I know about the Armenian Genocide, and there is an excellent novel written
about it by a fine author. Perhaps the name will come to me within a week or
so. The reason the author wrote the article is that the US has begun to send
weapons to one side of the conflict.
I remembered that the title had the word, sand, in it and looked on my word
document of downloaded books and here's what I found. This is the book in
case anyone is interested.
The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian DB75215
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Andy Baracco
Sent: Sunday, October 4, 2020 5:48 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and
Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do With Us
The Armenians view their situation as parallel in some ways to that of the
Jews. They even had their own holocaust at the hands of the Turks, who
massacred over 1 million Armenians in 1915, even though this event, along
with other smaller massacres and other incidents were never recognized by
the world's most powerful nations, including the United States, who saw
their relationship with Turkey as being more valuable to their interests.
The Armenians were driven from their homeland and scattered throughout the
middle east, and the world, with many coming to the U. S.
It was Russia who was largely responsable for establishing and protecting
what is now the nation of Armenia.
As was said in the article, this is really pretty much a proxy war between
Russia and Turkey. I do not see the U. S. becoming involved, as the U. S.
has never supported the armenians, not even recognizing the Armenian
genicide.
Andy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, October 04, 2020 2:33 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and
Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do With Us
I think that there's a difference between media coverage and militarycountry.
intervention. The author of the piece is a former professor at West Point.
I
posted the article to provide the list with media coverage.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Andy Baracco
Sent: Sunday, October 4, 2020 4:05 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: This Long-Standing Battle Between
Armenia and Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do With Us
The Armenian American community would disagree. We have a large
Armenian community here in LA and yesterday Armenian American
demonstrators effectively blocked one of the busiest freeways in the
What they were actually protesting was the lack of media coverage ofthe thing.
the conflict.
Andy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, October 04, 2020 12:54 PM
Subject: [blind-democracy] This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia
and Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do With Us
This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Has Nothingwide open.
to Do With Us ESSAY MAJ. DANNY This Long-Standing Battle Between
Armenia and Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do With Us October 3, 2020
1 Commenton This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and Azerbaijan
Has Nothing to Do With Us America doesn't really have a dog in this
fight. Unless it decides it does - which it's apt to do, especially
in this madcap moment.
Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army troops assemble before the National
Assembly building on Renaissance Square in Stepanakert. [David
Stanley / CC BY 2.0] By Maj. Danny Sjursen / AntiWar
Journalists and geo-strategists call it a "frozen conflict" - one of
several such deadlocked disputes under tenuous ceasefire in the
post-Soviet states.
Only now, the long-standing battle between Armenia and Azerbaijan
over Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) is anything but. For the third time since
the Russian-brokered 22-year armed-truce - ending a bloody 1988-94
war that claimed some 30,000 lives - broke down in 2016, the
antagonists are at it again. Yet this outbreak feels different, far
bigger, with an ambitious Azerbaijan seemingly intent on cracking the
whole stalemate
Indeed, Baku's bellicose rhetoric has drifted towards thatmaintain the NK-armistices.
ever-disturbing language of "final settlements," "Karabakh is ours,"
and of a "life-and-death war" - befitting the "blitzkrieg" intensity
of the Azeri strike.
Those of us in the nerdy-niche tribe of NK-watchers would argue this
latest bloodshed shouldn't have surprised anyone. Still, almost
everyone was.
Thus
far, through five full days of intense fighting, scores of soldiers
and civilians have been killed and neither side wants to back down.
Worse yet, one generic - and perceptibly inexpert - mainstream press
report after another has emphasized that the recent violence could
"draw in" outside powers like Russia and Turkey. Some have postulated
a "worst case scenario"
of "all-out war" between the two.
That's a pretty darn bold assertion, of questionable veracity,
especially when delivered so reflexively and downright casually -
plus usually absent context or caveat. These contentions are
inherently problematic because they assume a Russian-role that isn't
so stark, and simplify a Turkish posture that's indeed worrisome, but
highly complicated. The whole media picture creates - as it tends to
- a conflict-caricature that divines nefarious nemeses-hands behind
every dispute and views every challenge through proxy war prisms.
Could this be but a mirror of our own meddling?
