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First published on May 26, 2022
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Former president George W. Bush wrote in his memoirs that following the 9/11 atrocities, he had formulated a strategy in which to safeguard the United States. His plan did not make a distinction between the terrorists and the countries where they resided. Under Bush, the Americans would fight the enemy abroad before they could strike, confronting a perceived threat before it materialised, i.e. preventive attacks.
This strategy, known as the Bush Doctrine, had actually originated before 9/11, not after. The Bush Doctrine was developed together with the “freedom agenda”, which Bush wanted to use to support “inexperienced democratic governments” in the Ukraine, Georgia and Lebanon, to name but three; and strengthening dissidents in the “repressive regimes” of Syria, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.
Image on the right: President Bush makes remarks in 2006 during a press conference in the Rose Garden about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and discusses North Korea’s nuclear test (Licensed under public domain)
Comprising part of the freedom agenda, were flagrant attempts at regime change with president Bush leading a team of neoconservatives (neocons). They were focused on extending US global hegemony, and subordinating other countries to the superpower’s interests.
The Bush administration’s moves into Eurasia led to growing tensions with Russia, which has been returning as a world power over the past 2 decades under president Vladimir Putin. With legitimate cause, in late February 2002 the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Igor Ivanov, warned that the Americans should understand Moscow’s concerns about the highly provocative presence of US soldiers in Georgia, a nation which shares a 550 mile border with Russia.
The Russian grievances regarding US and NATO enlargement were ignored. NATO, in effect America’s military arm, has long been an instrument to subordinate Europe to the US along with that of its major banks, such as JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan Bank, Bank of America, etc. Rapid NATO expansion further enabled the war industry’s growth, bolstering profits through arms deals by selling weaponry to the many new countries which have joined NATO over the past generation.
Among the key tasks of NATO troops is “to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed to the West”, said NATO Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, in June 2007, when he was addressing a meeting of NATO members. Washington believes that the transportation of oil and gas through Russian territory makes Western markets vulnerable.
The Americans made great efforts to ensure that the pipelines avoided Russian land, or that of Russia’s allies. For Washington a crucial goal, to the present, is to control the countries of the former Soviet Union. They went about this not only with military persuasion, but through the assistance of organisations like the CIA, the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), Freedom House, USAID and the Open Society Institute; the latter was created by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, a ubiquitous and controversial figure, and in 2011 his Open Society Institute was renamed Open Society Foundations.
It should be mentioned that Soros is an implacable adversary of leaders such as Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping. Among Soros’ business deals, he has had ties to American politicians like John McCain; upon McCain’s death on 25 August 2018, Soros led the tributes describing him as “a brave warrior for human rights who stood up against repression and torture”. Not mentioned was that McCain had a history of warmongering – he strongly endorsed the US-NATO invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
The above Western NGOs and foundations serve as devices to promote regime change, in countries regarded suspiciously by Washington. Bush’s government dispatched 200 military advisers to Georgia. This small Caucasus country is recognised to be of vital strategic importance, partly because of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, supported by the West. The infrastructure, at 1,099 miles long, is the second largest oil pipeline present in the former Soviet Union. It transports crude oil from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, bypassing Russia and Iran.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline was operated through a consortium led by British Petroleum (BP) and Chevron. The Pentagon started drafting policies to use Georgia in a containment policy of Russia, with the intention of preventing the Kremlin from reasserting its influence over the Caucasus.
Location of Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
A few weeks after 9/11, Georgia’s president Eduard Shevardnadze visited the American capital, where he pledged his backing in the “war on terror”. Shevardnadze asked for economic and military aid from the Americans, and he signed a strategic partnership with NATO. He also authorized the construction of the previously mentioned pipeline, which would be commissioned in 2006. Yet the Georgian president’s position had become precarious. He was politically weak and isolated; Georgia’s foreign debt had rocketed to $1.75 billion and Shevardnadze had no way of paying it off. This instability in Georgia was viewed with concern in Bush’s White House, who feared that the country would return to Russia’s orbit of control.
The so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia of November 2003 was planned and initiated from Washington, in co-ordination with the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, according to Moniz Bandeira, a Brazilian political scientist. Bandeira continued, “The ambassador Richard Miles had played an important role in the toppling of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, when he headed the diplomatic mission of the United States in Belgrade, between 1996 and 1999”.
The “Rose Revolution” was granted huge funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute, totalling over $42 million. US-friendly politician Mikheil Saakashvili, who received some of his education at private institutions in America, took over the Georgian presidency in January 2004. Saakashvili’s rise to power was partly made possible by the assistance of Western NGOs, and pro-Saakashvili activists in Georgia who were on the bankroll of the Open Society Institute of Soros.
Saakashvili promptly went about reducing the Russian military presence in Georgia. The US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, signed a $15 million contract with the American firm, the Cubic Corporation, in order to provide defence equipment and training to Georgia’s military.
The Bush administration was sending to Georgia US Special Operation Forces (Green Berets) and the US Marine Corps, among others, to train the Georgian military personnel; these contingents participated in the US offensives in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Americans had launched the Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP) in 2002 and, in 2005, the Georgia Security and Stability Operations Program (GSSOP), initiatives formed to align the Georgian forces to US military goals.
With tensions rising in the separatist Caucasus regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which want to join Russia, president Saakashvili requested that Georgia be allowed to join NATO; which would have been the equivalent of Mexico acceding to the Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact.
