Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Well, as you all know, on the night of August 7th, early morning of August 8th, Georgia initiated an invasion of the small Southern Caucasus, little ethnic state-lit thing, South Ossetia, provoking a response by the Russians, who came and drove the Georgians back out.
And this has led to renewed calls by both presidential candidates to bring Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO.
Cheney just went on a visit and talked with the Azerbaijanis about building even more pipelines out of the Caucasus Mountains around Russia and the importance of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
And the thing about this is it's such a complicated mess and apparently our journalists here in America don't really want to understand it.
They only want to repeat whatever it is that the White House would like them to say.
So I thought it might be helpful if we could get some background and some sort of in-depth analysis of what's going on over there in the Caucasus Mountains.
And to that end, I have on the phone from Skopje, Macedonia, Chris DeLiso.
He's Antiwar.com's guy in the Balkans and is the proprietor of Balkanalysis.com.
He's written quite a few articles about Georgia for Antiwar.com in the past, including America's inheritance in the Caucasus.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
It's very good to talk to you.
So let's start with this one article that you had about a different view of the Georgia conflict, which talked about your trip to the southern side of the Caucasus Mountains and meeting and talking with Georgians and Ossetians and just the regular people, not the politicians, but the regular people who live in these areas back three or four years ago.
And what did you learn there?
Well, you know, I think Georgia is a fantastic place.
They have 3,000, 4,000 years of history, culture, and the average people are very hospitable.
And all the different ethnic groups that I've met are very kind.
The Caucasus is a very complicated region, largely because of the geography.
You know, you have these huge mountains, 12,000 feet or so, and from one valley to the next might be a different dialect or different language, completely different ethnic groups.
So there's always been a very mixed history.
And the thing I believe in the latest, you know, great powers, power conflict is the providence of political leaders rather than the individual.
So as usual in war, you know, the average people are suffering for the decisions of a few megalomaniacal leaders.
In one of your articles, you talk about how these people, well, I guess with everything, like Bastiat said, we're goods don't cross borders, soldiers will, and that kind of thing.
The people in these regions get along just fine and they rely on each other in trade to get by and kind of resented their governments picking fights with each other.
Yes, yes.
I also read something not too long ago that said that there were scores of different languages and ethnicities as you go from valley to valley.
As you said, thousands of years of history here, long before the age of exploration and everybody traveling around all over the world, these civilizations took root.
And as you say, they're separated valley by valley by valley.
And now are the ethnic tensions and grievances and so forth overblown the way they're retold here to most people, average folks in that region really get along?
It is just really their governments that are picking these fights or do they have grudges?
I don't want to be too general because there has been a modern history of ethnic conflict in every country, but it's certainly not so black and white like the American media is reporting.
This is one of the things is they seem to be in America, you know better than me, you're keeping up with the news.
They seem to be reporting as the White House and various talking heads want it to sound like Russia is guilty for everything and you know, the poor Georgians and this and that.
But this is obviously something that has larger political and economic interests with oil and the military industrial complex and so on.
And none of the average people that I've ever met have been interested in having conflicts with their neighbors.
So this conflict between Georgia, Russia, this really has nothing to do with ethnicity or very little.
I guess the Russians and Georgians are both Christians, you know, so the media couldn't get a Muslim Christian spin out of that, you know, so this is one of the first things they look for and they couldn't get something like that out of it.
And you know, you have many of these interviews that have come out lately or whether, you know, they're interviewing the people in the war zones who are not making the kind of statements that would support the conventional wisdom and you know, the famous thing that's on YouTube now where they interview the Bay Area woman is supposed to say anti-Russian things and instead she says anti-Svakevichvili things.
Right and they just cut her right off, her and her daughter.
Yeah, yeah.
We have to go to a commercial now, you know.
But that basically says it all.
Well so let's go back.
Let's talk about some of these politics since say, I don't know, 1991 in the fall of the Soviet Union.
