Replies to post #2600 on Foreign Correspondence

[CoalTrain]

McRevolution? What was your take on the Rose revolution? I did not follow that one closely. Are the people better off? Why do I suspect that many of the underlying principles are the same as in Ukraine?

[Amaunet]

Ukraine Parliament Brings Down Government

Updated 12:56 PM ET December 1, 2004

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By ALEKSANDAR VASOVIC

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine's opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko agreed to lift his followers' siege of government buildings in face-to-face talks Wednesday with his rival for the presidency aimed at resolving the country's spiraling political crisis.

Yushchenko signed a compromise agreement with Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych that also calls for talks on changes in the Ukrainian law to end the election crisis.

The deal came hours after Ukraine's parliament brought down Yanukovych's government with a no-confidence motion Wednesday in a show of the opposition's strength.

Hundreds of thousands of Yushchenko supporters have been in the streets, claiming fraud in the Nov. 21 run-off election that officials said Yanukovych won. The opposition backers have blockaded government buildings, paralyzing the work of Ukrainian authorities, and have set up a tent city in Kiev's main thoroughfare. It was not immediately known if Wednesday's deal also called for the lifting of the tent city.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Amaunet]

It's now or never for Washington
Mark Almond
Monday 6th December 2004



America's real aim in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics is to seize control of vital resources before China and India can challenge US dominance. By Mark Almond

Are we on the brink of a new cold war? On both sides of the Atlantic, media commentators see the crisis in Ukraine as comparable to the Berlin crises, involving the US and the Soviet Union, which kept the world on tenterhooks for decades. In this supposed drama, a resurgent Kremlin under an ex-KGB colonel is suppressing freedom at home and encroaching on ex-Soviet republics around his country's vast rim.

This terror of shadows has a track record of success. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the ailing world of Leonid Brezhnev was portrayed as a sinister superpower with its tentacles almost around Uncle Sam's throat. The US and the majority of western European nations combined behind a programme of arms build-up and covert sponsorship of anti-communist dissidents.

The coincidence of dates is not often noted, but the Pentagon was inaugurated on 11 September 1941, exactly 60 years before it took its first direct hit. In my view, its role was positive for many years: few would regret the fall of Hitler or the deterrence of Stalin. But America's bloodless victory in the cold war did not lead her to rest on her laurels. As early as 1992, Pentagon insiders led by Paul Wolfowitz and sponsored by the then defence secretary, Dick Cheney (under President Bush I), had drawn up a doctrine designed to prevent any power getting the "capacity" to challenge the US in the future. Not only potential foes but friends were to be kept subordinate.

There was no peace dividend. Instead, US defence spending rose. Now the Pentagon spends more than the European Union, Russia, China and India combined. As one Pentagon friend said to me recently: "The new arms race is between the US army today and the US army which might fight it tomorrow!"

Yet, according to Washington's friends, Russia is on the prowl, even though its military technology is ageing and Nato expansion (and with it, US bases) reaches deep inside the old Soviet Union. In reality, the Kremlin's writ is fraying at the edges of the smaller, post-1991 Russia. Already Chechnya is in chaos and much of the north Caucasus is simmering. If Russia poses no military threat even to its neighbours, the divide of the first cold war era is dead.

And yet the culture of the new cold war is very different from that of the old. For 40 years, the west's intellectuals and media were bitterly divided over policy towards Moscow. Each side - particularly the west - had its allies on the other side. The west's victory in 1989 was good for the market economy but bad for intellectual pluralism. Sky News came online in 1989 but the explosion of 24-hour news has been matched by an implosion of alternative views.

With the collapse of one-party states, any justification for western covert intervention in elections died. Yet the methods of the old cold war have continued and even grown in scale. Washington's power elite see the whole world as former president Reagan saw Latin America - indeed, many Reagan administration figures are involved in current events. Cold war methods are still in use - even more so - but now against opponents who do not merit the description "totalitarian", whatever their faults.

In the run-up to the velvet revolutions of 1989, I was a bagman carrying tens of thousands of dollars to eastern European dissidents. I have a good idea of how much money and foreign input are required to get a spontaneous "people power" revolution going. Then, however, it was the Communist Party that blocked dissent. Today, western intelligence agencies, the media and "the people" crush any dissent from the Washington consensus.

At the time of the Falklands war, Henry Kissinger said: "No great power retreats for ever." Maybe Russia is about to disprove his thesis, because so far Russia has retreated steadily under Vladimir Putin's rule. If Ukraine falls into the Nato orbit, Russia will lose her access to Black Sea naval bases and Russian oil and gas export routes will have to pass an American stranglehold.

Yet Russia is a bit player in this new global competition. The Pentagon is really aiming at Beijing in its grab for the old Soviet strategic space around Russia. China is booming, but energy is her Achilles heel. Economically and technologically, China's 1.3 billion people seem poised to assume superpower status, but China cannot risk falling out with America. Only access to Russian and central Asian oil can liberate China from dependence on vulnerable sea-borne oil supplies, so the real "Great Game" is between Beijing and Washington. America's real strategic fear is the rise of China and India. Unlike Russia, they are not beset by demographic decline.

