brief period, from September through December of 2001. Articles like the November 21st "To a Russian, with Lust," by Boston Globe staffer Joanna Weiss, capture the rather embarrassing Pootiemania: she described the man who had shut down the formerly independent TV station NTV, quashed the free media and consolidated power as "Compact and athletic, with a Mona Lisa smile," "visibly buff," "balding, in a cute Jean-Luc Picard sort of way... or maybe a Thorn Yorke sort of way." Even heavyweights like the Los Angeles Times, which now tries to out-anti-Putin its rivals, wore out their kneepads fawning over Putin.

In its November 24th editorial, "In a Word, Zdorovo," the L.A. Times concluded, with full Spielberg happy ending and John Williams score accompaniment, "Never mind for now the remaining political and policy differences between the two countries and the savvy public relations. ... If Americans could feel real terror at times about an opponent's evil 50 years ago, then there's nothing wrong with reveling for a warm moment in the changes today. 'Wow' is one word for it. 'Zdorovo' is another."

Ah, it's so vile it's is fun. For me anyway. God, I hope whoever wrote that has to read it again. Read it and weep, folks.

Yes, Putin had literally charmed the socks of America, because, well, let's admit the shameful truth we were scared shitless then. We had a big yella stripe running up our backs. We didn't know if we'd actually win in Afghanistan, or if we'd be plunted into a new Dark Age of fire and plague. In that sense of insecurity and existential crisis, a man like Putin was exactly what Americans, even liberals, felt they needed. Strange, but Russians, who experienced total collapse over the past 20 years, are called savages for supporting Putin for the same reasons. But at least Russians support him without that sphincter-twisting sentimentality found in that L.A. Times Op-Ed.

When Putin reached out to Bush and gave him everything he asked for post-9/11, his base was furious. Particularly the Siloviki -- the Russian officials from the old Soviet intelligence and military services who came into power in the late Yeltsin and Putin years -- who saw it as yet another in a series of betrayals, a repeat of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, whom they believed had betrayed Russia's interests in order to earn a pat on the head from America. They argued that Putin was being naive and foolish just as his predecessors were; and that in the end, the Americans would fuck him like they fucked Gorby and Yeltsin. Russia would get nothing for helping, neither would Putin; nothing but problems, just like what happened in the '90s.

The argument wasn't simply a matter of pride. The Gorbachev-Yeltsin years were among the most catastrophic of any nation in peace time. Russia was literally dying off -- its economy plunged by over 60 percent, and its death rate soared to unheard of levels. Another repeat of that could destroy Russia for good, they argued.

So it was a huge risk for Putin to cozy up so closely to America post-9/11. He went out on a limb, made a bold move against his own powerful base, in the hope that the benefits of a mutually-supportive relationship with America would in the end prove him right and make him, and Russia, stronger. And at first it looked like he might be right, as America was undergoing Pootimania.

But then America won the war in Afghanistan much more easily and quickly than we or anyone else thought. And that war victory went to our heads. Suddenly, we decided we didn't need Putin's help anymore.

In fact, as the Newsweeks triumphantly declared, we didn't need anyone's help anymore. America was not just a superpower, it was a hyperpower, perhaps the most powerful (and benign) empire that the world had ever seen. We were finally the true "Number One!" That kind of thinking went to our heads and turned us into assholes. Really Stupid assholes. Overnight, America became what can only be described as "If the Death Star were piloted by Gary Coleman."

And here is where the Timeline for a New Cold War really begins. On December 13th, 2001 after it was clear that Afghanistan had fallen to our allies, Bush announced that America was unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.

Putin went on national television, clearly stunned and weakened, calling Bush's move a "mistake." It was a painful broadcast, egg dripping from his face. I've never seen Putin so clearly pimp-slapped before or since.

I remember being shocked at what assholes we'd turned out to be. I couldn't understand why Bush didn't wait even, say, two or three months, at least for the victory dancing to settle down in Afghanistan, maybe throw Russia a bone or two. What was behind the timing?