What was the status of Georgia and what was the status of Osetia and for that matter Abkhazia under the Soviet Union and then how'd that all shake out?
There were some battles and things in 1992, right?
No, it was too complicated really.
I can't go into all the details there first of all because, you know, I don't know them and second of all because we'll get bogged down.
Well, I mean, there's a question as to whether this is a breakaway province or whether it, you know, quote unquote, belongs to Georgia at all there in Osetia.
Right, right.
Well, I believe that most people consider them Abkhazia and South Osetia as part of Georgia.
Okay.
And, you know, like I said, the ethnic groups spill over boundaries and, you know, you go back to the different sides and, you know, they will have different arguments still say, you know, Stalin resettled these people there the same way that Tito resettled people across Yugoslavia to make ethnic stalemates and so on.
But I really don't know the specific population movements and so on.
But there is, let's say, there is a North Osetia inside the Russian Federation, which is contiguous with South Osetia.
But at the same time, remember that this is geographically so inconsequential that South Osetia was described by The Economist magazine as a smuggling ring with a strip of land attached to it.
So this is certainly not something worth going to war over.
Right.
I mean, we are talking about a tiny little, what, a group of half a dozen valleys or something?
Yeah.
It's, you know, it's nothing.
Not even as big as Kosovo, which was also not worth going to war over.
But that's another story.
Yeah.
OK, well, so let's go back then to 2003 and the Rose Revolution.
The way TV says, at least, seems pretty cut and dry.
The old guy, Edward Shevardnadze, basically rigged a bunch of elections and the people, mostly the young people in the streets, just wouldn't stand for it and demanded new elections and then rose to power the wonderful Democrat Mikhail Saakashvili, right?
Yeah, of course.
Well, if you want to go a little deep history there, remember that Shevardnadze was brought in in 91, 92, because Georgia was in the middle of a conflict over Abkhazia.
And he replaced Gamsakhurdia.
And then this started a civil war that took place over the next year or two.
And then Gamsakhurdia was finally killed or killed himself in 1993.
So in the beginning, Shevardnadze was like, you know, the gray eminence, the man who could restore peace and so on.
But after a few years, you know, he ran out his sell-by date and he became an old communist who had to be overthrown, right?
And the interesting thing with the Rose Revolution was that it was patterned and guided specifically by people from Serbia's Otpor resistance group, which were trained by the U.S. and Soros and all those people in 1999-2000 to overthrow Milosevic.
So they were just literally imported from Serbia to Georgia to teach them how to, you know, make a sort of phony civil liberties, people to the streets campaign.
And the Georgian version was called Khmara.
And all the people who were associated with that were then, you know, given jobs and privileges inside the new Saakashvili administration.
But he was American trained, of course, but thought of as a hothead.
And I, you know, when I was there and I was there shortly after, I think the next year in 2004, and speaking with some of his close confidants there, even at that time, were quite concerned because he had this reputation as a loose cannon that eventually we would end up with a situation like this, where if the politics dictated it, that he would try to gin up a war, you know, to retain his popularity.
And as the, you know, the Rose has faded, as I believe Justin Raimondo wrote a year or two ago, when people get, you know, a little bit dissatisfied with the leadership, it's time to gin up a war, as it appears has happened this August.
Yeah, well, it's the same no matter where you go, I guess.
Well, now, during this Rose Revolution, because I think it's important, by the way, that you point out that this Ukrainian template, as Justin Raimondo calls it, that was applied here.
Well, Serbian, Ukrainian, Georgian, it's all in it, yeah.
And Kyrgyzstan as well, that that started there, yeah, in Serbia.
I think that's important.
But, you know, I was reading earlier about how the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, they said that George Soros spent $42 million on this, I guess, throwing the rock concerts and all the things.
You've got to admit, it's a pretty effective, I guess, you know, you're right, the orange rots and the bloom falls off the Rose and so forth.
