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Following the August events in the Caucasus, the entire Western system of strategic alliances, comprising not only NATO, but also an array of other structures - at first glance, not at all military - has finally acquired a new "raison d'étre." That "raison d'étre" manifested itself in an old - centuries, not years old - formula, namely, search for an enemy in Russia (no matter whether it is the USSR or Russia today). It has turned out that the genes of animosity toward Russia are still part of the DNA of many Western politicians.
The world that we live in today is, in its pure, refined form, a product of total domination by one superpower - the United States of America, which has relied in its policy on support from a number of key Western European states, as well as Japan. However, it should be noted in fairness that the US partners have always been playing a secondary role, only assisting Washington, providing a kind of retinue for the sovereign, as it were.
If this is not a unipolar world - to which Russia has always objected (true, being unable to provide any realistic alternative to it) - what is a unipolar world then? The Americans, figuratively speaking, were molding the world in their own image and likeness, and were very surprised when their "values" did not thrill everyone. To bring those slow on the uptake to their senses, there were always convincing arguments from the old arsenal of "gunboat diplomacy," which, it should be noted, was always close at hand, not locked up in the basement.
Let's face it: The United States had quite a few admirers in the world, primarily in Eastern Europe, who saw it as a state of common prosperity from a fairy tale, a source of only good and bright things for the world and, needless to say, for its admirers. The Americans like their admirers, both as entire countries and as individuals. They forgive individual admirers not only their misconduct but even their crimes. For example, in the good old days, when the infamous dictator Somosa Sr. was "playing pranks" in Nicaragua, while the Americans only frowned when their darling went a little too far, wagging their paternal finger at him. "He may be a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch," the avowed advocates of democracy would say as they moved in the US corridors of power.
Returning to our era, let us ask this question: Is a man whose first name is Misha [diminutive of Mikhail] and whose family name is Saakashvili any worse than his Latin American analog half a century ago? The United States will protect and save him, and it will obstruct justice. Even if he has several thousand human lives - mainly women, old people and children - on his conscience.

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As far as the United States is concerned, it seems that, from its perspective, the world has not changed at all over the past half century. There are "friends," who can do anything they like, and there are "foes," who can do nothing. Like before, the life of the last mentioned costs nothing. How is the Vietnamese village of My Lai different from South Ossetia's Tskhinval? Only in that in the first case the atrocities were perpetrated by Americans whereas in the second, by their diligent Georgian students. That is the only difference. However, in both cases, members of the punitive expedition were certainly "right." How could it have been otherwise if that was the only way of bringing their message home?
The Western reaction to everything that happened in the Caucasus (starting from the tragic night of August 7-8, 2008) has produced not so much a shock, indignation or outrage in Russia (which would have been quite natural), as surprise and disappointment. Deep disappointment. Disappointment at the blatant injustice of the Western reaction to the said events, literally in every respect. But most importantly, in the striving to distort the nature of what happened and put the entire blame on Russia - that is to say, the side that prevented an all-out ethnic cleansing of the South Ossetians and then the Abkhazians, with a death toll that could have easily run into tens of thousands and a cleansing that would have resulted in the expulsion of these people from their historical settlement areas. The average Westerner was able to see on his TV screen some mythical destruction of civilian facilities in Georgia, the endlessly repeated footage of Georgian old women crying and the faces of Russian military servicemen, distorted with hate - portrayed as some modern barbarians who had intruded into a peaceful neighboring democracy. Yet for some reason the average Westerner was denied an opportunity to see the real ruins of Tskhinval and learn the truth about the real tragedy of the average peaceful Ossetians who had within minutes lost their kith and kin, their homes and personal property.
In this context, a perfectly legitimate question arises: Why was public opinion in the West - renowned for its centuries-old democratic traditions and constantly stressing the right of each citizen to know the truth about what is happening - offered a deliberate, abominable lie? In other words, Western public opinion was consciously, deliberately misled, which is, in principle, a serious crime - in accordance with the spirit and letter of absolutely all constitutions of the Western democracies. After all is said and done, the South Ossetian conflict has already gone down into modern history as a model of deception in Western democratic society, perpetrated in accordance with some time serving political goals. Western democratic society has become a target of manipulation in the information realm, organized with the participation of both state institutions in a number of leading Western countries and Western media, which have always paraded their independence and objectivity.
On the one hand, it was outrageous, but on the other, simply ridiculous to see Saakashvili - standing on a green patch (exactly like the lawn at the White House in Washington), surrounded by yet another from an endless series of Western delegations that had taken to visiting Tbilisi after the failure of the Georgian blitzkrieg in August - tell brazen lies, distorting beyond recognition the real picture of events in South Ossetia. And none of the Western visitors (including Sarkozy, Barroso and Solana, not to mention a variety of US political figures) has ever checked him. Not even for the sake of propriety. Has the West really made use of some dubious experience from the past - i.e., the bigger a lie, the easier it is accepted by society?
