Russia, Georgia and the US: "A double standard in action"

Writes Edward Herman: "The way in which U.S. officials and the media handled the Russian response to the Georgian assault has been a lesson in bias, misrepresentation, decontextualization, and the applied double standard. It has also often been funny."

He is talking, of course, about the Ossatian War of the few months ago, and he delves deeper than most critics into the Western media's coverage of the military action and the systemic biases it unwittingly exposes.

He then elaborates on his thesis:

It is amazing to watch the U.S. imperialist establishment, including the media, wax indignant about "Russian aggression," Russian "brutality," and a renewal of Russian "expansionism." This establishment can never admit its own regular, serial, and massive aggressions—the word was never used by mainstream reporters or editors to describe the attack on Vietnam, 1954-75, or Iraq in 2003 and onward. And the Iraq war has never been ascribed to a planned expansionism, although this "projection of power" in the Middle East and beyond was actually announced in advance in the Project for a New American Century's Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) and the National Security Policy program of 2002. We may kill millions in Indochina and Iraq—including in the latter the 500,000 children's deaths from the "sanctions of mass destruction" that were "worth it" (to Madeleine Albright)—but this is not "brutal," a word used freely in the case of the hundreds killed in the Russian aggression. What this shows is that the U.S. establishment can swallow anything, no matter how outlandish, to rationalize that projection of power now built-in to the U.S. political economy. While McCain relishes it, Obama also bows down to it as he seeks electoral victory here.

We and our "defense department" are protecting U.S. "national security," according to the cliché-myth. That the electoral intervention, political capture, arming, and proposed absorption of Georgia into NATO posed a security threat to Russia was barely recognized in the West. If the Russians (or Chinese) had entered into a military alliance with Mexico, supplied it with arms and military advisors, used a Russian or Chinese version of the "National Endowment for Democracy" and other agents to bring about political change in Mexico (recall that Mexico has had a series of elections won by fraud), and perhaps put some ABMs in place to protect Mexico against a possible threat from Colombia, can you imagine the frenzy of U.S. politicos and the "free press?"

For the imperialist establishment only this country and its clients have "national security" threats. Certainly the Russians don't, even as we encircle them and arrange for ABMs on their very borders.

When it is occasionally recognized that the NATO expansion and U.S.-client status and arming of Georgia does worry Russia, this wasn't accompanied by suggestions that maybe we should lay off, withdraw, and stop trying to bully Russia (or China) into subservience. No, it was used to explain that this gave Russia an excuse to resume its expansionist ways, that is, it "gave Putin an easy excuse to exercise his iron fist" (Friedman, "What Did We Expect?", August 20).

Only Russia has bad motives. Georgia's President Saakashvili merely made a "mistake" or foolishly "baited" the Russians or the United States was careless or not very observant in failing to constrain him—but neither of them was guilty of aggression, brutality, blackmail, or expansionism.

As can usually be said about Herman's all-too-infrequent commentary on US geopolitics, it's worth one's time to read his analysis in its entirety.