But as far as getting a regime change done, bang for the buck, this Ukrainian template thing has worked pretty well, $42 million isn't that much.
But was this a CIA operation, or this is just George Soros and these non-government?
I'm not sure they were involved.
I mean, I can't say specific things, and you know, this guy did this, or that guy did that.
But obviously, it was very important for the American government, and you know, we can go back to the issue of why Georgia is a strategic area that is now being talked about as, you know, the next showdown between America and Russia.
And it wasn't always that way.
If you don't mind, I'd like to take you back to a comment made 10 years ago by the former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
I think it's been reported in other articles in the news recently.
This is when they were building the Baku-Tbilisi-Jaehan oil pipeline, which has come online a year or two ago, finally, after a long time, and I think $2.4 billion.
And he said that the pipeline was about America's energy security, which depends on diversifying our sources of oil and gas.
And it's also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don't share our values.
And speaking about the former Soviet countries of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, he says, we're trying to move these newly independent countries towards the West.
We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests, rather than going another way.
We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.
So, I mean, that says it all, and actually, the headline of this, which is a New York Times article, is, on piping out Caspian oil, U.S. insists the cheaper, shorter way isn't better.
So, this is politics versus business, because getting oil from the Caspian would be cheaper to go through Iran or through Russia, you know?
Building this pipeline was very expensive and very difficult, and Georgia doesn't have oil.
But they made it be on the pipeline route, so that it would develop this strategic location.
So, the U.S., in effect, created a strategic situation, which would then justify sending in the billions in military supplies, which started not long after that.
Well, wouldn't it seem that now this guy, Saakashvili, has put all that in terrible jeopardy?
I mean, I guess Chevron and British Petroleum are still pumping oil through there, but now the Russians are in South Ossetia, the Russian army, I mean, is in South Ossetia, they can see the dang pipeline from there, right?
Well, Russia has its own pipelines operating.
It's not like they were frozen out or anything.
They have the majority of pipelines from the Caspian or from Russia.
And that's why the EU and the European states are being a lot more conciliatory than the U.S. is, and that's why the U.S. is getting quite frustrated, but we'll get to that.
You know, sending in troops to support South Ossetia is just to sort of up the ante and remind them that they're there and that they're part of any solution.
And the thing that the American media seems to be forgetting is the Russian outlook and why they feel like they do, because they have now NATO and American military bases either or surrounding them on three sides.
You know, all the Baltic states, you have Romania, you have Bulgaria on the Black Sea, Turkey, and then military bases in Central Asia on the doorstep of Russia.
So it's not as if there's Russian military bases in Mexico and Canada, you know?
How would Americans feel then?
It's the complete opposite.
So when they hear more about NATO expanding closer and, you know, on their borders, they have every reason to feel nervous about what is the final goal.
You know, one thing that's interesting to me about this, well, I guess in every issue that has anything to do with Russia, it seems like this is where the neocons and at least Brzezinski and his buddies agree, if not, you know, so-called all the realist faction, but it seems like you've written about the Committee for Peace in Chechnya, which I guess ceased to exist a few years ago, but that was all the realist, most of the realist faction and all the neocons together.
They all seem to be in for this Cold War against the Russians.
Well, from the cynics' point of view, it would seem that, you know, it's been almost exactly seven years since 9-11, and they got enough mileage out of that, and it's time for a new enemy since there haven't been any major terrorist attacks in the last few years, and Giuliani ran on 9-11 and he didn't get the nomination, so maybe it's time to make Russia the new enemy, you know?
You know, it's interesting you bring that up, because this is something, one of your old articles from 2004 or something on Antiwar.com, you talk about how, and I bet you most people might remember this a little bit, if you mention it to them, oh yeah, there was something about that, where in 2002, right at the dawn of the War on Terror, they sent American special forces into Georgia to fight Al-Qaeda in the Pankisi Gorge.
Yeah, I was going to get to that, yeah.
Well tell us about that, what was going on there?