At first glance, the belated admission made by Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican Representative, at a congressional hearing a month after the Georgian aggression looked rather incongruous. He said: "The recent fighting in Georgia and its breakaway region was started by Georgia. The Georgians broke the truce, not the Russians!" Now, did the US Congressmen have any doubts about that? And if they really did (still have them?), this only confirmed the grand deception of the public, even including representatives of US government structures, over the recent crisis in the Caucasus. Highly indicative in this respect is a passage from Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's interview with ABC News, who slammed Russia for "invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked." Now it turns out that a person laying claim to the No. 2 position in the US hierarchy of power does not have reliable information about what is really happening in the Caucasus. The high point of Mrs. Palin's interview, however, was her suggestion that if Georgia was a NATO member and attacked again in the future, the United States would be bound to go to war with Russia. In other words, a big lie can provoke a big war - World War III, in the worst case scenario.
The deliberate misleading of the public has over the past few years become the hallmark of the Western elites closely connected with the intelligence services. Consider the massive "conditioning" of Western public opinion during the Balkan crisis, when the United States "appointed" those guilty for everything - for starting the war, committing war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and so on. Not surprisingly, the guilty party was mainly - the Serbs. Such a policy led to the NATO air strikes against the SFRY in 1999 (which killed hundreds of people, mostly civilians), which were enthusiastically backed by Western public opinion.
Or consider the grand scam when the US submitted to the UN Security Council allegedly reliable data from its intelligence services, showing that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had continued its secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction. An endless stream of "evidence" was produced to lend credence to the allegations - from the test tubes with some substance to the US satellite photos of some mythical mobile laboratories on Iraqi roads. In short, the authors of James Bond series come nowhere near. And what is the outcome? The outcome is a new war, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (needless to say, mainly peaceful Iraqis, although the Americans have been less protected in this case than during Operation Desert Storm).
Nor should one forget about such a thing as the gentlemanly pledges by the West - primarily, of course, by the Americans - not to expand the North Atlantic alliance in exchange for the Soviet Union's consent to the German reunification. The pledges that after the German reunification, the former GDR territory would not be included into the NATO zone and no Bundeswehr forces would be deployed there sound like a historical curiosity today. But the West was even ready for that. There was no question about the bloc's eastward enlargement.
Where is NATO now? What countries are the main candidate members? Everyone knows the answer. Naturally, our Western partners could argue that the verbal promises were made to the leaders of a now defunct country. However, in that case, it is all the more incomprehensible why the alliance has sought, with an almost maniacal obsession, to approach the Russian borders, if as the West said, it regarded Moscow as a strategic ally, not as an adversary. Hardly any serious observer will have any doubts that, by taking advantage of Russia's weakness, the West simply tried to lay a strategic groundwork for the future, and, it must be said, has considerably succeeded in that respect. Except that the question remains: Why? The Western excuses, to the effect that no one can deny young democracies the right to join NATO, if they want to, are not convincing enough. Is the West really continuing to prepare a bridgehead for a military scenario?
Going back to the Caucasus, it should be noted that, as is evident from this brief overview, M. Saakashvili's pathological dishonesty was not created out of thin air nor is it the sole product of his personal characteristics. Although, needless to say, they should not be underestimated. The Georgian caudillo, being an extremely diligent pupil, quickly learned the lessons taught by his Western mentors with regard to deceiving both his own and international public. He has been lying ever since he seized power in Tbilisi like a real revolutionary, and it turns out that ever since then there has been strong demand for his lies in the West because they are easily swallowed by public opinion, brainwashed for a negative perception of Russia. The only trouble is that Russia has no intention whatsoever to play such games. And it is high time the West understood that. Furthermore, the earlier it does, the better it will be for everyone, including itself.
The South Ossetian crisis and the subsequent developments highlighted, like never before, the problem of information security - information security in its main, fundamental sense, i.e., the people's right to receive reliable, truthful data, not some sort of surrogate that someone has hampered with - one where the truth and lies are mixed to such a degree that not even a professional politician, let alone an average person, can separate one from the other. Unless this question is asked point blank today, tomorrow the world may end up on the verge of a global military confrontation without even noticing it. As a matter of fact, manipulation of mass consciousness on the information level has long been practiced by the West. But it is especially disturbing that brazen lies (in the literal sense: "don't believe your eyes") is being increasingly and cynically used to justify aggression and the killing of thousands of peaceful civilians, as was the case in South Ossetia. This evokes an analogy with Nazi Germany and the way it started World War II: German commandos wearing Polish uniforms attacked a German army unit, which served as a formal cause for starting the carnage on a global level.
