US blocks probe into Uzbekistan massacre posted by Richard Seymour

Via Socialist Worker , I hear that the US blocked attempts to initiate an investigation into the massacre in Andijan committed by the security forces of Islam Karimov. The issue was raised during discussions at a Nato meeting in Brussels.

The Washington Post reports :

At the private general meeting later that day of all NATO alliance ministers, plus Ivanov, Rumsfeld's remarks on the issue emphasized the risks of provoking Uzbekistan, according to four sources familiar with his statements. Rumsfeld said the ministers needed to know that the Uzbekistan situation had direct implications on NATO operations in the region.

The policy reflects an increasing division between 'realists' and neoconservatives - among the former, allegedly, are Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and the State Department; among the latter, Rumself and the Pentagon. The Post reports that Colin Powell had previously refused to confirm that Uzbekistan had met its human rights obligations (ie, don't do anything stupid and embarrass us), and this led to the cutting off of funds for training Uzbekistan's military forces. General Richard Myers, when he went to Tashkent, said that the decision had been extremely short-sighted and announced that the US was giving $21 million dollars to help Uzbekistan defend itself against "bioterrorism".

The Christian Science Monitor says that this "diplomatically costly" move is a blow-back from the strategy of placing "lily-pads" ('defense' bases) in Uzbekistan. The Council on Foreign Relations , a centrist New-York think-tank/establishment-grooming-parlour says that although US troops are supposed to be there to conduct 'relief' efforts and allow easy access for "search-and-rescue missions" in Afghanistan, the troops have in fact been involved in military missions and their day to day activities are "shrouded in secrecy".

Afghanistan has largely been absent from the news despite the fact that fighting continues apace , and a resurgent Taliban is mounting attacks with growing regularity. Britain has just agreed to send a further 5000 new troops to Afghanistan , which is more than a five-fold increase. This is part of a general move to shift operations to Nato forces , which is expected to take over the occupation in 2006, when the US intends to scale back operations there. Nato has controlled ISAF operations there since August 2003, but its forces have rarely strayed into the more hostile terrains.

Nato first strayed outside of its traditional territory in order to bomb the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, and at the time much was made of a suggested need for it to expand beyond its usual zones of action. Its involvement in Central Asia is the first test of that expansionist aim. Presumably, there is an attempt by the US to off-load some of its imperial burden onto other states (which would probably be claimed as a success for multi-lateralism). However, the alacrity with which other Nato states have accepted this role suggests they think they have more to benefit from attaching themselves to the US vanguard than opposing it. That point was particularly obvious in the priority given to building Nato forces in the EU Constitutional Treaty.

In short, what we are seeing here is old-fashioned realpolitik. There's an ugly irony in this. Christopher Hitchens and others have claimed for a while now that neoconservatives were preferrable to their old realist counter-parts precisely because they were militant idealists, democratic revolutionaries and the like, unlike the Kissingerian cynics who played at being Bismarck. Instead, the neoconservatives are cosying up to dictatorships, while the realists remain cautious. It has served the interests of some who support the war to claim that they are ranged against a stale establishment of realists, Old Europe (even, Hitchens averred, Ariel Sharon). Now that it is obvious that there is little to choose from between them, that particular sleight of hand is even less impressive. Imperialism hasn't changed for the better; all that has happened is that some commentators who should bloody well know better have engaged in a collapse of moral nerve and analytical verve, preferring to leap aboard the bandwagon (or should I say tumbrel?) of received wisdom.