Well, there was different views, and I was in Georgia not too long after that, so I was interviewing different media people, and in fact some people from that area, and you had conflicting stories, some were saying yes, there are terrorists holed up from Chechnya here, and others were saying no, and actually I had a very interesting experience, which was, I don't know if I wrote about it, perhaps I did, I went by helicopter with the OSCE delegation to the border with Russia, in a place called Shatili, where just a few days earlier there were various European nationalities, these OSCE monitors who were walking around the border all day, had been detained by a group of 13 Chechen rebels, they were telling me this amazing story about how they survived this, and basically the rebels said to them, we know where you live, where your little base is, and you have to not report this to the Russians in the next 48 hours, or we will destroy your little base.
So these people didn't really have a choice about this, and so after 48 hours they reported that they had seen these people, and Russia got angry and said the OSCE is working against us and allowing the terrorists to operate, but it was a fairly pragmatic decision on the part of these kids who were tasked with watching the border.
But we don't know, I mean, I don't know if there were ever any terrorists who made it all the way down to the Pankeithi Gorge, but it was, like you said, it was a good reason for bringing in special forces and these military contractors and so on.
And now there's an article in the British newspaper, I'm on that right now, in the Financial Times, which has this alleged revelation of the U.S. military training Georgian commandos in offensive operations, and saying that, you know, the U.S. saying they're so surprised, they didn't know that these commandos would be used in South Ossetia, they imagine that they will just be used in Afghanistan, and, you know, who knows, but I'm sure that they're aware that they're planning to do something here, because they've been training them since 2002.
And I remember when I was interviewing different Georgian military experts in 2001, 2002, they're talking about how sort of pathetic was the Georgian military at that time, and ragtag and rundown and underfunded.
So they clearly needed some boost, but the question is, what were they being trained for?
Yeah, well, I still don't think it's clear, I don't know if anybody's written anything that really kind of definitively showed whether America gave him the green light, Saakashvili, the green light to attack South Ossetia, or whether he thought he had one, but they didn't mean for him to, or there's some who say that the neocons were egging him on, but the State Department was telling him no.
It seems like, just from where I'm sitting, on the plus-minus column, this was a really bad idea from the point of view of America and Europe, Georgia.
The consequences of this, they're never going to take South Ossetia ever now, they've got Russian troops there from here on out.
As far as I can understand anyway, this Georgian attack was not provoked by anything.
On the ledger of benefits and losses, do you see that the Georgian-American side has gained anything here?
No, of course not.
Nothing?
I don't know if, in the internal politics, I don't know if a surge in Georgian nationalism will help Saakashvili, but in the end, whoever comes to power from American help will be deposed by American help.
You remember when Saddam thought he had the green light to invade Kuwait, and what happened with him?
Right, the stabbing back.
It's not exactly the same scenario, but it's possible that we can already look beyond Saakashvili, and I'm sure that there's people within Georgia in the political opposition who are grooming themselves to be the next Georgian leadership.
Yeah, it's like that movie, War, Inc., where the guy that they're going to install as dictator of Turakistan, he says, well, they may kill me, or they may make me president, or they may make me president and then kill me, and he says, yeah, that's the way it goes when you work for the Americans.
Yes.
All right, well, so what about the benefits to the Russians?
If the Americans and Georgians have done nothing but lose, how much stronger, if at all, have the Russians come out in this, do you think?
It certainly plays well for their domestic audience.
It will strengthen the government, which is already very popular, and they didn't have any real losses out of this, as far as I can see.
So now, they've actually gotten a foothold, and so any further negotiations, of course the Europeans and U.S. will want them to remove their troops, but the facts on the ground are there's troops there now, so there weren't troops there before, so any negotiations, the Russians already have one step ahead.
And Europe is probably making the Bush administration go into fits, because Russia has control over a lot of European oil and gas, so there's not going to be any sanctions or real condemnations from the European side, because Russia can say, well, you know what?