It is deplorable that at the start of the 21st century, the democratic West and its clients have resorted to the worst, meanest elements of politics and diplomacy inherited from the past - from an era when such notions as morality, virtue, and honor were in rather short supply. Little lies are a prelude to big lies. This is an axiom.
I suppose that taking into account the negative experience of the past several years, the issue of information security and the right of the individual and entire nations to reliable, not biased, distorted information needs serious consideration on the international level, including at European institutions and the UN, in particular, its General Assembly. In any event, deliberate manipulation of public consciousness must not be allowed to be used in the interest of certain countries and forces to justify and cover up aggressive actions.
The question about the West's real goals - not only in the Caucasus, but also with regard to Russia - is of crucial importance. It is quite obvious that the West as a whole has been actively involved in ensuring that the younger generation in such countries as Georgia, Poland, the Baltic States and partly Ukraine be raised as friendly to them but hostile toward Russia. That happened at a time when the Soviet Union fell apart and it was customarily believed that relations of strategic partnership existed between Russia and the West including the US. An anti-Russian potential has been created, which - taking into account the possibility of these people entering big politics - will continue to wreak destruction for decades yet. As for how the current anti-Russian, completely pro-Western political trend works in the aforementioned countries, as well as in other countries, during a crisis period, there has been ample evidence of that over the past several months - permeated with the "Caucasus spirit." It is naïve to think that Moscow - both on the official level and on the level of the average citizen - has failed to notice that or draw the appropriate conclusions. As a matter of fact, the West has been setting up "cordons sanitaires" around the Russian state, essentially, throughout its long history. What we are seeing today is a new edition of that old model.
At the same time, the West, primarily Washington, must bear in mind that its policy of double standards, hypocrisy, cynicism, half-truths or even downright lies in international relations, as well as its inappropriate and sometimes even plainly hostile treatment of Russia, has already had consequences that are unlikely to please it. A new generation has also been raised in Russia that has its own specific attitude toward the West. Little if anything has remained from the euphoria about the Western standards and lifestyle that was characteristic of the era of perestroika and democratization in Russia. Both the United States and Europe (true, to a lesser degree) have become subjects of irony rather than models to emulate. For example, in the perception of young Russians (at any rate, a significant part of young Russians), the average American is generally associated with a conceited, narrow minded, poorly educated individual obsessed with hamburgers, who is ready, with fire and sword - without thinking about the consequences - to impose the American lifestyle wherever his government tells him to. Actually, anything can be expected from that country.
Was it this kind of scenario that the "architects" of the new world order were counting on in the second half of the 1980s, when the Soviet Union and the United States, and with them entire Europe, set the course toward a fundamental normalization of the international situation? How attractive, how fascinating the contours of a new, open world, built on the sound foundation of mutual trust, appeared at the time! However, when - following the disintegration of the USSR and the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact - they gained a significant military-political advantage, the United States and the rest of the West deviated from the optimal, multi-polar and multi-vector model of international development, giving priority to a unipolar world order. And - as it has become obvious now - they made a big strategic mistake. A unipolar world order, based on the complete military-political and economic domination by one center of force in the world, is unable to ensure durable stability in international relations and is, therefore, doomed.
Over the past 20 years, the United States, which lays claim to the role of a global regulator (or policeman, to put it more bluntly), has become involved in several wars - waging some of them simultaneously. Before pulling out of one war, it becomes involved in a second, third, and so on and so on. If its success on the battle field was more impressive, I do not think anyone would have any doubts that today there would be another couple wars with direct US participation. There is no need to speak about all possible conflicts in which the Americans are involved. They number in the dozens.
All of this is the result of a unipolar world, American-style - a world that they are trying to govern from just one place. One does not have to be a Delphian oracle to predict that sooner or later the sum total of local conflicts with US participation will grow into one big conflict with consequences that would be really hard to predict.
The conflict around South Ossetia has perforce highlighted a number of fundamental issues that require in-depth analysis and urgent action. The world can no longer remain in a state of instability, when the reckless action by one insignificant person from an insignificant state can put the entire planet on the verge of disaster. It is not Georgia, which is attempting to draw attention to itself through provocations, but Russia, the United States, China, Western Europe, India, and Japan that bear the global responsibility for survival and progress on our planet. Stable relations between them, based on mutual trust and respect for the legitimate interests of all partners, will ultimately benefit mankind as a whole.