Let's get a few things out of the way up front. The unfrozen conflict
in Nagorno-Karabakh is not, and has never been, a vital interest to
the United States. Even rather establishment American think tanks
have admitted as much. Despite its Christian Armenian, and Muslim
Azeri antagonists, this isn't one of the "clashes of civilizations"
Professor Samuel Huntington predicted back when the conflict was in
full gear. After all, Armenia's Christian co-religionist Georgian
neighbor has hardly been a friend - having assisted U.S. and Muslim
Azeri efforts to bypass Armenian territory with Caspian oil and gas
pipelines, and recently conducted trilateral military exercises with
Azerbaijan and Turkey.
It also didn't begin as, and has rarely been, a classic proxy war.
All interested global and regional parties - yes, even Russia and
Iran - have generally demonstrated restraint, hedged bets, and
maintained links with both sides. Nor is Nagorno-Karabakh a microcosm
of Russian-Western confrontation; in fact, it "falls outside this
stereotype." However imperfectly, Europe, America, Russia, and other
regional actors have more often than not cooperated to negotiate and
In other words, as one comprehensive analysis correctly posited, the
"combination of structural distinctiveness and geographic remoteness
has made the Nagorno Karabakh (NK) conflict conceptually and
strategically peripheral." To translate from the think-tankery:
America doesn't really have a dog in this fight. Unless it decides it
does - which it's apt to do, especially in this madcap moment. Yet
if, and I fear when, Washington makes this about us, and our troubles
with those wretched Russkies, matters will only worsen.
In other words, lesson one of recent American Foreign Policy 101.
Bad History: Long Memories and Intractable Backstory
Don't tell a pundit or a politician now, but when wading into
regional ruckus - it usually helps to know at least a few things about
Socialist Republic (SSR).That ought include the relevant backstory, even - maybe especially -
if, as the conflict-acquainted journalist Bill Keller once observed:
"The Karabakh conflict taught me that we need a statute of
limitations on history."
Damned
if he couldn't have said the same about Lebanon, Iraq, the Balkans,
or heck
- the American Civil War. Nevertheless, even contested pasts - both
Armenian and Azeri leaders deny documented communal massacres and
peddle in conspiracy theories - matter more than a mite. Here's an
abridged "idiot's guide" to a conflict hardly any policy players have
heard of, and even few scholars want to touch:
For at least 150 years now, ethnic Armenian Christians held hefty
majorities in the more mountainous ("Nagorno" in Russian, language of
the pre-1991 imperial masters) bit of the Karabakh (aptly meaning
"black garden" in Turkish, language of that other interested regional
actor) district in the South Caucasus. In 1805, Tsarist Russia
conquered the region, including all of what's now Armenia and
Azerbaijan. Divide and conquer, pitting different ethnic and
religious groups against one another to maintain order through
designed instability was this - and most all - imperium's ruling tool
of choice. So too it was with the new Soviet Empire "of the proletariat"
after
the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
It was in the gradual and contested consolidation of communist
control
- and the ensuing intra-Soviet politics over proceeding decades -
that established the framework for the current NK-conflict.
Initially, in 1920-21, things looked to be swinging in the direction
of Armenia and self-determination for Nagorno-Karabakh's people.
Unfortunately for them, the Azeri's had then been more amenable to
communism and the precarious USSR hoped to placate the new
Armenian-hating Turkish republic of Kemal Ataturk to earn a
desperately needed ally. That didn't pan out, but the new Soviet
commissar for nationalities, Josef Stalin (yes, that Stalin) reneged
and established NK as an autonomous Oblast within the Azerbaijani Soviet
air).Despite occasional ethnic strife - often smothered by ample Sovietwar was an accomplishment in itself.
troops - that unhappy arrangement held for some 65 years.
However, this lengthy backstory aside, it's vital to recall that -
contra modern Western orientalist assumptions - over the centuries
the mixed Armenian-Azeri communities in the Karabakh region generally
cohabited peacefully. In that sense, they track the experience of
Mideast Sunnis and Shia, whose conflict is hardly as ancient and
hopelessly intractable as most Americans assume. Nagorno-Karabakh's
current ethno-religious (emphasis on the ethnic) dispute - like the
Muslim World's intra-confessional divide - is mainly a modern affair.