You're not going to have electricity tonight, or you're not going to have gas tomorrow.
So the Europeans are going to be much more pragmatic.
As I understand, the French have come up with a peace plan, so they will be allowed to be looked at as diplomatic types, if they like.
Everybody will be happy.
They will come out with something out of it.
The Russians will come out of it with something.
But probably the real winners will be the Chinese, again, as they don't have to do anything.
They don't have to lift a finger, and the U.S. and Russia exhaust each other, as was the case in Kosovo.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm glad you mentioned Kosovo, because that was sort of the precedent for this, right?
Where the Russians are simply playing the role of the USA in guaranteeing the Kosovo of Georgia.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
The way I was looking at it was from the reaction in the media and the government, which was one of complete hypocrisy, because in 1999, Yugoslavia and the Serbian troops were sent in because the Kosovo Liberation Army was making attacks and waging a separatist campaign.
And Yugoslavia, the result was they got whacked by the world's largest military alliance.
And now that Georgia has invaded a separatist republic that was not even fighting anything, and they get $1 billion in aid from the U.S.
So the hypocrisy is as blatant as you can get.
And now you have Richard Holbrook, a big supporter of Kosovo independence, who's saying that the Russians are wrong because territorial integrity is the guiding strategic principle the UN was founded on.
You know, they've just gone and disobeyed that principle by separating Kosovo from Serbia.
So the U.S. does not have a whole lot of credibility anymore, in any sense.
And this is exactly what Putin warned a year or two ago when they were moving to make Kosovo independent, was that this is overthrowing the whole strategic and the whole diplomatic arrangement of states respecting territorial integrity.
So all bets are off now.
Well, and that's something that they might have to deal with themselves, too.
There are ethnic Russians in a lot of the former Soviet states surrounding Russia, as well as, well, like the Chechens, for example, a lot of non-ethnic Russians inside the Russian Federation.
Yeah, and if you look on the map, the Caucasus is the area that's closest to, say, Russia's Yugoslavia, where you have all these little enclaves and various autonomous republics.
I had the suspicion, although I never really delved into it, that the neocons with supporting this, you know, free Chechnya thing would be happy to spread that further and get some of the other minorities there involved into separating the Russian republics, which would make it a lot easier for them.
But in fact, with some strong arming and some cash influx, they have made some progress in rebuilding Chechnya, which the neocons don't like to see.
So the Kremlin has a little more credibility there, and the war is finished.
And, you know, definitely now that Russia has got some leverage by having troops in South Ossetia, so the plan for, if there was such a thing, for weakening Russia through its Caucasus republics has been shelved for now.
But, you know, the U.S. has too much on its plate by far.
You know, Iraq and Afghanistan, occasional conflicts in South America, China, presidential election.
So they certainly have too much on their plate to be able to really stop Russia in any way.
And now, what about Azerbaijan?
Because I don't think anybody's talking about bringing them into NATO, but it's Georgia, Armenia...
No, I think the U.S. would like to.
I'm sorry?
The U.S., I'm sure they would like to.
If they could bring Georgia and Azerbaijan into NATO, they would be very happy to do that.
Now, Azerbaijan, was that a part of Iran before the fall of the Soviet Union?
Or that was part of Russia?
Oh, difficult, difficult.
It was in different times part of Iran, part of the Ottoman Empire, part of Russia.
But so were all of these areas.
As a state, you have Azerbaijanis in Iran.
You know, this is one of the sort of groups that the U.S. has allegedly been working on to get them agitated.
The important issue to watch out for is Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed area between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which has an Armenian majority, but is technically part of Azerbaijan, is another frozen conflict.
And the U.S. tends to support Azerbaijan on this issue, and Russia tends to support Armenia, although it sometimes is more opaque.
But the thing to watch there is that Azerbaijan, with a lot of oil wealth, has really built up its military.
