March 19, 2008 (the date of publication in Russian)
Konstantin Cheremnykh
THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S RUNNING WATER
Opponents of Kosovo independence equated with anti-Semites
THE PURPOSE-ORIENTED PROGRAM GOES BUST
A day before the parliamentary elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US State Department urgently needed to report about the current achievements of foreign policy. On the dire background of economic recession, the national audience had to be soothed with at least a bit of advance in the global expansion of American interests.
However, the record was not encouraging at all. The State Department could express enthusiasm over the declaration of Kosovo independence, in strict accordance with the guidelines of the White House. It would sound convincing if the area, crossed with trenches and surrounded with barbed wire, were recognized by then at least by one sixth of the world community. It would demonstrate a real advantage in case the warnings of European experts were not coming true one after another, the declaration of sovereignty echoing with a political paralysis not only in Serbia but also in Macedonia, a NATO candidate.
The State Department could justify those implications with benefits of the Belgrade crisis for US interests – namely, the fact that no Serbian authority can presently sign the advertised agreement with Russia's Gazprom. But this indirect advantage looks as a small fish on the background of the Russian-Hungarian gas accord in Budapest, this time not disturbed with sufficiently massive "public protests".
The State Department, finally, could boast of NATO's increasing popularity in the former USSR, referring to the score of the relevant referendum in Georgia and the Ukrainian troika's commitment to comply with the NATO Entry Cooperation Plan. It would sound convincing if Angela Merkel, the General Chancellor of Germany, had not just claimed that these two nations are yet unfit for NATO membership due to unsettled border problems. Saying this, the General Chancellor could not be unaware of the fact that this unfitness is directly related to the status of Transdniester, Abkhazia and South Ossetia – the breakaway territories that have the same right for sovereign statehood of Kosovo, and the same background of emergence from the disintegration of the USSR as the by-products of the similarly staged and similarly promoted disintegration of Yugoslavia.
It was also remarkable that Mrs. Merkel's remarks followed her trip to Moscow, where she talked to the President-elect Dmitry Medvedev shortly after his trip to Budapest. These remarks are naturally interpreted by experts as an exchange for guarantees of German transit to Afghanistan, as well as commitment of partnership with Russia on a stronger confidential basis than with the newly-democratized Ukraine.
The behavior of post-Soviet transitional democracies in the first quarter of the year also did not reflect due regard of US strategic interests. Moldova's President Vladimir Voronin, viewed as a most reliable asset of those Washington, claimed that the presence of his state in the US-supported bloc of GUAM is worth nothing but expenses. The leaders of the glorified Ukrainian Maidan, Victor Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko, adopted the price requirements of Gazprom, while the equally heroic Georgian democrats decided to give away the Armenian oppositionists who had served to Washington's attempts to prevent the rise of Prime Minister Serge Sarkisyan to the post of Armenia's President. Moreover, the democratic press of Georgia has leaked out the State Department's recent confidential talks over transfer of power from President Mikhail Saakashvili to Speaker Nino Burjanadze. This flap could not be interpreted as anything but diplomatic incompetence of the responsible officials, primarily, of Mathew Bryza, Secretary of State's Deputy Assistant for the Caucasus.
The failure of a coup d'etat in Armenia, a longtime subject of the purpose-oriented program of "colored revolutions", would be not so annoying if its neighboring arch-enemy, Azerbaijan, had managed to fulfill the entrusted special tasks: firstly, to provoke a large-scale war in the breakaway Karabakh, and secondly, to undermine the victorious election campaign of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's party in Tehran.
The Kosovo precedent was supposed to spark an outburst of war around the unrecognized Karabakh, viewed as an only plausible pretext for concentrating international military contingents along the adjacent Iranian border. Not surprisingly, the Armenian presidential campaign was followed with equally radical pro-Karabakh independence slogans of convenient Armenians, as well as with a trip of an equally convenient Yashar Demirbulag, former head of Turkish military intelligence, to Baku for encouraging the Azeri army for military crackdown upon Karabakh. Not surprisingly, the convenient ethnic Azeri candidate, Jafar Fatkalizadeh, for the Iranian race was selected from clerical circles, while his local campaigners heavily bemoaned the victims of Hojala, an Azeri town occupied in 1992 by the Armenian army – with emphatic reference to involvement of "the Soviet Army's Regiment 366".