I contacted a good friend of mine in the Defense Department to ask him why we chose to withdraw from the ABM treaty in such a time and manner as to maximally embarrass Putin for having sided with us. Why didn't we wait?

My Pentagon friend seemed surprised. "We didn't even consider the effect on Putin," he answered. "We only considered what's in our own interest, which is to withdraw now. Besides, we got rid of the Taliban, that was a favor enough for the Russians in our opinion." At the time, Russian anger over Bush's decision to start building a missile shield was dismissed as old Russian paranoia, a holdover of Cold War thinking. Russia had "nothing to worry about," we said.

In fact, the Russians were entirely right to be shocked and paranoid. As Professor Kier Lieber, one of the authors of the recent controversial Foreign Affairs article "The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy," admits that the shield is offensive in nature and only makes sense as a weapon aimed at an enemy like Russia or China. With the sole aim of allowing America to launch a first strike against Russia... and win it. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

"The missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal if any at all." As for deterring North Korea, Dr. Lieber told me, "You wouldn't have a shield for them, you'd put AEGIS ships all around the Korean peninsula and hit the missiles upon launch." This is where the bad blood started. At America's darkest hour, we reached out to Russia and got full cooperation and trust. And literally the second we felt tough again, we announced our intention to build a weapons system that targeted Russia for total annihilation.

A couple of months later, in early 2002, Bush announced that he was sending Green Berets into Georgia to fight against alleged Al Qaeda terrorists in the Pankisi Gorge. I visited Georgia then, and literally no one on the ground believed that there was a real Al Qaeda threat. What it had everything to do with was training up a strong pro-American Georgian army to secure a planned Caspian Sea oil pipeline, which was due to be constructed through southern Georgia's territory on its way to Turkey, a route chosen to bypass Russia and stay Western (i.e., American).

When the Green Berets were first announced, the Russians, particularly the Siloviki base that first warned Putin against trusting America, went ape shit. First America took East Europe, the Baltics and its former wealth; now the Americans were moving in on what was left, working through the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia still couldn't even pacify Chechnya (a conflict which America would now be in an even better position to manipulate).

Just like with the ABM treaty, Putin kept a low profile for the first few days after the Green Berets-in-Georgia announcement, then said that there was no reason to get hysterical. His hand was weak, and he saw no gain in reacting hysterically.

As time went on, it was becoming clear that Bush really didn't plan to leave the military bases he was setting up in Central Asia. I remember working on an Op-Ed piece at the time for the San Jose Mercury News about this, and when I suggested to my editor that the thinking in Russia was that Bush was planning to stay in Central Asia and take what he could, Russia be damned, she was horrified: "No, we couldn't do that," she said. "That would be so wrong of us."

"Yeah, but what can Russia do about it? Nothing," I said.

"But... we're just not like that," she argued. "We're not that ungrateful. The American people would not be happy." Well, we did it. And as usual, the American people didn't care.

The rest of 2002 was about the lead up to the war in Iraq. This is when neocons were genuinely outraged, feeling a sense that they were getting stabbed in the back by a merely-spiteful Russia for not supporting the war. Of course, the fact that Russia stood to lose potential tens of billions in oil contracts and that America stood to gain those tens of billions also played a roll. But most Americans dismissed Russian (and French) objections to the war as mere jealousy and spite.

From Russia, however, America looked like it had literally gone insane, with no limits to its war aggression; part Wermacht, part Napolean's Army. And now America was building up its military capability all around Russia's southern flank in Central Asia and Georgia, and expanding further.

It was at this time that the real battle in this new "Cold War" that the Yukos struggle was coming to a head. Yukos was fast becoming one of top three or four oil companies in the world. Its chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was feted by the very top elite circles of American/Western power, regularly hobnobbing with Bill Gates and Dick Cheney among others.

