05/13/09 – Mark Ames – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, on to our last guest of the day here.
I'm very happy to welcome Mark Ames back to the show.
He wrote a great article at the Exiled, that's ExiledOnline.com, called My Autocrat's Worse Than Your Autocrat.
Corruption galore in the Washington Post.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
That's fine.
By the way, to make a quick correction, I reposted it on ExiledOnline.com.
Originally, the article was published in TheNation.com.
Oh, I see.
Okay, yeah, good call.
Very important point there.
Who pays the piper and all that.
Okay, so here's the thing.
I'm sorry to do this to you, Mark, but it's possible that somebody in the audience doesn't even know where Georgia is and doesn't know why anybody ought to care at all.
So could you give us a little bit of a background here before we build on the details of the Post and their lies?
Yeah, well, the first thing people should know about Georgia is that's where Joseph Stalin came from.
So, you know, Georgia did kind of help shape the modern world, for better or for worse.
Georgia is a small republic, former Soviet republic.
It's located on Russia's southern border.
It's a small sort of mountainous country between Turkey on its southern border and Russia on its northern border.
And it's got, you know, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and these little countries around.
It's a rough neighborhood, Chechnya is to the north of it and so on.
So it's a pretty rough neighborhood.
Okay, and now since the fall of the Soviet Union, well, it was part of the Soviet Union, right, and then got a measure of independence then, right?
Right.
It was actually, Georgia actually asked for protection from Catherine the Great in the late 1700s from, I believe, the Ottomans, the Turks.
So it was incorporated voluntarily, and it actually really was, back in the late 18th century.
And it was part of the Russian Empire, you know, for the rest of the Tsarist period.
And then there was a brief period of independence after the Bolshevik revolution until the early 1920s, when Georgia was run by the Mensheviks rather than, you know, the Bolsheviks who took over Russia and started taking back all the old republics of the Russian Empire.
So it was brought back into the Soviet Union.
And from the early 20s on up until Georgia got independence in 1991, it played a pretty key role.
I mean, as I said, first of all, it gave the world Joseph Stalin.
It also gave the world Beria, who was the head of secret police under Stalin.
And it produced Edward Shcherbanadze, who was the historical foreign minister under Gorbachev, who basically, you know, ended the Cold War before resigning right near the end.
He resigned because he had word that there was going to be a coup attempt against Gorbachev in early 1991.
And on top of it, the Georgians were already just clamoring to get out of the Soviet Union at that time.
There were already, you know, riots and protests.
And they elected some kind of crazy, you know, quasi-fascist leader to lead them into independence.
This is 1989, 1990, 1991.
So then by the end of 1991, like all the Soviet republics, they finally got their independence.
And it's been a pretty rough time for them ever since.
You know, breakaway republics in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, you know, rampant poverty, corruption, and so on.
And eventually, if you want me to keep sort of going on about the history, in 2003 there was a revolution called the Rose Revolution.
It was actually something between a revolution and an American finance coup d'etat, a color revolution.
And it was led by, I was there for it, it was led by two people, Mikhail Saakashvili, who is still the president.
He was kind of the unknown, charismatic leader.
And with him was Nina Bergenadze, who was the head of parliament.
And she's just, she's sort of an elder statesman.
She's been a big figure ever since independence.
Very sort of, you know, kind of more westernized, rational, calm, and so on.
She didn't have Saakashvili's charisma.
And it's important to know that because today in the opposition to Saakashvili, Nina Bergenadze is one of the leaders of this opposition movement against the president.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
My previous guest was the other Scott Horton from Harper's Magazine.
And he actually taught Saakashvili at Columbia.
And says that he was actually like a very libertarian type of guy at first.
And really, you know, not a corrupt, crony, capitalist kind of guy.
Like he really wanted to have a free economy in Georgia and stuff like that.
And yet apparently over the years he's just become like the Putin that he's accusing.
He's not looking out the window.
He's looking in the mirror.
Yeah, I read Scott Horton.
You're talking about Scott Horton, right?
At Columbia.
Right.
Yeah, I read what he wrote.