Both were reignited by recent geopolitical contexts and catalysts.
For NK that meant, however lamentably, the unintended effects of the
last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his Glasnost - or
"opening" - political and social reforms in the late-1980s. (To
review, this means that Washington's recent tack towards the Azeri
position not only places the US at odds with its supposed commitment
to self-determination, but on the side of Stalin's ghost over
Gorbachev's living legacy - isn't that fun?)
The lid blew off in 1988, when Nagorno-Karabakh's
Armenian-super-majority sought independence from Azerbaijan. After
its defeat in the Afghan War, and given Gorbachev's newly peaceful
proclivity, the Soviet Army hadn't the stomach for its
mass-suppression standard and mostly left the local antagonists to
fight it out. The ensuing six-year war resulted in
25-30,000
deaths, about a million displaced persons, and with the Armenians in
control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven additional adjoining
sub-regions
- in total, nearly 20 percent of young Azerbaijan's territory.
Both sides engaged in atrocities, particularly mass expulsions and
ethnic cleansing. Large-scale combat stopped in 1994 with a
Russian-brokered ceasefire, but neither side accepted the status quo
and international settlement efforts like the tri-chaired - Russia,
America, and France - Minsk Group barely moved the needle.
Nevertheless, despite semi-regular - but usually short - violent
outbursts, the Russian-orchestrated truce basically held for 22 years.
It's not that any permanent resolution was forthcoming, but the
absence of
Nagorno-Karabakh?
So what changed by 2016 - when in the "Four-Day War" Azerbaijan
recaptured small parcels of territory and at least 200 people were
killed - and especially during the run-up to the current combat in
Well, three key things, actually. Specifically, the machinations ofdeniers.
three "mad men."
Mad Man #1: An emboldened Aliyev's opportunistic blitzkrieg.
First, Baku's strategic calculus: the reality, and Azerbaijani
perception, of a growing power and military mismatch with weaker
Armenia. That plus Aliyev's not incorrect sense that the lingering
status quo would ultimately favor its enemy. In international affairs
too, it seems possession is often nine-tenths of the law, and the
facts-on-the-ground benefit Armenia's de facto occupation of
Nagorno-Karabakh and seven other Azeri-majority districts it won in
battle during the 1988-94 war. Time isn't on Aliyev's side,
diplomatically, so he decided on a game changer. Say what you want
about this scion of Azerbaijan's mini-Stalinist autocratic dynasty,
but - like his daddy Heydar - Ilkham Aliyev sure (thinks he) can read
a regional room.
There's always been an implicit - if initially unrealized - potential
power gap between these two small countries fighting for a Caucasus
sliver the size of Rhode Island. It begins with raw population
numbers: 9.9 million Azeris versus 2.9 million Armenians, or almost a
3.5-to-one ratio. Their respective military arsenals are also
increasingly mismatched.
Azerbaijan's
defense expenditures now hover between $2 to $3.5 billion annually -
in 2014, for example, it spent $3.43 on its military, compared to
just
$458 million by Armenia, about 7.5-to-one. Baku also imported 20
times more arms than Armenia from 2012-16.
In the interest (initially) of shaving off some of Baku's Caspian
energy supplies, and (then) contain arch-rival Iran to its south,
Washington has disproportionately upped its security-sector
investments to favor Azerbaijan. Most recently, Trump's taken the gap
to obscene levels, bolstering Baku's aid from about $3 million in
2016-17 to some $100 million in 2018-19. Armenia, on the other hand,
received just $4.2 million in US security assistance in 2018 - or
about a 25-to-one ratio. In other words, official Washington can
protest its NK-neutrality to the high heavens but - unlike Russia's
relatively balanced arms bonanza with both - America arms one side to
the teeth at the expense of the other, then feigns ignorance and
shock when its favored party puts all that "Made in the U.S.A." gear
to good use.
As a not irrelevant side note: there's also a corruption gap between
the two antagonists. While neither is a particularly free or open
society, the current Transparency International Index ranks Armenia
as 77th out of 198, and America's vaguely favored friend Azerbaijan
at 126th on the same list.
