The Honor Of God

by F. William Engdahl

The dramatic military attack by the military of the Republic of Georgia on South Ossetia in the last days has brought the world one major step closer to the ultimate horror of the Cold War era—a thermonuclear war between Russia and the United States—by miscalculation. What is playing out in the Caucasus is being reported in US media in an alarmingly misleading light, making Moscow appear the lone aggressor. The question is whether George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are encouraging the unstable Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili in order to force the next US President to back the NATO military agenda of the Bush Doctrine. This time Washington may have badly misjudged the possibilities, as it did in Iraq, but this time with possible nuclear consequences.

The underlying issue, as I stressed in my July 11 piece, Georgia, Washington and Moscow: a Nuclear Geopolitical Poker Game , is the fact that since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 one after another former member as well as former states of the USSR have been coaxed and in many cases bribed with false promises by Washington into joining the counter organization, NATO.

Rather than initiate discussions after the 1991 dissolution of the Warsaw Pact about a systematic dissolution of NATO, Washington has systematically converted NATO into what can only be called the military vehicle of an American global imperial rule, linked by a network of military bases from Kosovo to Poland to Turkey to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1999, former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia followed suit in March 2004. Now Washington is putting immense pressure on the EU members of NATO, especially Germany and France,  that they vote in December to admit Georgia and Ukraine.

The roots of the conflict:

Please Read : http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Caucasus_War/caucasus_war.html

A review of God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, by Walter Russell Mead

In his new book, God and Gold, foreign affairs expert Walter Russell Mead argues that modern world history can be understood as the global application of a system of economics, religion, and culture developed and directed by the English-speaking peoples. From the time of Oliver Cromwell to the present, the British and the Americans, either individually or together, have won every major war, and have established a commercial and military dominance that remains the foundation of the modern world. “It is perhaps bad manners to say so,” Mead acknowledges, “but that does not make it less true.”

Mead addresses six questions which he believes can help us better understand and handle the problems and dangers that confront America today:

(1) What exactly is the agenda of the Anglo-Americans?
(2) Why have they been so consistently successful in their military and economic conflicts with other nations?
(3) How did they manage to build a global order?
(4) Why have they so frequently believed that their successes were about to give rise to a world of peace and prosperity?
(5) Why have they been wrong every single time?
(6) What is the meaning, significance, and future, of Anglo-American power?

As Mead confronts these questions, we find that the strengths of his book include his authoritative mastery of historical, political, and economic facts, which he uses liberally to support his argument, and his ability to weave together cultural, religious, economic, and political strands of history into a fascinating, coherent synthesis. Its weaknesses include a sometimes overbearing repetitiveness of key points and a rather unsatisfying response to the major contemporary criticisms of Anglo-American culture in the end. Nonetheless, the book is a very worthwhile read, both for its historical sweep and—most importantly—for Mead’s lucid and useful suggestions regarding the future of American foreign policy.

http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.764/pub_detail.asp