Worse still for US planners, the Chinese and Indians may want the benefits of western consumerism but they do not share the cultural cringe of peoples of the former Soviet bloc: like Gandhi, they believe that western civilisation would be a very good idea.

In Latin America, too, Washington does not have everything its own way. It is not just that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez saw off a Ukrainian-style "people power" push, having already trounced an old-style putsch in 2002; Brazil and Argentina are also failing to toe the Washington line. The region's big players show signs of looking to China and south Asia for markets and investment.

If South America, south Asia and China begin to coalesce, then Washington could find itself confronted by an alternative axis not seen since before the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. But, whereas Mao and Brezhnev represented economic dead ends, the new China and her potential partners have dynamism on their side. Maybe India and China are business rivals, but their old frontier disputes in the Himalayas are frozen. Latin America has nothing to fear from either superpower of the future, nor do Latin Americans nurse visceral resentments of Beijing or Delhi that are in any way comparable to their deep-dyed anti-Yankee feelings.

America's drive to dominate the old Soviet Union represents a gamble by today's only superpower to seize the highest-value chips on the table before China and India join the game. If China can add access to post-Soviet energy to the Chinese hand, it will be game on for a real new cold war. Many of the predictions among Washington neoconservatives about China's growing power recall the fear among German militarists that the window of opportunity for a global role was closing by 1914. Washington's drive to seize maximum advantage before the inevitable waning of US power recalls the Kaiser's cry 80 years ago: "Now or never!"

Mark Almond is a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford


This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200412060023

[Amaunet]

China vows to further trade ties with Belarus

Belarus risks being isolated from the international community unless they not only adopt democracy but given the amount of US influence a democracy under a president who obsequiously bows to Washington’s wishes.
#msg-4693618

A lot of planning, work and money has gone into efforts to design a US model for promoting democracy around the world. The model's first success was notched in Serbia. Funded and organized by the US government, which deployed US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organizations (NGOs), the campaign defeated Slobodan Milosevich at the ballot box in Belgrade in 2000.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role in the campaign to oust Milosevich. In November last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, Miles reapplied the same method successfully. Thanks to his coaching, US-educated Saakashvili brought down Eduard Shevardnadze. When the US ambassador in BELARUS, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in Central America, notably in Nicaragua, organized a near identical campaign to try to defeat the BELARUS strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, he failed. "There will be no Kostunica in BELARUS," the BELARUS president declared, referring to the United States' Belgrade success 10 months earlier.
#msg-4696890

China in vowing to further trade ties with Belarus looks to be softening the blow of censor from the West and is attempting to stop the flow of bogus democracies toward the dragon’s border.

-Am

China vows to further trade ties with Belarus

www.chinaview.cn 2004-12-14 00:40:41


BEIJING, Dec. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- China suggested enhancing trade ties with the Republic of Belarus, which borders Russia, by expanding cooperation in sectors such as energy, telecommunication,automobile and pharmacy, said a Chinese senior trade official.

Zhang Zhigang, Chinese vice minister of commerce made the proposal during talks with his Belarus counterpart Kulichkov Alexander Nikolaevich as both co-chairmen at the sixth meeting of a China-Belarus joint committee on trade and economic cooperation here on Monday.

Zhang suggested the two countries enhance financial cooperation,such as providing export credits, promoting trade; strengthening regional cooperation and welcoming Belarus enterprises to participate in China's develop-the-west drive and the rejuvenationof its old industrial belt in northeastern China.

He also suggested the two countries optimize trade commodity struct

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-12/14/content_2330457.htm

[Amaunet]

At a news conference, Bush rejected the suggestion that Washington and Moscow work out a mutually agreeable way to bring democracy to Belarus the former Soviet republic that Bush calls the "last remaining dictatorship in Europe."

"Secret deals to determine somebody else's fate I think that's what we're lamenting here today, one of those secret deals among large powers that consigns people to a way of government," Bush said. He called for "free and open and fair" elections set for next year in Belarus, now run by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko. - Bush
http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=050507&cat=frontpage&st=frontpageap200505...


Bush wouldn’t know a fair election if he were pissing on it.

No country can match to the same extent a candidate buoyed with full Western support.

If any one thinks these are fair elections they should let their kid run against Donald Trump’s son for president of the third grade in a school that puts no restrictions on campaign spending.

The man "selected" by the West to lead Ukraine, Yushchenko, finds his support among groups who have privatized public assets to their cronies. He is supported by huge funds from newly rich Ukrainians, who want to preserve their gains. Huge amounts of money were also pumped from the West to groups who support Yushchenko. Openly and blatantly, the US and other Western embassies paid for exit polls, prompting Russia to do likewise, though not to the same extent.

It is claimed that officially the US government spent US$41 million to fund the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevich from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be about $14 million so far.
#msg-4696890

The Bush administration has put the democratisation of Iran out to tender--offering money to groups and individuals inside the Islamic republic--in what officials describe as the start of a long-term effort to pay for opposition to the ruling clerics.
#msg-6268625