And we have people like Canadian journalist Scott Taylor, who was reported on there last year, and I think he's going back again in a few weeks, on just how big of a difference the Azerbaijani military is.
And there's some who believe that they're getting ready for an offensive to really reclaim this republic, and that Armenia doesn't have the military strength to stop them.
So this is one of those scenarios where if all bets are off in Georgia, and if they get the chance to justify such a thing, maybe the Azerbaijanis could launch a war against Armenia for this.
So this is an enclave of ethnic Azerbaijanis, wholly surrounded by Armenia, and so the danger then would be a war to create a corridor to it.
It's an enclave of Armenians.
Oh, inside Azerbaijan?
There was a war there in the 90s, and the Azerbaijani population was run out of town when the Armenian irregulars defeated them.
But this is, according to the Azerbaijanis, part of their territory, and they would like to get it back.
It's even more complicated, because there's a part of Azerbaijan that is not contiguous with Azerbaijan, between Turkey and Armenia.
So this is just a very complex area, and there's a number of pretexts by which conflict could erupt.
And the Georgian invasion of Ossetia might be eventually remembered as the stupid idea that started off a whole lot of other stupid ideas.
Well, let me ask you this.
The oil itself, the oil pipeline begins in Azerbaijan, right on the coast of the Caspian Sea, and then crosses Georgia and dumps out into the Mediterranean, right?
And so, where's all the oil?
Is it under the Caspian Sea?
Yeah, there's the Caspian Sea resources from various countries there.
And so this whole game, and this is something that Chaney was talking about in the news last week, was, let's build more pipelines, and we'll have another one going, I guess, straight south, out of the south end of the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan, and then I don't know where, I guess he plans on having a regime change in Iran before he's got to figure out where it goes.
Well, I'd wonder if it's truly from Iran, I'd wonder if that portion would be the ethnic Azerbaijani populated part, if they're thinking about someday annexing that as well.
I'm not familiar with the map of Iran there.
But don't forget that Chaney, he was originally involved with this in the 90s, when he was president of Halliburton, who was involved with the original plans for the pipeline.
So they were all over there and talking about how he said something like, I don't remember if there has ever been a region to emerge as so strategically important at once, like the Caspian.
I don't know exactly, but it was something like this, where they were just so excited about the potentials there.
And so I'm sure what he means is, more pipelines means more Western oil companies, and that translates into more political pressure to get the political results that they're looking for.
Right.
And I guess, ultimately, this is, in a way, an attempt to cheat OPEC, so that we don't have to rely on the Saudis to do what Houston wants in setting the price, you think?
Well, that might be one.
That might be one thing.
But it's amazing.
Some of these things, like this Cold War mentality, it might seem to us as incredibly just stupid and passe, but apparently there's a lot of people in the U.S. government and administration and past administrations who really are set on this, that Russia is the enemy.
It's just amazing to me, because Russia has not provoked anything in how many years?
Do you remember when was the last time that Russia provoked anything?
I don't.
Yeah, it's been decades, anyway.
There's no Russian leaders slamming his shoe on the table.
I mean, the war in Chechnya was brutal, but that was an internal thing.
It was an internal thing.
So it doesn't count.
You know, this is something, too, when you talk about how stupid this is, I think this is something that is not really getting much coverage.
Because what we're talking about here are war guarantees, and when we're talking about bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, that means any attack upon them is an attack upon Harlingen, Texas.
And you know, we're talking about Russia here, again, the guys with the nukes, the H-bombs on ICBMs.
And this is why it's so stupid what Condoleezza Rice has announced now, that the time isn't right for a civilian nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia.
I mean, if any time was right, it would be now.
If the U.S. wanted to be diplomatic, they would say, you know, we have these disagreements now about Georgia, but as a sign of good faith, we're going to continue working on, you know, a nuclear deal so that, you know, we can guarantee our mutual security.
If they were going to be responsible diplomats, they would take that opportunity that's been handed to them, instead of saying, we're going to move to make it further like the Cold War again.
