Russia & Georgia, US & Hamas, Cheney & Musharraf

Bush’s demand that Russia “reverse course” on Georgia and not try to overthrow an elected government is full of special pleading.

Bush has no standing to ask anyone not to go around invading countries, of course.

Russian PM Vladimir Putin has already thrown Iraq in Bush’s face, saying

‘”Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages . . . And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed 10 Ossetian villages at once, who ran over elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection.”‘

Bush’s implicit defense is that unlike Iraq’s, Georgia’s government is elected. Why Bush would never undermine a democratically elected government, would he?

But that is exactly what he did when Hamas won the elections for the Palestine Authority in January of 2006. Bush slapped sanctions on the elected government and encouraged Israel as it kidnapped ministers, and then ultimately connived at a coup in the West Bank (an an attempted one in Gaza, which failed).

And, of course, Cheney and Bush supported Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf against much more popular civilian officials willing to run against actual other candidates. Before she was assassinated, Benazir Bhutto said that she wished Cheney had reined Musharraf in. Bush even initially was lukewarm about the popularly-elected parliament that is now set on impeaching Musharraf. Bush only just stopped taking his ‘best buddy’s’ phone calls.

Bush and Cheney are shocked, shocked that a great Power would act unilaterally and with massive force to secure its interests, violating the Enlightenment principle of popular sovereignty.