What we didn't know until later was that Khodorkovsky already deep in a high-stakes struggle with Putin over control of Russia's pipeline network. Owning pipelines was the Kremlin's one stick it wielded over the oil oligarchs.

Khodorkovsky understood that for Yukos to further boost its position, it would need to at the very least wrest control of the pipeline network away from the Kremlin. Khodorkovsky wanted to build up Yukos' value quickly to sell a huge chunk of it to one of Cheney's Texas oil buddies, reportedly either Exxon or Chevron. The reason this was so important for Khodorkovsky was that, since he essentially stole the company during the loans-for-shares privatization scheme in the 1990s, it meant that his hold on the asset was tenuous. The Kremlin could just steal it back any time, as it later did. But the Kremlin would be loathe to steal a massive asset from Exxon or Chevron.

At the same time, Cheney was formulating a worldwide oil grab which he had been working on going back to the 1990s at least. In a speech in 1998, then-CEO of Halliburton Cheney said, "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." The reason is simple: The Caspian Sea basin, particularly Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan's shares, holds upwards of $5-10 trillion worth of oil, perhaps more given today's prices.

Meanwhile, Russia emerged as the world's second-largest oil producer, but not much of that was getting to the US. At an Russia-American oil summit held in Houston in late 2002, an agreement was signed to build a pipeline from the rich oil fields in western Siberia to Murmansk, where it could be easily shipped to the US. The pipeline was to be Russia's first private consortium, and Yukos was essentially going to lead it. This was it, the first big play to free up Russian oil from Kremlin control, and get it to the US.

But there was a hitch. Putin and the Siloviki saw this pipeline as an American oil grab. Putin was no longer inclined to like or trust the US after the ABM disaster and the Green Berets in Georgia scandal. No more illusions.

Now you can see where the chips were lining up. Both Cheney and Khodorkovsky had a serious interest in seeing control of the pipelines taken away from the Kremlin and handed to the "free market," where the US would have an advantage; and both of them wanted to see Yukos get bought by a US major, and both wanted to secure that US stake in Russia's oil wealth by every means possible, including political means. Khodorkovsky was transforming both Yukos and himself into a model Westernerizer, and he was becoming increasingly critical of the Kremlin's role in holding Russia back. If Khodorkovsky really was able to transform Russia into a pro-American state, it would obviously be better for Cheney and the oil companies than if the FSB controlled the state, and the oil.

This is what led to Khodorkovsky to allegedly try to buy off and retool the Russian political system. Without political control, he might not keep and grow his assets. While the Kremlin kept the oil companies from becoming even bigger and richer simply so that the Kremlin wouldn't lose control of them.

The Siloviki saw it as a struggle for Russia's survival and independence (and their own too). If Khodorkovsky, working with the most powerful people in the US (the Cheneys and the Houston oil oligarchs), took control of Russia's resources and its power, it would become little more than an appendage of American capitalism, they believed.

In March 2003, America invaded Iraq, turning Russian public opinion decidedly against America as a nation of Huns. That same month, Khodorkovsky was allegedly working with Duma parties he had paid off in order to change the Constitution and weaken the powers of the President in favor of parliament. It was a kind of constitutional coup in the works, a coup which would serve his and the Bush people's mutual interests.

It all ended in July 2003 when Putin jailed Khodorkovsky's business partner, Platon Lebedev, and Yukos was finished. With its destruction went Cheney's hope of getting control of Russian oil.

It's odd now to look back and consider how quietly Bush people reacted to it. My sense is that they didn't expect it -- and that they were too busy with their oil grab in Iraq. I did see the significance of Lebedev's arrest in my column "Russia Thaws" in July, 2003, when I predicted that everything had completely changed after Lebedev's arrest. I'm gloating now because, well, that's what you do when you're right. But I think Cheney and his goons were too busy mired in the unfolding debacle in Iraq that summer, when the dead-enders were first getting their insurgency on, to react to Russia.