Despite the fact that in year 1992, the Soviet Army did not exist, and despite the reluctance of Washington to promote Azerbaijan's resolution of territorial integrity in the UN, these and other accumulations of provocative lies of the State Department were supposed to provide at least some fish to report of before the Congress. However, the instinct of self-preservation repeatedly saved the countries of Transcaucasia from a bloody inter-ethnic war, while Jafar Fatkalizadeh was banned from the race by Iranian authorities for "propagating ideas of ethnic intolerance".
As a result, the special envoys of US interests became a laughing-stock even in a tiny and landlocked Armenia. Mass media of the neighboring Azerbaijan's media reproduce the following mocking characteristic, given to them by Armenian political scientist Levon Melik-Shakhnazaryan, without comments: "One of the co-chairs of the Minsk Group on Karabakh, Mr. Mathew Bryza, behaves as a cowboy, poking into all the problems but being unable to grasp any of them.
For the two other co-chairmen, Karabakh is a honorary exile. The EU representative, Peter Semnebi, has never been in Karabakh. Being too illiterate in the local situation, he fears to travel to the area where, as he believes, he will get killed".
SKINHEADS FROM SYKTYVKAR
Peter Semnebi is pretty safe – unlike the leaders of Columbia's FARC, one of them blown up on the territory of the neighboring Ecuador. Still, the attempt to fuel up a war between two states failed here as well as in the Transcaucasia, the conflict efficiently solved by the FARC-sympathizer and Yankee-mocker Hugo Chavez, while Ecuador's President recommended George W. Bush either to deploy his military forces to the area or to "turn off his water".
The first option – to deploy troops – was not ventured by the White House, while the second advice – to shut up – could not be implemented due to the Presidential campaign in the United States that inevitably urges the State Department to either report about the achievements, or, like the late Soviet Politburo, to refer to objective circumstances that mount obstacles on the shining path of otherwise victorious policy.
In this effort, the fantasy of the State Department's strategists did not take them too far. The Congress was offered a 90-page account on international dissemination of anti-Semitism. Curiously, the fault for spreading this epidemic was laid exactly upon those national and international subjects that dared not to follow Washington's guidelines on the Kosovo issue.
Namely, the fault was laid upon the United Nations, whose Resolution 1244 does not recognize Kosovo independence, as well as Venezuela and Belarus, described as the two most ominous foes of the state of Israel. Certainly, Arabic countries (among which Kosovo independence was recognized only by Saudi Arabia) were named as well. In Russia, anti-Semitic symptoms were searched with most efficient optical devices, discerning the ominous sentiment even in areas where it is physically hard to meet a single Jew. Only from the State Department's report, the Russian Jewish Community was surprised to find out that anti-Semites and skinheads have launched web media as far as in Syktyvkar, center of the northern Komi Republic, and in Ulyanovsk, the smallest and poorest regional town of the Volga area.
In fact, the term "skinhead" arrived in Russia from the United States of America, where the number of media resources, quoting the Elders of Zion and exposing Ziono-Communist and even Ziono-extraterrestrial conspiracies, exceeds the total European amount of relevant media production. In fact, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia has noted yet in January that anti-Semitism in Russia is declining and not increasing. Moreover, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was just preparing for a trip to Jerusalem in order to sign an agreement on a non-visa regime between Russia and Israel, to be implemented since June 2008.
Unlike Russia, the convenient Azerbaijan is not going to open a single embassy in Israel. Hikmet Gadjizadeh, a prominent political scientist from Baku, recently explained to the daily Day paper that diplomatic relations with Israel don't correspond with the national interests of Azerbaijan. "This issue is postponed due to the solidarity of our Government with the international Islamic community that we have to take into consideration. Besides, this (diplomatic) move would be perceived negatively in a certain part of our country's population". "A comprehensive explanation", Day's interviewer Ilya Feinsilberg slimily agreed.
