Pat Buchanan: Should We Fight for South Ossetia?

Bush' support for extending NATO to the borders of Russia is quite provocative. Imagine the reaction if Russia joined a security arrangement with Canada and Mexico guaranteeing that Russia would intervene if either was threatened by any other country. The U.S. could face Russians on their doorstep. When the USSR intervened in Cuba and a Marxist regime "threatened" in Grenada and Nicaragua the USA itself intervened to roll back this influence in its sphere of influence. The U.S. still has a trade embargo against Cuba. So the Russians on the other hand are supposed to stand by and watch while NATO an organisation designed originally to protect members against attacks from Russia(USSR)recruits members on its borders and in countries that were originally part of the USSR. Why Bush wants a new Cold War is hard to fathom. As Buchanan points out the US military with a humungous budget is strained to the limits already. Many European countries are wary of the expansion since Russia supplies a lot of their natural gas among other things. The Missile Defence system plans have already miffed Russia. Now Bush is at it again.


Should We Fight for South Ossetia?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: 04/01/2008

In echo of Warren Harding's "A Return to Normalcy" speech of 1920,
George Bush last week declared, "Normalcy is returning back to Iraq."

The term seemed a mite ironic. For, as Bush spoke, Iraqis were dying
in the hundreds in the bloodiest fighting in months in Basra, the
Shia militias of Moqtada al Sadr were engaging Iraqi and U.S. troops
in Sadr City, and mortar shells were dropping into the Green Zone.

One begins to understand why Gen. Petraeus wants a "pause" in the
pullout of U.S. forces, and why Bush agrees. This will leave more
U.S. troops in Iraq on Inauguration Day 2009, than on Election Day
2006, when the country voted the Democrats into power to bring a
swift end to the war.

A day before Bush went to the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio,
to speak of normalcy returning to Iraq, he was led down into "the
Tank," a secure room at the Pentagon, to be briefed on the crisis
facing the U.S. Army and Marine Corps because of the constant
redeployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

As The Associated Press' Robert Burns reported, the Joint Chiefs
"laid out their concerns about the health of the U.S. force." First
among them is "that U.S. forces are being worn thin, compromising the
Pentagon's ability to handle crises elsewhere in the world. ... The
U.S. has about 31,000 troops in Afghanistan and 156,000 in Iraq."

"Five plus years in Iraq," the generals and admirals told Bush,
"could create severe, long-term problems, particularly for the Army
and Marine Corps."

In short, the two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wearing down
U.S. ground forces of fewer than 700,000, one in every six of them
women, to such an extent U.S. commanders called Bush and Dick Cheney
to a secret meeting to awaken them to the strategic and morale crisis.

This is serious business. With the Taliban revived and the violence
in Iraq rising toward pre-surge levels, the Joint Chiefs are telling
the commander in chief that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are worn
out.

Crunch time is coming. And what is President Bush doing?

He is flying to Bucharest, Romania, to persuade Europe to bring
Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, which means a U.S. commitment to treat
any Russian attack on Kiev or Tbilisi like an attack on Kansas or
Texas.

Article V of the NATO treaty declares that "an armed attack against
one or more (allies) shall be considered an attack against them all."
Added language makes clear that the commitment to assist an ally is
not unconditional. Rather, each signatory will assist the ally under
attack with "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of
armed force."

Yet, it was understood during the Cold War that if a NATO ally like
Norway, West Germany or Turkey, which bordered on the Soviet Union or
Warsaw Pact, were attacked, America would come to its defense.

Can any sane man believe the United States should go to war with a
nuclear-armed Russia over Stalin's birthplace, Georgia?

Two provinces of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have seceded,
with the backing of Russia. And there are 10 million Russian-speaking
Ukrainians in the east of that country, and Moscow and Kiev are at
odds over which is sovereign on the Crimean Peninsula.

To bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would put America in the
middle of these quarrels. We could be dragged into a confrontation
with Russia over Abkhazia, or South Ossetia, or who owns Sebastopol.
To bring these ex-republics of the Soviet Union into NATO would be an
affront to Moscow not unlike 19th century Britain bringing the
Confederate state of South Carolina under the protection of the
British Empire.

How would Lincoln's Union have reacted to that?

With a weary army and no NATO ally willing to fight beside us, how
could we defend Georgia if Tbilisi, once in NATO, defied Moscow and
invaded Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- and Russia bombed the Georgian
army and capital? Would we declare war? Would we send the 82nd
Airborne into the Pankisi Gorge?

Fortunately, Germany is prepared to veto any Bush attempt to put
Ukraine or Georgia on a fast track into NATO. But President Bush is
no longer the problem. John McCain is.

As Anatol Lieven writes in the Financial Times, McCain supports a
restoration of Georgian rule over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and
NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. He wants to throw Russia out
of the G-8 -- and talks flippantly of bombing Iran.

Says McCain, "I would institute a policy called 'rogue state
rollback.' I would arm, train, equip, both from without and from
within, forces that would eventually overthrow the governments and
install free and democratically elected governments."

Wonderful. A Second Crusade for Global Democracy. But with the Joint
Chiefs warning of a war-weary Army and Marine Corps, who will fight
all the new wars the neocons and their new champion have in store for
us?