Bad Guys v. Bad Guys: The People Lose Again

Like Gary Leupp at Counterpunch, I find the current election fraud crisis in the Ukraine totally fascinating, but hardly a leftover Cold War question of Good Guys versus Bad Guys (as the Western media portray it). Sadly, the struggle for control of the Ukraine is one of Empire versus Empire and absolute moral authority abides with neither side.

As usual, the real question is money, once again in the form of oil revenues:

Washington wants to gain control over the flow of oil from the Caspian Sea, especially Turkmenistan, and to do so, vies at every step with Russia. Backing regime change in Georgia earlier this year, it has increased its leverage in that former Soviet republic. It woes the former Soviet republics to join its NATO military bloc, which with the end of the Cold War would seem to have little raison d'être except to contain friendly capitalist Russia. While Eastern European allies once buffered the USSR from NATO, the alliance now borders Russia in the Baltics (Estonia and Latvia), and Washington would like to expand it to include Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, encircling Russia's western flank. Meanwhile it stations U.S. troops and acquires military bases in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, pursuant to the unpredictably expanding "War on Terrorism."

To highlight the hypocrisy of the USA's moralistic hollering, Leupp quotes David Frum ("former Bush speech writer, author of the notorious "axis of evil" line, implacable foe of a Palestinian state, public proponent of the allegation that Yasser Arafat died of AIDS, Richard Perle associate") who recently said that "independent Russia can be a normal country with a democratic future: [but] Russia plus Ukraine is the Russian empire, which can never be a democracy."

Frum is not necessarily expressing the thinking of administration officials; obviously the latter find no contradiction between the empire in general (surely not the one they're busily expanding) and "democracy" as they perversely conceptualize it. And they realize that the differences between Russia and the U.S. at this point are not ideological, Russia having long since thoroughly and very painfully embraced capitalism. But I expect that such officials will publicly opine that, indeed, a bloc led by Moscow, even limited to the immediately adjoining Slavic lands with intimate historical ties to Mother Russia, is somehow antithetical to democracy and must be prevented. They will emphasize Putin's manipulation of the Russian press (hoping no doubt it doesn't raise the issue of the U.S. press's slavish deference to Bush), and the lack of political opposition in Russia (as though there were some here).

Inter-imperialist rivalry is again the order of the day, as it was before the Russian Revolution, before the socialist alternative and the Cold War. Powerful nations struggle, not over radically different ideas about society, but over mere lucre: markets, labor-power and resources.

P.S. Leupp also has an interesting look at another neo-con takeover target: South Korea.