Today most of Yukos is in Kremlin hands; Putin's power is uncontested; and Khodorkovsky is in jail. The Murmansk pipeline was canceled. Now the Siberian pipelines, secure in Kremlin hands, are taking oil to Asia.

You could see why a guy like Dick Cheney wouldn't like Putin.

That is the real story behind this mini Cold War. The other part of it is, of course Cheney's longstanding desire to get ahold of Caspian Sea oil. With Russia seemingly lost, this meant that the fight for Central Asia took on more importance. Indeed in 2001, Cheney advised President Bush to "deepen [our] commercial dialogue with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and other Caspian states." Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan: the two countries he visited right after his Cold War speech last week.

In 1994, Cheney was a member of Kazakhstan's Oil Advisory Board.

He helped broker a deal between Kazakhstan and Chevron, a company where Secretary Condoleeza Rice served on the Board. Today, US oil companies have large stakes in Kazakhstan's oil fields. But most of the oil being pumped goes through Transneft lines out of the Russian port in Novorossiisk. America has been battling with Russia to get Kazakhstan to pump its oil through an alternate pipeline, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, that goes through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

In order to secure that pipeline, powerful American oil/politics figures, led by Bush family consigliore James Baker, ingratiated themselves into oil-rich Azerbaijan. Despite that nation's atrocious record on democracy and human rights, in 1996 oil majors like Exxon, Chevron and Amoco, set up the powerful United States Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC). Its board members include or included Cheney, Baker, top figures in the oil majors, and top figures in Azerbaijan's government (even crazed war-monger Richard Perle had a place on the board of trustees!).

The task was to get Azerbaijan to agree to the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, whose stated goal was to ship Caspian oil out of Russia's reach and into the Mediterranean for Western consumption. It worked the pipeline is now operational. And a big event in late 2003 was the key to securing it: Georgia's Rose Revolution.

This was the first of the "color revolutions," and it quickly became apparent that, although it was rooted in genuine dissatisfaction, it was accomplished with massive American aid.

To recap: then-President Shevardnadze was showing signs of drifting away from the US and towards Russia in the summer of 2003. Suddenly, Bush became concerned with Georgia's "backsliding" on democracy, and he sent Baker of all people to tell Shevardnadze that he'd better hold "free and fair elections" or else. The elections were rigged; a carefully coordinated revolution (in fact a coup) was staged to overthrow Shevardnadze; and a pro-Western, US-educated president, Saakashvili, was installed. Shortly afterwards, control over a region of Georgia where the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline passes was taken out of a pro-Russian leader's hands, and given to a pro-American.

The Russians were oddly slow in reacting to the Rose Revolution. They were taken by surprise: in the Siloviks' paranoid way of thinking, the "people" are irrelevant, and everything is manipulated by a tiny elite and outside interests. To them, the entire Rose Revolution was nothing but an American-manufactured coup, which was only partly true.

The same month that Bush and the US denounced the rigged elections in Georgia, they praised even worse-run elections in next-door Azerbaijan, and kept mum over the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protestors. Why? Because Azerbaijan was giving Cheney what he wanted: oil. Both for his favored oil companies, his friends, and for the West.

In other words, in classic Cold War maneuvering, Aliyev became "our bastard."

If Putin's first real counterstrike in Cold War II was against Khodorkovsky, then his second major counterstrike took place in mid-2004, when Georgia tried to start asserting its control over two Russian-backed breakaway ethnic regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin drew a line in South Ossetia, where war started to break out again in the summer of 2004 when Saakashvili tried to assert federal control over it.

It was strange how that war's coverage evolved: in the big Western press, article after article dismissed the notion that there is any legitimate Ossetian grievance, calling it an entirely manufactured Russian ploy to maintain control over Georgia and keep it weak (oddly similar to Russian belief that the Rose/Orange Revolutions were entirely manufactured by cynical American interests). But I happen to know some Ossetians.