In another odd twist, Shia Muslim Azerbaijan (along with Iran and
Bahrain, one of the few majority-Shiite nation-states) has long
consorted, conspired, and traded arms with Israel - not a bad big
brother to have in a fight. In the last few battles, the Azeris have
even slammed Israeli-supplied suicide kamikaze drones into Armenian
positions. Overall, Baku is the third-largest purchaser of Israeli
arms, buying a cool $137 million's worth in 2017 alone.
Furthermore, Aliyev's aggression may be geared for domestic edification.
Amidst the economic turmoil of waning energy prices and popular
frustration with his dynastic corruption, he's whipped up nationalist
revanchism - a move right out of the strongman's playbook. Look back
to the language. On Sunday, Aliyev called "settlement" of the
NK-conflict "our historic duty,"
so that "the Azerbaijani people are satisfied." He is no doubt partly
responding to the thousands of angry Azeri citizens who poured into
Baku's streets in July, demanding the government mobilize the army
wage war on Armenia. Azeri police had to arrest several protesters to
tamp down this popular outburst.
In fact, though both sides profess obligatory innocence, Azerbaijan
probably started the current combat. It's no accident that a
researcher at Germany's Bremen University said of the recent Azeri
offensive: "This is a blitzkrieg, of course." Also, given the order
of battle, weapons employed, and intensity of the assault, it appears
Baku has likely planned the attack for years.
For
example, it bears noting that Baku threatened to target Armenia's
nuclear power plant back in July.
Of course, even beset with internal insecurity, economic instability,
and not-easily bottled popular jingoism, Khan Aliyev II might not
have gone into full conqueror-mode without the presumed - and/or
actual - promise of more Turkish support than usual. Enter President
[now nearly for-life] Recep Tayip Erdogan, head of NATO's
second-largest army and perhaps the most madcap meddler of all.
Mad Man #2: Sultan Erdogan and NATO fracture.
Another favored regional (among Ankara's enemies) and Western media
trope these days is Erdogan's neo-Ottoman angle - the idea that the
strongman seeks a rebirth of the old empire: to make Turkey great
again! TAGA, anyone?
Some of this is overblown - confusing capacity with aspiration.
Still, there's something to Erdogan's delusions of grandeur. Turkish
troops invaded and persistently patrol northern Syria, and it both
bombs and deploys its private mercenary army in Libya. Erdogan's
ambition outruns his actual capabilities or strategic competence, but
his authoritarian hyper-nationalist chauvinism ensures that it is a
different sort of Turkey approaching Nagorno-Karabakh's latest
outbreak. Ankara under this sultan has demonstrably drifted away from
NATO Europe, and towards the Greater Levant and Central Asia. This
doesn't bode well for a South Caucasus conflict.
Thus, according to a senior analyst at the International Crisis
Group, "Turkey is definitely a wild card in any escalation."
Some of Ankara's bias is perhaps natural: Azeris are ethically and
linguistically Turkic. They share common cultures and historical
memories of nomadic steppe-horsemen greatness. Yet the ties of blood
and native tongues only go so far. Though halting and regionally
uneven, Turkey's Russia rapprochement has also been real. Though
Ankara and Moscow do, in fact, back opposing sides in the Libyan and
Syrian civil wars, they've also maintained trade ties, cut natural
gas deals and Turkey even angered the US by buying Russian
antiaircraft missiles.
Though Baku denies it, Armenian foreign ministry spokesmen have
claimed Turkish "military experts" - and perhaps even Ankara-paid
Syrian mercenaries
- are fighting alongside Azerbaijani troops this time around. On
Tuesday, Armenia alleged that a Turkish fighter jet shot down one of
its planes, killing the pilot - though Ankara denied it. So far, much
of that may be a stretch but it's hardly outside the realm of
possibility. After all, this year Turkey shipped 5,000 such Syrian
soldiers of fortune to turn the Libyan tide in favor of its favored
faction in that civil war (incidentally, Russian hired guns from the
Wagner Group fight on the other side). While an overt Turkish
military intervention, or attack on its eastern Armenian neighbor,
still seems unlikely, Ankara is more liable than ever to escalate and
catalyze conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Again, look too to Erdogan's language - which disturbingly tracks the
Azeri line. Early this week, he spoke of Armenia's "occupation" of
NK, and said it was time for the dispute "to be put to an end." Talk
of final solutions to frozen conflicts rarely end well.