The following year, starting in November 2004, a second colour revolution commenced this time in the Ukraine, another very important country which has an 830 mile border with Russia. The protests occurred principally in the capital Kiev, by no means nationwide, and it had been dubbed by the Western media as the “Orange Revolution”. The target was the Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, who had assumed power in Kiev 10 years before in July 1994.
Kuchma could not be called an ardent pro-Russian but, overall, relations with Russia had improved during his decade in office. Kuchma described Russian as “an official language” in the Ukraine and, during late May 1997, he had signed a Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Partnership with Russia.
As regarding Georgia, the anti-government actions in the Ukraine were encouraged by American organisations like the NED, USAID, Freedom House, along with activists on the payroll of Soros. He was supporting the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-Western figure. Yushchenko has been an advocate of the Ukraine joining NATO and the EU, while he was opposed to Russian being the second state language in the country.
English correspondent Jonathan Steele wrote of the Orange Revolution in the Guardian newspaper, “Intervening in foreign elections, under the guise of an impartial interest in helping civil society, has become the run-up to the postmodern coup d’etat. The CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days adapted to post-Soviet conditions”. In the decade or so following the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, Washington poured $350 million and counting into eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet republics. This included the funding of psychological warfare operations assisted by the mass media.
The Pentagon had invested millions of dollars in the colour revolutions, with the support of the US State Department and the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC). Washington had clearly not abandoned its Cold War practice of surrounding Russia, and if anything was increasing the intensity of such policies post-1991, breaking verbal promises made to the Russians.
With crucial Western support, Yushchenko took power in Kiev in January 2005. Bush hoped that Yushchenko would shift the Ukraine towards Western integration, while adopting a “free-market economy”. The first major project that Yushchenko announced, in the summer of 2005, was the construction of a pipeline originating from the Caspian Sea via the Ukraine to Poland. This would reduce Kiev’s dependence on Moscow for raw materials.
Yushchenko’s prime minister was Yulia Tymoshenko, known in the Ukraine as the “gas princess”, because of the fortune she had gained through murky business deals relating to natural gas. Tymoshenko has publicly supported Ukrainian accession to NATO and the EU.
President Bush and colleagues had no desire to sow instability in Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic. Azerbaijan, which rests on the Caspian Sea, serves as a critical pipeline corridor between the Caucasus and Central Asia; as Zbigniew Brzezinski started to realise about Azerbaijan, when he was the National Security Adviser under president Jimmy Carter.
To help protect the oil/gas fields and pipelines, the Pentagon dispatched to the Caspian region mercenaries from American Private Military Companies (PMCs) like Blackwater. The Caspian region had historically been dominated by Russia and Iran. Bush, like his predecessor Bill Clinton, was provoking and humiliating Russia by sanctioning further NATO expansion and launching wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Less than a year after becoming president in January 2001, Bush withdrew America from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which had been signed in 1972 with the USSR in order to implement the anti-missile defence system. He also refused to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (1996), along with modifications to the SALT 2 agreement on the reduction of strategic armaments.
Bush moved to establish missile bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, two central European states which had joined NATO in 1999. He aggressively advanced NATO to Russia’s very borders, with the accession in 2004 to NATO of the Baltic states Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, along with that same year Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia.
In early 2007, an increasingly frustrated Putin rebuked NATO’s march to Russia’s frontiers when he said “the United States has overstepped its borders in every way”, a policy which he described as “very dangerous”.
Undeterred, the Bush administration continued its imperialist program, by making steps to incorporate the Ukraine and Georgia into the American military sphere. In early April 2008 it was outlined at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO. Both nations have made valuable contributions to Alliance operations”. NATO’s stated ambitions did not go unnoticed in the Kremlin.
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Shane Quinn, Journalist and renowned Historian, focussing on geopolitics and the history of World War II, based in Ireland. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Sources
George W. Bush, Decision Points (Crown, 20 Nov. 2010)
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, “Ivanov: Russia Opposed to US Troops in Georgia – 2002-02-27”, Voice of America
Doug Bandow, “John McCain Loved the Military Too Much”, Foreign Policy, 28 August 2018
Jacob Grandstaff, “George Soros, John McCain, and Immigration”, Capital Research Center, 10 July 2017
Jonathan Steele, “Ukraine’s postmodern coup d’etat”, The Guardian, 25 November 2004
Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA (Springer 1st ed., 23 June 2017)
Taiwan News, “Ukraine to ditch Russian friendship treaty amid tensions”, 10 December 2018
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books; 1st edition, 18 Nov. 1997)
Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st ed., 4 Feb. 2019)
“Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on the President’s Trip to the NATO Summit”, Bush White House Archives, 3 April 2008
History of World War II: Operation Barbarossa, the Allied Firebombing of German Cities and Japan’s Early Conquests
By Shane Quinn
The first two chapters focus on German preparations as they geared up to launch their 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, called Operation Barbarossa, which began eight decades ago. It was named after King Frederick Barbarossa, a Prussian emperor who in the 12th century had waged war against the Slavic peoples. Analysed also in the opening two chapters are the Soviet Union’s preparations for a conflict with Nazi Germany.
The remaining chapters focus for the large part on the fighting itself, as the Nazis and their Axis allies, the Romanians and Finns at first, swarmed across Soviet frontiers in the early hours of 22 June 1941. The German-led invasion of the USSR was the largest military offensive in history, consisting of almost four million invading troops. Its outcome would decide whether the post-World War II landscape comprised of an American-German dominated globe, or an American-Soviet dominated globe. The Nazi-Soviet war was, as a consequence, a crucial event in modern history and its result was felt for decades afterward and, indeed, to the present day.
Click here to read the e-Book.