Believe me, they exist, and the tensions with the Georgians are very real, and very deep. And valid. The West bleeds for oppressed minorities in literally every corner of the world, even every corner of the Caucasus, except for the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. Why?

Could it be... because they're aligned with Russia?

When Saakashvili tried retaking South Ossetia, Russian-backed troops repelled them. Putin was not going to lose anything else to pro-American interests.

In the summer of 2004, the Georgians realized that the US wasn't going to support a hot war against Russia, so they stood down... and then in September, Chechen terrorists seized a school in North Ossetia, leading to the massacre of hundreds of children. Connected?

If you recall, at the time Putin essentially blamed the West, and specifically, the US, for helping make the Beslan attack happen. He said it was funded with the goal of "weakening Russia" in order to seize and control the region's resources.

It seemed crazy at the time, but looking at the big picture... is it? Putin was widely criticized for post-Beslan moves to cancel gubernatorial elections. But put in this context, it seems like a genuine wartime move to consolidate power in the face of an attack. Not Chechen attacks. But American Cold War-II attacks.

The last great American victory in this Cold War-II was certainly the Orange Revolution. But it was a hollow victory, shocking the Russians into action. Since then, Ukraine has turned into a political, ideological, and geopolitical swamp. The fight is still on; neither side has won yet.

The Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan was the first one to go bad. Since then, it's been nothing but setbacks for the US as it lost its huge military base and its influence in formerly-anti-Russian Uzbekistan, now Putin's bestest buddy in the region. Kyrgyzstan is also showing signs of moving closer to Moscow. Bush's people recently made incredible claims about democracy moving forward in Tajikistan, but it's unlikely that the whitewashing will do much good since the country is under pretty solid Russian control.

Meanwhile, Putin, now completely and forever disabused of any illusions that he would ever be anything to Bush and Cheney but an obstacle standing between Siberian oil wells and Houston oil oligarch bank accounts, has seen his country become wealthier and bolder. He's fighting back, not just in Russia and its neighbors, but also for example by selling weapons to Venezuela and nuclear plants to Iran. Cheney lost out in his bid to secure Russia's oil, but the Caspian oil is still being fought over, especially as Kazakhstan hasn't started pumping yet most of its upcoming oil streams.

That's what this Cold War hype is about and the bleating about democracy, and the seemingly clumsy display of hypocrisy. It's not a Cold War, it's an oil grab gone bad.

I don't think a jackal like Cheney is capable of recognizing hypocrisy. I think he meant everything he said, with a straight face, and that he saw it as both rationally and morally right to chastise Russia's record on democracy while praising Kazakhstan's and Azerbaijan's in the same trip.

Democracy isn't about voting. It's about serving America's interests.

And serving America's interests is more tightly defined a serving the interests of the oil oligarchs in Houston, where Cheney spent the previous 10 years. In fact, it's even more simple than that. It's personal. America's interests are Cheney's interests. Il est l'etat. In that sense, Putin is indeed a genuine menace.

And that's what makes this Cold War so different: Whereas the last one was a mortal struggle over two different systems, this is a struggle between two short, balding, bloodless men, and the oil -- other people's oil -- that made them as powerful as they are today.

Mark Ames is editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, The eXile. He is the author of "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion--From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond" (Soft Skull, 2005).

© 2006 Independent Media Institute.

Legislating Hate

Paul Waldman

May 31, 2006

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at  Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success , just released by John Wiley & Sons. The views expressed here are his own.

Election Day 2006 is just over five months away and time is running out for the Republican Congress to pack in a few more accomplishments before heading back to their districts for the final campaign push. So it’s useful to note what have they put on the docket as the last flurry of legislation to show the voters what they’re all about and why they should be returned to office.
 