In case any further proof was needed that a utility-diminishing NATO
has all but reached its breaking point, on Wednesday, French
President Emmanuel Macron blamed Erdogan's "warlike" rhetoric for
removing "Azerbaijan's inhibitions in reconquering Nagorno-Karabakh."
These two ostensible NATO brethren have traded insults - after their
navies nearly came to blows off Libya's coast this July - calling
each other, and perhaps the whole Atlantic Alliance "brain-dead."
Both may be right.
Then there's the minor matter that in backing Turkey - in NK
especially - America sides with a government full of official
genocide
Remember,
part of the reason for all those fraught ties between Ankara and
Yerevan is that the Turks still won't fess up to displacing,
starving, and killing a million odd Armenians during the First World
War. It's a deeply held non-culpability delusion: in 2016, a Turkish
exchange officer in a strategy class at Fort Leavenworth nearly tore
my head off when I politely nudged him on the subject. (Incidentally,
he soon left the course and sought asylum in the US after Erdogan
stymied a suspicious coup-attempt that July - fearing himself among
the many military personas non grata in its wake.)
Mad Man #3: The boys in Washington and their imaginary
Russian-monster friend.
Finally, the world family's crazy curmudgeonly Uncle, Sam, is more of
a wildcard than at any time in three plus decades of NK-strife.
Washington styles itself the foremost "honest broker" for global
conflicts; but it's almost never that. Ever heard of Palestine?
However, as Nagorno-Karabakh has shown, even the most tangential and
distant discord belies America's professed straight-dealing. Ole Sam
hasn't met a far-flung fracas in which he won't take sides, seek
personal benefit, accelerate, and counterproductively catalyze, for
quite some time now. And if Washington catches a whiff of Russia?
Well, then it's game on.
The US has long had its vulturous eyes on the region, especially
after the Soviet Union's final collapse in 1991. It still does - more
so maybe. As a student at the Army's Command and General Staff
College
(CGSC) in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on
planning fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the
South Caucasus region. As I recall, our recurring scenario involved
defending Azerbaijan (and, incidentally, its pipelines and Caspian
Basin energy sources) from a northbound attack from a breakaway
statelet of ethnic-Azeri Iranians. We planned, practiced, and
simulated offloading troops, tanks, and supplies at Georgia's Black
Sea ports, through its capital Tbilisi - bypassing Russian and
Armenian territory, and staying clear of the Nagorno-Karabakh
third-rail, naturally - into the frontlines in southern Azerbaijan.
Come to think of it, in the war-game, US forces traced a rather
reverse route of the corporate-crafted BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan,
Turkey) pipeline.must've been a coincidence.
To be fair, my own joint strategy instructor was a thoughtful,
sensible guy who eschewed the mission's potential for grandiosity -
always questioning our ambitions, challenging assumptions, and
emphasizing regional tensions and limitations. In fact, he was the
person who first truly peaked my interest on Nagorno-Karabakh. That
said, to my knowledge, he didn't choose the scenario - and the fact
that similar war-games infused the military world for a couple of
decades speaks to the thinking in Washington. And while Armenia
stayed tangential to the CGSC training, it was quite clear that
Azerbaijan was the protected protagonist - invaded by putatively
Iranian factions (and, of course, the Russian menace was always in the
Baku.
All of which reflects an increasingly (if inconsistently)
Azeri-friendly US posture since the late 1990s. Despite the real, but
oft-inflated influence of the Armenian-American Lobby - consider it
the Kardashian Factor (Kim has been weighing-in with a series of
tweets) - the Washington winds have been blowing Baku's way for quite
a while. As Antiwar.com's own, the late Justin Raimondo - a rare
NK-watcher - explained during the first major post-truce explosion in
2016, US policy in the South Caucasus is driven by two main
motives: energy and encirclement [of Russia].
The view from Moscow - and frankly from objective outer space - is clear:
since the late 1990s, the US has geographically (through overt NATO
eastward-expansion) and diplomatically (by denying any legitimacy to
Russia's sphere, or say, in regional affairs) caged-in the Bear.
