Chris Herz: At worst we will see Bush, Inc. and Putin et Cie. get their very own Great War!

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: We have before us in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia what is potentially as serious a crisis as has happened since August, 1914.

A US proxy moved in the best of imperial style to solve a political problem with military force: That is the US proxy state of Georgia, a creation of a CIA-aided putsch, moving by force against Russian forces and their allies in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

This could not have been done without Washington's knowledge, and likely, without its approval.

In turn this set into train a Russian counter-stroke which now leaves Russian forces in control of much of central Georgia. This matter seems to be intolerable to the creeps in charge of policy in Washington and they have reacted as provocatively as is possible -- sending their own and other NATO ships which may well be armed with nuclear missiles into the Black Sea. One of them now lies in a Georgian port.

I do recall the USA would not allow a Russian nuclear-armed force in Cuba, and I do not think Moscow is prepared to accept this action. Indeed they seem to have sortied some of their ships from the Ukrainian port of Odessa. Prompting, by the way, Ukraine to threaten the status of the Russian lease on that base. This too, Moscow cannot tolerate, under the circumstances.

And those circumstances are an extremely belligerent regime in Washington DC which has, for years, made utterly no secret of their determination to control and exploit the natural resources of their former Cold War rival. The dominant factions of Washington's policy elites call for expansion of direct US power, with or without the NATO junior partners, into the former Union Republics of the USSR all along the littoral of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

• Furthermore, these lunatics have such an ignorant and uninformed belief in their own infallibility that I suspect many have their personal assets vested in commercial ventures in these disputed regions.

The Washington regime are at once flushed with triumph over their self-proclaimed victory in Iraq, and rendered desperate by the immense and on-going costs of this disastrous exercise, and its Afghan and Persian side-shows. Both the Bush factions and their Obama rivals unite in their understanding that like Germany, Russia or Austria-Hungary in 1914 they are so heavily vested in military/imperial expansion that further failures threaten their hold on state power within the USA itself. Their mood is not one of compromise. With more and greater wars, they can perhaps hope to cling for another generation to power in a state which is now a life-support system for its colossal military and little else.

Certainly the virulent propaganda being put about around here suggests this.

Moscow, a regime of oligarchs enriched personally by their plunder of the state assets of the defunct USSR, held barely in control by the firm of Putin & Medvedev, seems in little better case. Both sides in what may be a coming world war see their survival in the distraction of their respective populations, beset by rapidly falling standards of living, with militarism and foreign adventure ... and thus both are now on a collision course from which they cannot easily turn away.

Expect no resistance to war from the US population, as always much preoccupied with a daily struggle for economic survival, beset and bemused by the best propaganda system in the world, and with even its tiny peace faction now totally distracted by the twin spectacles of the just-ended Olympics and the mock election and its convention shows, which unfortunately cannot end before November.

Some damned-fool event in the Caucasus ... a place not worth the bones of one South Carolina Marine ... will burst upon the US sheeple as surprisingly and as violently as the summer thunderstorms so common in Washington.

• And of course, as usual, the flock will rally around its fleecers.

But even if this conflict is temporarily resolved without resort to a general war, we may expect at best a revival of the Cold War and this presents unparalleled opportunities for Venezuela and other Southern powers. Once again there will be pressures for adhesion to the US empire, as always, but now also opportunities for maneuver between competing power blocs.

At worst we will see Bush, Inc. and Putin et Cie. get their very own Great War.

From the Imperial Capital

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com

____________________________________

Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.

HELP US TO KEEP BRINGING YOU THE TRUTH
http://tinyurl.com/n4fg