You know, it seemed to be true.
I mean, they also, though, I remember back then in the very beginning, before the revolution, in the weeks and months before and afterwards, there was a lot of talk of Saakashvili being compared to Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia.
He's this sort of pseudo-fascist guy, you know, who talks about taking back Alaska and Germany and all these places.
Yeah, I mean, that guy is a real right-winger.
He's a real right-winger in that job, and he's also a KGB sort of front.
But Saakashvili was just kind of known as charismatic, sure, libertarian and so on, but also, you know, a real nationalist, a bit of a chauvinist.
And nobody was really quite sure.
Everybody kind of thought he was going to become what they wanted him to become.
You know, eventually he became what his predecessor, Shevardnadze, became, who everybody in the West also loved, which is an incredibly corrupt, unpopular dictator.
And part of this, I think, is the culture there.
I think it would be pretty tough to steer a straight course there.
Now, that's not to excuse him at all.
I mean, he's really gone down that route with, like, real serious enthusiasm, and it's pretty frightening to see his transformation and how he's alienated, you know, literally everybody in that country, all of the people who formerly supported him, all of the people with whom he led the revolution.
He seems now the only people who support him, and this kind of reminds me of the last days of Shevardnadze, are the people that he's paying off.
You know, there are a few politicians, a few businessmen, who still have it in their interest to keep him in power.
There are a few people out there in the media world, think tankers and so on, that are basically on his payroll or have an interest in keeping him there.
But it's sad and it's disheartening, and, you know, one really hopes.
I mean, personally, I'm a big fan of Georgia.
I've been there a few times.
Until that war in South Ossetia, I was always a real kind of Georgophile.
It's a very charming country.
The people are very charming.
You know, the food's great.
The scenery's great.
It's very disheartening to see what's happened and how sort of dispirited a lot of the people are who had so much hope when Saakashvili first came to power.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
I mean, it's all very interesting and, you know, kind of as a historical note or whatever, but the reason we're talking about this and not the latest happenstance in outer Mongolia is because this U.S. government is deeply involved in Georgia, and they're making this our business.
Yeah, well, we basically put Saakashvili into power because his predecessor, Shevardnadze, right at the very end, was turning out to be not as reliable of a puppet as we wanted him to be, and Georgia is a key country for us geopolitically because it's on Russia's southern border but also because of oil.
Georgia is a transit country.
You know, to take the oil out of the Caspian Sea, which is the last great untapped sort of oil reserves in the world, and with British Petroleum and a whole consortium of, you know, Western oil companies and Western financing governments, we created a pipeline to divert that oil from the Caspian Sea into the Mediterranean so that we control it and Russia doesn't.
And Georgia is the key transit route to that.
So, you know, going back to 2002, well, in the 1990s, first of all, Georgia received more U.S. aid per capita than any country in the world besides Israel.
And then in 2002 we sent in the Green Berets into Georgia.
It caused a real shitstorm in Russia when the Green Berets were suddenly on their border with the former republic under really specious theories that Al-Qaeda, of course, was setting up in this kind of lawless northern region of Georgia.
And then after that we started training up the Georgians and there was a revolution.
We put in a guy into power, you know, who basically wanted to be George Bush.
He actually named the main road from the airport to the city center, to the capital center.
George Bush Road.
And if you go there, you'll see this giant mural photo of George Bush waving at you with this manic look on his face.
And, you know, so the country had been crawling with military advisors, spooks, you know, aid officials, the whole works, and it basically became a neocon project throughout the Bush administration.
And in return, Georgia's president, Saakashvili, he sent what was the third largest contingent of troops to Iraq.
He only pulled them when the war, you know, when he launched that idiotic war last August against South Asia.
And, you know, now I think there's a bit of disarray.
I mean, the neocons are out of power.
Saakashvili is less and less popular.
You know, we're now getting to around the two-year mark, close to the two-year mark, since demonstrations against him have really, you know, gelled in a big way.
And so, you know, it's a big question.
Who's going to be the future leader?
Are we going to continue to throw weight there in Saakashvili?
