Why Georgia, why now?

Cui bono? is that very useful Latin phrase "to whose benefit?" which has its origins in Roman legal discourse (Cicero cites it as one of Cassius's sayings) as a maxim used both to understand the motives and intentions of a crime. In political theory it also is invoked when we want to figure out the always complex and sometimes unintended results of political events. We don't have to reduce the answer to the one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory to see that too often, the answer seems to be "men with guns."

While China hosts the Olympics and consolidates its control over internal dissidence, as Naomi Klein details, The Guardian's Ian Traynor lays out the immediate consequences of Russia's defeat of Georgia's military (armed, trained, supported by U.S advisors and Halliburton) this past week. Some news has filtered its way through the inane chatter about medal counts, but, as usual, we (and by that, I mean the general public in the United States watching CNN on the aiport monitors while we wait to pick up our loved ones) have little to no clue as to what is really going on and why. Which stories should we believe? Who thought they would benefit, who really benefits, and why?

One view, (in it sometimes seems as if the entire world acts only in function of the U.S. presidential campaigns), is evident in this piece by Joe Lauria in HuffPo, highlighting the benefit of these events to the McCain campaign "Did McCain Help Bait Russia into Georgia?" because the revival of Cold War rhetoric is seen as an asset to the neocons. Lauria also reminds us that McCain's chief foreign policy advisor (and registered foreign agent for Georgia) is Randy Scheunemann, whom Lauria calls "the personfication of the military- industrialist racket" and one of the many players in a much larger geo-political game about oil, capitalism, and hegemony.

The tendency among many Americans is to consider any point of view that takes history into account a "conspiracy theory" and the mainstream press has tried hard to sneer at the explanation proposed by some of us during the runup to the war in Iraq, sometimes called "It's the oil, stupid", but this hasn't prevented many scholars, journalists and the ever-diligent Noam Chomsky from persisting in their pesky analysis of the larger historical contexts of these conflicts. William Engdahl's analysis of the geopolitical implications is illuminating, because it clearly shows how Georgia fits into the wider geopolitical strategies of Russia, the U.S. and the NATO countries (let's not forget them, in the post-Soviet scramble to maintain control over the rest of the world).

Can you say "competing oil pipelines"?

SFMike at the blog CivicCenter sends us to the TBR News for the back story of the conflict in Georgia, and how this territory is a staging ground for power struggles between Russia and the U.S and its allies for control of Central Asia, the broader arena in which Afghanistan and Iraq are only two of the theaters of bloody conflict.

Let's not forget that Cheney and Rice and the Bush-McCain neocons are busy carrying out their plans, formulated decade ago, in the continuing struggles begun over a century ago for control of oil and territory. European imperialism in this region is sometimes called The Great Game. Understanding the current nature of global capitalism and imperialism between rival powers entails historicizing these events . Cui bono? Who stands to benefit from these events? Not the people who have been hiding in their basements while men with guns bomb, kill and pillage.