Capitalism & war in the Caucasus

[IndianaGreen]

Capitalism & war in the Caucasus

Wednesday September 03, 2008 12:09 by James O'Brien

Some things in life are pretty obvious. One is that you don’t attack a heavily armed gang that outnumbers you 30 to 1.

The conflict in the Caucasus was started by an American puppet. It’s vanishingly unlikely that Saakashvili, the Georgian President, didn’t get the nod of approval from Washington to blunder into the Russian military. It’s still rather hard to understand, however, what the Americans were thinking. They probably calculated that Russia wouldn’t respond and advised the Georgian leadership of this. This would make sense if you’re of the mind that the Kremlin could be pushed around at will. After all, NATO, has expanded from West Germany to Russia’s borders in the years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union as well as having established bases in Afghanistan. Quite a reversal of fortunes for Russia, compared to, say, 1970.

Russian Revival

Clearly the Russian regime thought the time had come to stop their rot and, more importantly, Russia’s economy has recovered from its Stalinist paralysis and the subsequent neo-liberal chaos of the 1990s. It is also one of the world’s major producers of natural gas, which is an increasingly crucial commodity, and which significantly magnifies their international power. The recently constructed pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey lies outside their control. Not only is that a threat to Russia’s domination of the natural resources in the Caucasus region, it was also, for them, a dangerous precedent of the smaller Caucasian states gravitating toward an American orbit.

The Americans intended expanding their influence in the Caucasus by suitably demonstrating Russia’s relative weakness and diluting its monopoly on the region’s gas. Instead their man in Tbilisi got a bloody nose while they are stopped in their tracks and are looking more and more like an overstretched Empire. More importantly, thousands of ordinary people get caught up – that’s dead and injured – in a quarrel between elites.

In real terms, this means lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and ethnic tensions kept nicely boiling over in case the major powers require pretexts for future conflicts. It’s worth remembering, as the media never seems to, that people are people and that ethnic differences are, at most, extremely minor and trivial. Conflict between nationalities is not inevitable and in fact, as the relationship between France and Germany illustrates, fairly easily solved once the respective ruling classes agree to end their power games.

War and capitalism

Both the recent conflict in the Caucasus and the mounting drumbeats for war against Iran highlight an unpleasant fact about the world: War is a permanent feature of capitalism. They are not going to stop. Ever. This is simply a consequence of the world being organised by capitalism because the fundamental logic of the economic and social system is competition.

http://www.wsm.ie/story/4388