I don't know what these people are thinking.
Well, I guess the only thing I can think of is that they want to sell more big-ticket military items.
It's hard to justify $10 billion submarines and massive aircraft carriers and fighter jets when you're talking about fighting goat herders in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Yeah, that's for sure.
But it was wrong of the Russians to say that this invasion, this Georgian invasion, was a plan of the Republican Party to make McCain win, except that now he seems to have believed that with the way that he's talking, and he's, you know, justifying it after the fact, even if it wasn't true.
I mean, you heard him at the Republican National Convention.
Well, I said I read it.
I couldn't be more honest.
You had people in the audience who knew less about Georgia than they did about Sarah Palin two weeks ago, cheering and clapping at his call to stand by the people of Georgia.
And you have McCain talking about how unfair it is that a big power can invade a small and defenseless country for their oil role.
I mean, come on, people.
This hypocrisy is so blatant.
If we think about Iraq.
McCain himself has said, and it's on the YouTube there for all to see, that, hey, listen, we have to be energy independent so we don't have to fight any more of these oil wars in the Middle East.
That's what he's, he already called it that, the Iraq War.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
And you know what?
One more thing.
I just like picking on Richard Holbrook when I get a chance.
And you mentioned him before.
And by the time you were done with that answer, it was too far off topic.
But I want to go back.
This guy who says that we must respect all territorial integrity.
Wasn't he the guy that in the mid 1990s, as Yugoslavia was breaking apart, wasn't he the one who came from far away North America and said, OK, all these sort of more or less borders that are starting to shake out here, let's take a big black magic marker and say these are all now internationally recognized borders, leaving thousands of people of various ethnic populations on the quote unquote wrong side of the lines and leading to even more mass slaughter?
Well, you know, every news article in history that's about Richard Holbrook has always said that he's the, you know, the visionary who made the Dayton peace plan in 1995 to end the Yugoslav civil wars.
And of course, his memoir is called To End a War.
And, you know, if you do any reading about Bosnia recently, things are not so rosy there.
And there's not fighting, but there's economic stagnation.
There's, you know, moves for more and more nationalist leaders on all sides.
And a number of analysts are considering that the Dayton agreement will not be the final thing and that, you know, the borders could change further.
And certainly the independence of Kosovo is not helping that.
But you know, and you could also go on and say that Holbrook was, you know, one of the ones who was most eager, along with Al Gore, for arming the Bosnian Muslims with the Islamic Mujahideen, as I wrote about in my book, Coming Balkan Caliphate.
But so these geniuses are still, you know, going on with their great advice, which has always had unintended and terrible consequences.
And you know, the policymakers are just listening to their own rhetoric.
And it's amazing, because think about the last eight years, what has happened.
In 2000, you had the victorious, you know, presidential candidate, George W. Bush, campaigning on the idea of a more humble foreign policy, no, you know, no foreign interventions, bring the troops home from Kosovo, and so on.
And now, eight years later, you have the candidates outdoing themselves on any given issue, whether it's Iran or Russia, or this or that, outdoing themselves on who can be more militaristic.
And you have McCain talking about restoring American greatness and leadership and showing the world how great we are.
The world has changed so much, and the US is actually much less capable than it was eight years ago, economically and due to military overstretch, of actually achieving these goals that it has set out for itself in this grandiose Romanesque way.
It's just embarrassing.
And they're so far out of touch with reality now, you know, I shudder to think what's going to happen.
One of them has to be elected, but, you know, it's hard to say on any given day which will be more dangerous for our own well-being, McCain or Obama, because they keep trying to, you know, outdo themselves with their rhetoric.
Once he picked Biden, he forfeited the opportunity, Obama, once he picked Biden, forfeited the opportunity to criticize McCain's judgment on Iraq.
So now all he can do is try to run to the right of him.
Well, yeah, but there's something in the political discourse that has changed, which is that, you know, everybody has to be more gung-ho than the next.