Are we going to continue to treat Georgia like a colony or a pawn in a kind of geopolitical and oil game with Russia and Iran?
You know, there's a lot of big questions.
And meanwhile, what is interesting is that Saakashvili, the Georgian president, has been hiring out these top Washington PR lobby firms to basically to help keep him in power by boosting his image here.
I mean, you've got an image problem at home.
Anybody who knows anything about him knows that the guy is an autocrat and has been destroying democracy, destroying rule of law, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, it's actually kind of funny in your article where you talk about how in this whole PR push, they know to leave his name out.
All they do is talk about democracy all the time.
They never name the leader because if anybody's ever heard of him, they already don't like him.
Yeah, exactly.
That was really ironic.
I thought that Senators Kerry and Congressman Dreyer wrote this harmless-sounding op-ed in the Washington Post that said, you know, we've got to be friends with Russia and Georgia.
I mean, it was really just a bunch of crap.
And some variation of the word democracy appears seven times in this short little piece, and yet the president's name doesn't appear once.
And it's no coincidence that these guys, you know, quote, unquote, penned this op-ed just a couple months after Georgia, after The Hill reported that Georgia has spent, or Sarkozy really has spent, you know, somewhere in the area of close to a million and a half dollars just in the last year to boost his image.
And what he's pushing for is a free trade agreement between Georgia and the United States.
And, you know, that's obviously not going to do anything for us.
It's not going to do anything for the Georgians.
I mean, poverty there is rampant.
You know, anywhere from possibly up to a quarter of the population doesn't live in Georgia.
They live overseas and send money back home.
You know, and it's how half the population kind of survives.
But the reason why Sarkozy really, really wants this free trade agreement is because he'll get a great photo op with Obama.
They're going to beam that back in all the television stations, which he controls, back in Georgia.
And this is going to help him in his fight for power against the democracy protesters.
Now, can you confirm, or do you know about Arnaud de Burgrave's article where he talks about, I think, Israeli bases?
Or was it American bases?
It's been a few months now.
But not just Americans training there, but actually building bases.
I think he is talking about Israeli bases there that were poised for airstrike on Iran there.
Yeah, I think that sort of came out in the aftermath of the August invasion of South Ossetia, which then sparked Russia's counter-invasion of Georgia.
Last August.
Last August, exactly.
And after that, you know, a bunch of information came out.
You know, I think what happened, Israel was very deep in, and Israeli military advisors were very deep in sort of transforming the Georgian military, as have been American advisors.
You know, I think after that war, the Russians were really pissed off, because Israeli help, Israeli advisors basically helped kill, you know, Russians.
And there seemed to be a lot of behind-the-scenes, I don't know, apologies and new deals being made between the Russians and the Israelis, because obviously the Russians can arm, you know, Hamas and Hezbollah and that sort of thing in retaliation.
So I don't know what's going on with that right now.
I would think that with the neocons out of power and with Saakashvili proving to be a pretty unreliable, hot-headed client, I'm not sure how deep in these people are with him right now.
I mean, they may have been winding that down.
By the way, I should add that I got some information out of, I don't know, let's just say a Western European country from, passed on to me from some journalists there via intelligence people, that, and I've heard, I also heard this from Russians, that American advisors actually participated, at least in the very beginning of the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia.
Well, that's very interesting.
I guess I'd heard those rumors, too.
I didn't have any real footnotes for it, I don't think.
But that sounds like sort of one.
Yeah, it's, you know, it's not hugely surprising, I believe it.
You know, I wouldn't be surprised by anything that went on in the Bush years.
And the neocons really were, they really saw Georgia as their absolute project, and they were sure, just like with everything else, that this was going to be, like, you know, the great, I don't know, triumph and victory of American neocon philosophy.
Well, now, were they, they were, according to your information, they were attacking the South Ossetians with the Georgians, or they were pulling triggers pointed at the Russians?
I guess both, because there were Russian peacekeepers in Ossetia when the war started in the first place.
Exactly.
Advising in the whole kind of lightning blitz.
