Patrick J Buchanan
February 4 2004
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Which brings us to this headline in last week's Washington Post: "U.S. May Set Up Bases in Former Soviet Republics."
The lead graph reads like something out of the London Times in the salad days of Kipling and Queen Victoria: "Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the United States might establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire, but he sought to reassure Russians that increased U.S. influence in the region does not pose a threat to them." With bases already in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, we apparently intend to build a base in Georgia, birthplace of Stalin.
Query: What are we doing there? What is the strategic interest in Georgia? Tiblisi is about as far away as one can get. Why are we rubbing Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat by putting U.S. imperial troops into nations that only yesterday were a part of that country? Powell anticipated the question: "Are we pointing a dagger in the soft underbelly of Russia? Of course not. What we're doing is working together against terrorism."
But after Iraq, where we invaded an oil-rich country on what the world believes were false pretenses and forged evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, why should Russians not suspect our motives?
After all, the neoconservatives who beat the drums loudest for war, and cherry-picked the intelligence sent to Bush that got us into war, have been braying for years that we intend to create an American empire and impose our "benevolent global hegemony" on all mankind.
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http://www.theamericancause.org/patwhatarewedoingthere.htm