So we started even with Hillary and Obama when they were campaigning against each other, saying, if I was, you know, president, if I was wearing the daddy pants, I would say this to Iran, or, you know, would you talk to that world leader?
It's like, ugh, you know, like you're in sixth grade or something, making a list of leaders that, you know, are not suitable for you to talk to.
And you're right, it shows the fact that they've learned nothing from all this.
They thought they had this unipolar moment where they could take the unstoppable U.S. military and do anything in the world with it, and it didn't work at all, and yet they still talk as though everything's worked out perfectly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't think the American people are much better.
I saw Carlos Mencia doing stand-up comedy the other night, and when he got to the part where he was loudly proclaiming how wonderful it was that America has killed millions and millions of people overseas and used atomic weapons on people, and all, you know, Mexicans, blacks, and white people in America will all team up to kill Ahmed, he said, and the whole crowd was just absolutely going wild.
They loved it.
And he didn't even choke when he talked about the millions of people killed by this government.
They loved it.
In 2007, at least, was when that was recorded.
Yeah, you know, I haven't spent much time in America in the last few years, so I don't know, but it's always this voluntary suspension of disbelief, which is how they describe fiction, the definition of fiction.
Whenever I see, you know, these rallies or these political speeches and see people clapping and cheering, I'm like, who are these people?
I can't believe, living in the real world, as I like to call it, which is anywhere outside of America, that people actually believe the things that they do, or that they seem to believe.
How would you compare the media in Macedonia versus America?
In a way, it's more sophisticated, because, and also politics, because here everybody knows exactly, they know all the media is lying to them, but because it's a small country of two million people, so they know why they're lying to them, too, because he's associated with this party, or that party, or that, you know?
In America, there appears to be still quite a large number of people who believe that the media is telling them the truth, or that, you know, this or that politician is telling them the truth, and they will get really excited to support them, whereas here, people just support the different parties because they think that they or their family can benefit, you know, from whoever wins.
So it's a much more realistic view, and you have these true believers in America, and I don't know how they can sustain this belief, but apparently some of them do, in quite large numbers.
Hmm.
So even though the media itself is probably just as corrupt, the people there at least have a realistic view of it, and can read between the lines.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's a shame.
I mean, this is the land of the First Amendment, and Macedonia, as far as I know, has never had a tradition of individual protections of liberty or anything, have they?
Well, they're working on it now, but the point is simply, there's no illusions, let's say.
People pretty much know what is what.
And anyway, from what I've seen on TV and the Internet and stuff about American voters in this last election, the people who really believe that any of these politicians are different from the others, or have any real ideals, it's amusing, but depressing at the same time.
Yeah, exactly.
And the Georgia thing is just sort of underscoring that, because we really have a situation where nobody knows anything about Georgia.
And because some people tell them on TV that, you know, we have to stand by the people of Georgia and this and that, it's as if, you know, their cousin was shot or something.
They don't take the time to even think about what actually happened.
It's just that, you know, John McCain told them, so here we go, get ready for another war.
Yeah, well, I guess when this one starts, we won't even know it, except for the few seconds, you know, between the really bright flash and when we turn to dust.
Oh, God, let's hope not.
All right, Chris, tell me, tell me the name of your book again.
Ah, The Coming Balkan Caliphate, that was a tangential moment, but I can't resist, you know, making a short plug.
And that came out, that's received enough coverage, I'm sure, in 2007.
But that's not related to Georgia, just the Balkans and terrorism and so on.
But.
Right.
All right, everybody, that's Chris DeLiso.
He's the proprietor of Balkanalysis.com, Antiwar.com's man in the Balkans and author of The Coming Balkan Caliphate on the phone from Skopje, Macedonia.
Thank you very much for your time today, Chris.
Thank you, Scott.
Did I say your name, your town right?
You did, you did it.
All right.
You're getting better now.
OK, thanks a lot, man.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
