The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union

It could only have been written by a Canadian! No mainstream Brit or American journalist would hold up the dirty underwear of the East European "democratic transition" in broad daylight - if only because so many of the stains orginated in London and Washington. Mark MacKinnon has done an excellent investigative job in portraying the packaged "democracy" of the color-coded pseudo-revolutions that swept through the former Soviet bloc (and, later, targeted other sites from Lebanon to Venezuela) within the last decade: how they were spawned in "think tanks" funded by Western governments, and their agendas formulated to serve strategic Western agendas. Ironically, MacKinnon sees no difference between this subsidized subversion and the Putin-style "managed democracies" they target. And of course he's right. Promoting "democratic revolution" has become the surrogate for direct armed invasion - though, as in Iraq, both can work well together. The strategies these ersatz movements pursue are no different from Communist Popular Front tactics in the same region after World War Two - in fact, the Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" resembles nothing so much as the Czechoslovak "Communist coup" of 1948: a great betrayal of democracy when committed by Them, a flowering of the democratic spirit when choreographed by Us. Of course there is real frustration and disappointment in the targeted nations, and the revolutionaries of color can find fertile fields for sowing. But the end result does not serve the people whose anger has been manipulated, but invariably the economic and "security" interests of major Western powers, principally but not exclusively the United States. The danger of raising false hopes in these client regimes has been all too plainly illustrated in the case of Georgia, whose US-installed president launched an armed quarrel with Russia banking on the broad American support he'd grown used to, hoping to force his country's inclusion into NATO. When the US didn't "come through" pro-US feeling quickly turned sour, the disillusioned backlash inevitable after starry-eyed adolescent puppy-love meets the real world. Beyond doubt more such knee-jerk little wars and subsequent bad feeling await other "successful" color-coded regimes described in MacKinnon's book.