8-16-08, 2:24 pm

For those in the war torn Caucasus this has been a week of unfathomable turmoil. It has been a week filled with images of displaced peoples, and the instruments of modern warfare doing what they do best, dispensing death. This has been a week that can only serve to remind us of the urgent need to rattle the parameters of the present world order. According to the mass media in the West, this conflict is a mere reminder of the utter savagery of Russian aggression. Just in case we have forgotten the lessons of Prague, Budapest and Afghanistan, the media is keen to remind us of what Moscow is willing to do to maintain its iron grip over its former client-states. In truth the situation on the ground is far more complicated than this. The point of this piece is to establish, clearly and definitively, that the immediate responsibility for this unnecessary war lies with Georgian strongman Mikhei Saakashvili and the Western powers that back him. Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that the conflict in the Caucasus was born from a global system that breeds war. It is our duty as socialists to not only denounce all forms of state violence and war, but to expose the true nature of the present world order, an order that if left unabated will invariably continue to march humanity towards peril.

It would be foolish to not acknowledge that Russia, like the rest of the powers of the West, is a capitalist and imperialist state. The Georgian people were forcibly annexed into the Russian Empire in the waning days of the 18th century and admittedly the great majority of Georgians are proud of their independence and will fight tooth and nail to preserve it. They have endured economic pressure from the Russian oligarchy, but have attempted to maintain their autonomy. Yet Georgia is not a homogeneous country and just as ethnic Georgians fear domination from Moscow, the people of South Ossetia and the Abkhazians fear cultural assimilation and political domination from Tsibilisi. During “Communist” rule South Ossetia was an autonomous region of Soviet Georgia, sporting its a local government and its own official language. During the disintegration of the Soviet Union the leadership of the 65,000 natives of South Ossetia and the Abkhazians, who live in a Georgian province bordering the Black Sea, launched campaigns to join Russia and maintain their former statuses as a autonomous regions. Media reports that portray the separatist movements as purely concoctions of Moscow ignore the fact that South Ossetians overwhelmingly supported independence in a referendum held in 2006 that asked whether or not South Ossetia should preserve its present status of a de facto independent state. Furthermore, over 80 percent of residents of South Ossetia, which was separated from the North following the dismantling of the USSR, have voluntarily taken Russian citizenship.

This present conflict started when the Georgian government initiated a sudden and unprovoked aerial and artillery attack on South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali. The attack was an unwarranted and idiotic miscalculation by the U.S.-backed Saakashvili. The right-wing Saakashvili’s dream of “reuniting” Georgia and the Western support for the “territorial integrity of Georgia” are mere code words for the reactionary, nationalist desire of Georgian nationalists to subjugate the non-Georgian minorities in Ossetia and Abkhzian and the Western desire to deal yet another defeat to their Russian rivals.

Similarly, the Russian ruling-classes’ response to Georgian aggression, its invasion of Georgia, is not a purely humanitarian mission like they profess it to be, but rather a familiar tactic in a centuries-old game, imperialism. Russia, of course, had no concern for the rights of ethnic minorities when they were brutally suppressing a mass movement for independence in Chechnya. The Russian rulers are however acutely aware that they themselves are under attack from a power far mightier than Georgia only, the United States. The relentless expansion of the NATO alliance, an organization that should have been dissolved along with the Warsaw Pact, and the placement of US military bases and client-states around Russia has been a grave concern for Russian elites who have attempted to counter the West with their own brand of imperialism. Just as NATO members fed the flame of nationalism across the former Socialist Republics of Yugoslavia and used the movement of ethnic Albanians to establish a client-state in Kosovo, the Russians seek to use the legitimate sovereignty struggles of the Ossetians’ and the Abkhazians to stop NATO from expanding into Georgia. This is all happening within the broader context of the United States placing missile defense shields in Eastern Europe to attempt to marginalize Russian power in their own natural sphere of influence.

The role of economics in shaping this quagmire cannot be ignored either. The Caucasus is a region well-bestowed with natural resources and a strategic location, a blessing that has placed the region at the center of conflicts in the past. Georgia borders Turkey and Armenia, a supporter of Iran, and resource rich Azerbaijan. The country’s locations is the reason why many oil and gas pipelines pass through it, like the Baku-Tabilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, and even more are planned. All of these pipelines use pro-Western Caucasus states to bypass Russia, a country that fulfills most of the energy needs of Eastern and Central Europe. We must not succumb to the simplistic notion that the rivalry between the United States and Russia is merely a relic of the Cold War, but instead we must show that the conflict has its roots in competition between rival power-blocs for both political and economic supremacy.

The response of US politicians and the Western media to the crisis surpasses the bounds of hypocrisy and leaps boldly into the grounds of self-delusion. There is plenty of attention to Russian “aggression”, but there is no mention of the US engineered Ethiopian invasion of Somalia (today alone, US-backed Ethiopian soldiers killed 37 civilians who were riding in passenger buses in the town of Arbiska and killed more in another incident in Mogadishu), there is no coverage of 1.25 million dead and 4 million displaced in Iraq, the continued occupation of Afghanistan, the generous American tax-payer support for the apartheid state, or our continued support for a paramilitary-linked, anti-labor government in Colombia. War and repression are used by the United States and its client states across the world to preserve American interests and the rights of capital. This is the true nature of Pax Americana. And dating back to its conception this has been the true nature of the Empire.

Imperialism is a game played by the ruling-classes of great powers, but it is a game in which the working-classes will always lose. Today, it is the duty of the sons and daughters of the middle and lower stratum of society to carry the guns, rebuild the cities and bury the dead. Tomorrow, it will be the charge of these same sons and daughters to bury capital and the plight of imperialism along with it.

--Bhaskar Sunkara is is an undergraduate student at the George Washington University, he is currently serving as the Editor of The Activist (theactivist.org), the online magazine of the Young Democratic Socialists.