Naturally, one has to choose one of two options: either to support radical clergy in Iran, or to dispatch diplomats to Israel. It would be possibly easier to implement both tasks in case Baku were instructed to promote Iran's liberal opposition. However, the State Department's agency of distribution has entrusted this mission to chessplayer Garry Kasparov – born in Baku but ethnically incompatible with Azerbaijan's national interests. One could just feel sorry for the ordinary promoters of US interests who have to steer the cadre material of the quality of Mr. Fatkalizadeh and Mr. Kasparov in the same regional strategy.
THE CAT THAT DOESN'T CATCH MICE
Cadres, boosting ethnic intolerance, have been appraised by the White House as even more instrumental than liberals. Sometimes, not only persons but even whole ethnic groups have been efficiently steered against one another – especially in Africa. Still, one exceptional ethnic group with special privileges in expression of ethnic feelings was found in Europe as well: the Albanians. Their demand for ethnic proportional representation in Macedonia's power bodies became a pretext for withdrawal of the Democratic (sic) Albanian Party from the government coalition. In 1990s, a similar Russian demand would be denounced as a symptom of anti-Semitism.
It is noteworthy that the interests of the privileged nationality of Kosovars are pursued by Condoleezza Rice's office with more fervor and effect than the interests of the state of Israel. Take at least the example of Iran, where the White House’s 2003 attempt to promote a more liberal candidate than the convenient Mohammad Khattami resulted in the triumph of a strongly anti-Zionist candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yevgeny Satanovsky, former executive director of the Russian Jewish Congress, reminded of this fact in the January discussion on Russia TV. In his recent analysis of the Iranian election campaign, Mr. Satanovsky admitted that democracy is more developed in Iran than in any other Moslem country.
Though every contender for the US Presidency swears of his sympathy to Israel, the State Department's policy in this direction represents a series of shots in the ally's eye. The attempt to carve out a Middle East Kosovo from convenient Lebanese and Palestinians resulted in an effect contrary to the intentions.
Therefore, the US assertions on Russian anti-Semitism are unlikely to be seriously taken by the Israeli. After all, they have got foes much closer to their borders than Caracas and the especially alarming Syktyvkar. They owe the menace from these closest foes mostly to "cowboys, poking into all the problems but unable to grasp any of them".
The times when speculations on the Jewish issue served as a powerful detonator of anti-Soviet sentiment among the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad, have long passed. Thousands of then-emigrated intellectuals are now applying for citizenship of Russia, where they feel more secure than in the Promised Land. This tendency of return has become so troublesome for the Israeli leadership that one shouldn't wonder if the next proposal to Washington to "turn off the water" comes exactly from the object of touching concern of the authors of the State Department's report.
In fact, the State Department does not deserve more than a D mark for its work in this year's first quarter. Certainly, the score would be opposite if one calculates the ensuing degree of anti-Americanism. In this nomination, Condoleezza Rice's office would get a perfect A.
However, the State Department's cowboy manners, verbal fountains and customary manipulation schemes are so simplistic and predictable that any independent global actor is able to foresee the sequence of moves. For instance, it was quite easy to precisely calculate how many days the Lamas of Tibet and allied hooligans would need to activate since the diplomatic recognition of Kosovo by Taiwan. This stereotypic banality of designs and tools, worn out like cowboy jeans, eventually transforms international hate into ironical indifference. The more inadequate are the guidelines, ejected from the White House's fountain, the more visible are its double standards in world policy, and the more helpless is the implementation. Eventually, the self-assured cowboy is likely to be viewed as the anecdotic "uncatchable Joe" who is never caught not because he is so hard to catch but because nobody would bother to pursue him. With his worn-out haversack, slimmed by recession, he is not more useful in the global household than a cat that does not catch mice.
Number of shows: 1078
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