I mean, a lot of people, you know, a lot of people that I spoke to, a lot of Ossetians, everybody kind of forgot about, in this war between Georgia and Russia, forgot about the Ossetians who were kind of the whole core of this whole thing.
You know, they're a legitimate, genuine ethnic group that the Georgians have historically been massacring.
In any event, a lot of these refugees from the war spoke of, like, a shock and awe blitz that was completely different from the first Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, which took place in 1992.
They said, you know, it was clearly just, the whole thing was designed to terrify, paralyze, and drive out the population and completely overwhelm them.
You know, when you hear that kind of thing and shock and awe, and you know that there are American military advisors running all around, and you hear rumors that they actually participated in the initial launch, you know, it all kind of makes an ugly sense.
Well, now, I think we discussed this before, but here's my characterization.
You do whatever you want with it.
It seems to me like Vladimir Putin said to Dick Cheney, what?
And Dick Cheney said, nothing.
Yeah, you know, I would have a feeling that Putin probably really stopped talking in any substantive way to people like Cheney going back a few years.
Like John Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy and all those guys would talk about diplomatic language and what have you.
That's what it means to send troops even a little bit past the southern border of South Ossetia, right?
That's him telling Dick Cheney, what are you going to do about it?
Yeah, I can see the pipeline from here.
And basically, Cheney backed down, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, what they found out was that, you know, it was a pretty jarring, terrifying moment, I think, for a while for the neocons and for just the whole kind of arrogant imperial enterprise that, you know, that was running America during the Bush years, and maybe still is.
The Georgians got their clocks cleaned, and the Russians moved into Gori and moved south, getting closer to the capital, Tbilisi.
And in a way, I think what kind of really showed their strength, everybody was expecting them to even go farther, and they could have.
They could have taken over the country, they could have destroyed the pipeline.
You know, they pretty much could have done what they wanted, and we couldn't do a thing about it.
But they stopped.
And I know a lot of big stockers, really supporters in the American media, Western media, were convinced that the Russians were such barbarians, they were definitely going to flatten, you know, the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, the way we flatten, you know, all the cities we've gone in to liberate.
And even though that didn't happen, they still went along with John McCain and everybody else's lie that Russia started the whole thing.
And they kept with that until, what, late November, when the New York Times finally said, oh, okay, you know, antiwar.com was right.
Yeah, I know.
It's really disgusting.
And when they finally come out with it three months later, it just doesn't have the same effect, because in the heat of the war, when everybody was just revising reality and history right in front of your eyes, turning it upside down, saying, actually, Russia started this war.
And, you know, they had all these conduits in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, on television.
It was pretty unsettling watching that, seeing reality completely inverted.
So, yeah, three months later, they finally come out, because the weight of evidence was so huge.
And let's remember, this didn't start in the New York Times.
It started, really, with the Western European press, Der Spiegel and so on, which got ahold of OSCE monitor reports on the ground in Georgia, which blamed Georgia for starting it.
Then, eventually, that got to the BBC, which was at least a little bit more skeptical from the beginning than the American media.
And then, finally, a month later, the New York Times did a big piece saying, oh, and by the way, we were kind of wrong.
Sorry for almost dragging America into World War III.
You know, promise not to do it again.
Love, us.
You guys are insane, I know.
Well, and that's what's funny, too.
You know, you rewind it, and I'm sorry, we're almost out of time here for me to throw this little anecdote in.
But I just love it, because Wesley Clark almost started World War III at the Pristina airport back in 1999 in the war against Serbia.
And it was Sir Michael Jackson, the British general, who said, I'm not going to start World War III for you.
We're not fighting the Russians here.
Forget you.
And refused to follow his orders from the Supreme Commander of NATO.
Thank God for that.
Yeah, absolutely.
These people are crazy.
And that's the Democrats, the reasonable ones.
Yeah, exactly.
I know.
Thanks for the big men you've got.
I mean, it really sucks, doesn't it?
All right, everybody, that's Mark Ames.
Really great stuff.
Reposted at the Exiled, originally at The Nation.
My autocrat's worse than your autocrat.
Corruption galore in The Washington Post.
Really appreciate you coming back on the show today.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.