There are the competing immigration bills which have gotten so much attention recently. Then there’s the amendment to the Senate bill making English the “national language” (we can all rest easy knowing the creeping tyranny of Esperanto has been arrested). Beyond that, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has made clear he will bring two constitutional amendments to the floor in the coming weeks, one to ban gay marriage and the other to ban flag burning. Though the flags in your neighborhood may have yet to be set aflame by roving bands of anarchists,  Frist assures you that—although it sounds like the most cynical of ploys—he’s actually just doing what the public demands. “It may not be important here in Washington where people say, well, it’s political posturing and all,” said Frist, “but it’s important to the heart and soul of the American people.”

As for another go-round on gay marriage, if gay Americans are looking for a silver lining to being scapegoated again, they can at least find company with their Spanish-speaking neighbors.
 
What do the flag-burning amendment, the gay marriage amendment, the immigration issue and the national language amendment have in common? It’s not just that they seek to solve “problems” that a month or two ago no one felt required urgent attention. The real common denominator is the lowest one: hatred. If you’ve got hatred in your heart, the GOP has a piece of legislation for you.
 
Twelve years after its historic victory, this is what the Republican Party has come to. Where are their “big ideas,” their grand visions of remaking American government and society? Abandoned, with some gathering dust and others, like Social Security privatization, soundly rejected by the public. Without much of an argument to make about their rule, they have been reduced to one more nasty campaign, but this time without even a fig leaf of a policy agenda. So with bad news piling on worse and electoral doom seeming almost inevitable, they reach down into the muck for that blunt instrument that has worked so well for them so many times before.
 
As they slip down the mountainside toward defeat, they can only throw their arms out to grab desperately at roots of hate sticking from the ground. There go racism, homophobia and xenophobia, just reach for them! But what they find is that these roots don’t reach as far as they used to. America is passing them by. The nativists are a smaller and smaller group in a country growing more at ease with its diversity. The John Gibsons of the world (the Fox News host who recently implored white people to “make more babies”  to lessen the impact of the brown tide) look more and more repellent in 21st century America to the rest of us. Meanwhile, the homophobes try to update their views to look more progressive with each passing month. In 2000, George W. Bush refused to support legislation forbidding discrimination against gays in housing and employment. Yet four years later he said if states want to pass civil union laws, it was okay with him.

As America continues its long, slow movement toward a more liberal and open society, and the failures of Republican government become clearer, we should hardly be surprised at the corruption spreading through Washington like a fungus. When the president proclaims that he is under no obligation to obey the law unless he feels like it, when the most powerful Republican in the House resigns under indictment, when an influential congressman literally types up a bribe menu for defense contractors, when the capital’s top Republican lobbyist operates a small but lucrative criminal syndicate, these are dark times for the GOP. They have become like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings , transformed by power into a gnarled, grotesque version of themselves. And with the repossession of that power seeming more likely with each passing day, they grow more and more hideous.
 
A few weeks ago, there was an article in the The New Yorker  about one man who fell for the Nigerian e-mail scam. It detailed how all of his money was squeezed out of him bit by bit, as the Nigerians kept coming back again and again for another $5,000 here and $10,000 there, and how he turned into a criminal himself to keep up with the scam and lost his own integrity. He gave it up willingly in the hope that great riches would soon be his, long after any sane person would have realized he was being taken for a ride.
 
“An enduring trait of Nigerian letter scammers—indeed, of most con artists,” the author wrote, “is their reluctance to walk away from a mark before his resources are exhausted.” Today the conservative base, particularly the religious conservatives, is like that mark. They give their money and their time to the Republican Party, offered up in exchange for the firm promise that a pot of gold—the banishment of homosexuality, the criminalization of abortion, the return of a time when life was simpler and everyone knew their place—will be theirs come election day.
 
Yet election day comes and despite their efforts to ensure GOP success their reward is nowhere to be found. The constitutional amendments languish, gays gain more acceptance every day, people stubbornly continue to have sex and the supposed idyll of the 1950s recedes ever further into the past. Then another election day approaches and the Republicans will once again tell conservatives: this time it will be different. They will stoke their fires one more time telling them: we just need you to