Washington
would've gone far further if its (at a minimum) encouraged "color
revolutions" along Russia's borders - "Rose:" Georgia, 2003; "Orange:"
Ukraine, 2004; "Denim" and "Tulip:" Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, 2005)
hadn't fallen flat, and that pesky Putin hadn't used force in 2008 to
keep a rather aggressive little Georgia from joining NATO. It's only
gotten worse since then, as the entire bipartisan Washington
establishment has donned facts-resistant Russia-alarm goggles,
particularly since Donald Trump's election. Pundits and politicians
alike now view every global conflict through these Moscow-facing lens.
Then there's the money to follow. While its markets, sources, and the
US supply-situation have since diminished certain energy-urgency,
Washington seems stuck in the oil-is-everything past. It was that
calculus which, in the late 1990s, helped push America towards
Azeri-amenable positions in the Caucasus. The key was that BTC
pipeline and the announcement by Papa Aliyev of "the Contract of the
Century" - apparently strongmen speak similar slangs. That centennial
deal amounted to an agreement with a consortium of oil companies -
Amoco, Pennzoil, British Petroleum, Unocal, McDermott, Statoil,
Lukoil, and the state-owned Turkish and Saudi enterprises, which
granted them exclusive rights to Azerbaijan's oil and gas reserves.
Adding insult to injury, it's another "inconvenient truth" of his
career that in 1997, now environmentalist-guru and then vice
president Al Gore presided over the White House signing ceremony of
four additional Caspian Sea contracts between Aliyev-senior and US
oil giants Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, and Amoco (which merged with
British Petroleum-BP a year later). The deals were reportedly worth
some $8 billion. As it relates to NK, there's one salient fact to
keep in
mind: Armenia has no oil reserves to speak of. But I'm sure that
nasty corporate cash would never sway the evenhandedness of honest
Abe's successors in Washington.
Only wait for it: the 2016 burst of NK-combat - what Raimondo dubbed
"The April Fool's War" - was launched by Azerbaijan just as
Aliyev-the-Younger was flying back from Washington. In that meeting,
Secretary of State John Kerry used suspiciously Azeri-inflected
language, calling for "an ultimate resolution" to the decades-old
conflict. Kerry's (maybe) unwittingly incendiary phrasing was absurd,
Justin wrote, "because the 'crisis' has already been resolved" -
meaning the facts on the ground support a de facto independent
Nagorno-Karabakh that accords with self-determination, as well as the
world as it is.
No doubt, there are serious outstanding issues and Baku has real
grievances:
the expelled NK-Azeris have a right to return and the seven
additional Azeri-majority occupied districts should be handed back to
bloc).Nevertheless, by pretending that there's a solution that involvesgame-changing conquest.
peaceful reintegration of Armenian super-majority Nagorno-Karabakh
into Azerbaijan, the US all but green-lights Baku's resort to
2001 attacks.
The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson
At root, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict - and US perceptions of it -
comes down to the seemingly incompatible tension between two
geopolitical and international legal principles: [Armenian]
self-determination and [Azerbaijani] territorial sovereignty. So far,
all attempts to square that circle - in Moscow, Brussels, and various
international bodies - have failed. Washington, though, has barely
tried - especially since the energy-crazy late-1990s and the
September 11,
Funny, isn't it, how inconsistently various American administrations
have applied the self-determination principle pronounced by President
Woodrow Wilson in January 1918? Not that Wilson evenly applied his
own policy either (Just ask anti-imperialists like Mao or Ho Chi Minh
how they faredat the Versailles Peace Conference). In fact, from the
first, contradictory commitment to popular sovereignty was an
American
trademark: you can talk to a Kurd, or a Palestinian, or some
Kashmiris about that. Furthermore, since the fall of the USSR, the US
and a compliant West treat the synthetic post-Soviet state borders -
Justin called Azerbaijan a "Soviet fiction, created by Stalin," back
in 1999
- as inerrant gospel only when its suits them.
Take just a few examples: Kosovar Albanians - possessed with
remarkably similar arguments as the NK-Armenians, by the way -
apparently deserved to carve an independent state out of Serbia. In
fact, the US Air Force went to war on behalf of the rather checkered
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the late Clinton-era. Yet,
Russian-friendly Abkhazian or South Ossetian minorities - who want
out of post-Soviet Georgia - or even locals voting for autonomy or
outside-accession in Nagorno Karabakh (1991) or Crimea (2014)?
Nah, Uncle Sam says they have no inherent right to self-determine or
choose which state they live in. Their borders are inalterable, see.
To Washingtonians, the degree of popular sovereignty rights all
depends which way the people in question are perceived to lean - East
or West, so to speak. Even inconsistency can be consistent.
Still, Russia doesn't deserve most of the rancor it receives
regarding Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite having a military base in Armenia
and the country being a signatory to the Russian-led NATO-facsimile
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Moscow isn't terribly
close to Yerevan on this issue. While some claim "Armenia has become
a pawn in the Kremlin's geopolitical games," because Russia convinced
Armenia to scuttle an association agreement with the European Union
(and instead join the Eurasian Economic Union, a Moscow-led free-trade
Predictably, few Westerners bother ask why Armenia should be tied to
the EU - it's not even located in Europe.
Besides, the lukewarm relationship is reciprocated. Indeed, Russia's
responsible hedging behavior during the NK conflicts has, according
to the director of a think tank in Yerevan, engendered "a justified
Armenian perception of questionable and unreliable backing from
Russia in the event the current fighting expands." That's
understandable, given that the spokesman for the supposedly
neo-imperial-obsessed Kremlin said Monday that "[they] are not
talking now about military options."
Still, make no mistake: on its merits, Nagorno-Karabakh has not - and
need not - be a classic proxy war. This isn't Libya or Syria - though
Turkish, and/or American interventions could help make it so.
For their part, America's favorite bad boys - Russia and Iran - have
generally shown remarkable restraint in Nagorno-Karabakh, past and
present.
The former has quickly called on both sides to "immediately halt fire
and begin talks to stabilize the situation." One might assume the
latter would back its co-religionist Shia Muslims in Azerbaijan; or
conversely, that Iran
- pushed ever closer to Moscow by U.S. enmity - would tack towards
Russia's treaty-allied Armenians. Yet Tehran has rarely come down
strongly on either side.
Few observers, even among the more aggressive Iran hawks, realize
that the Islamic Republic is hardly a homogenous state. Perhaps 20
percent of its people are ethnically Azeri; which at 10-15 million
souls is greater than the total population of Azerbaijan. Yet, lest
one assume that instantly translates into support for Baku, in fact
Persian-dominated Tehran tends to fear its occasionally restive Azeri
minority and resents its northern neighbor's amenability to Israeli
encirclement of their embattled Islamic Republic. Furthermore, Iran -
like Armenia and (mostly) Russia - was notably excluded from the
U.S.-organized Azeri oil consortium.
That doesn't mean Tehran necessarily pivots to Christian Armenia
either; rather, that its response to the latest fighting has
basically been balanced and circumspect. During the smaller July
outbreak of violence, one of its senior diplomats said only that
"Iran supports a peaceful solution," - that while "we support the
territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.we are interested in resolving
the issue through dialogue in favor of Azerbaijan.when it comes to
war and military conflict, we do not agree at all with this subject
and prefer to maintain the status quo."
Hardly words commensurate with the "Mad Mullahs" of American
imaginations.
Meanwhile, on Monday, that supposed Moscow-mule of an American
president, Donald J. Trump, simply said of the current NK-outbreak,
"We're looking at it very strongly.We'll see if we can stop it."
Trump is hardly a geostrategic whiz - one doubts he'd ever heard tell
of Nagorno-Karabakh. Still, like it (or him) or not, in this case his
perfunctory, and somewhat dismissive, realism inadvertently reflects
what's what. Sad indeed, that it takes a foreign policy sub-neophyte
like The Donald to put his finger on what's at stake and what's not
for the US in NK; to denote the limits of American power, interests,
and investment in this Caucasus backwater. But it is what it is.
In Nagorno-Karabakh, count me highly Hippocratic: "primum non
nocere"."first, do no harm."
