Fighting has erupted between Russia and Georgia over the region of South Ossetia. For a brief background see here. For a report on what is happening, see here.
From the NYTimes piece is an example of why the situation is not merely as local matter:
Russian officials said that strong ties to the United States had emboldened Mr. Saakashvili, who wants to make Georgia part of NATO, into sparking the conflict by trying seize back South Ossetia. But there were signs that Mr. Saakashvili was feeling the limits of how much American help he could expect after signing up as an ally in Iraq.
Pentagon officials said late on Friday that the Georgian government had officially requested assistance in airlifting home the approximately 2,000 Georgian troops now in Iraq. The request was under review, and standard procedures would indicate that the United States government would honor the request, officials said.
Chris Floyd on the matter - and follow the links. including those in the Comments.
From Pravda. This is provided as an example of how the Russians will be seeing things.
The above material is a starter to prepare people for what could be a dangerous situation for more than the Ossetians. There might well be a much larger and more dangerous game in motion.
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G'day Phil, more material starting with two more installments from Chris Floyd - here and here.
We have seen examples of the Crawford Caligula's lack of a sense of irony in this matter - his "sovereign state" comment weas a classic - and his VEEP has followed suit.
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney says Russia's military actions in Georgia "must not go unanswered."
Cheney spoke Sunday afternoon with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. "The vice president expressed the United States' solidarity with the Georgian people and their democratically elected government in the face of this threat to Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Cheney's press secretary, Lee Ann McBride, said.
Cheney told Saakashvili "Russian aggression must not go unanswered, and that its continuation would have serious consequences for its relations with the United States, as well as the broader international community," McBride said.
Chris Floyd has some views on a certain clique (2nd of the above links):
As noted here the other day, I don't think the current crisis in Georgia will spiral into any kind of military confrontation between Russia and the United States. The U.S. government has a long history of egging on other people to slap at Washington's enemies -- then abandoning them when the inevitable slapback occurs. George Bush I's incitement of a Shiite uprising in Iraq in 1991 and his subsquent collusion with Saddam in crushing the rebellion is a prime example. As I said earlier, the American elite's armchair militarists -- like Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney, and George W. "I Quit" Bush -- prefer to slaughter defenseless people in broken-down states, not take on nations with powerful modern militaries.
Then again, there is a long, strong lunatic strain running through the American militarist establishment, a cultish faction that has always longed to unleash "the Big One" on the Russkies or the gooks or the Ay-rabs or somebody out there. The Cheney faction in particular is riddled with adherents of this cult, who, like their leader, measure their manhood by the throw-weight of America's nuclear missiles. Thus every flashpoint on the international scene -- which inevitably involves "American interests," because the American Empire has extended its military and monetary reach into every nook and cranny of the world -- carries with it a disproportionate danger of escalation into annihilation. In almost every case, this threat is extremely low; but it is always there, like background radiation, or perhaps a dormant fever, and must be considered. Especially considering the moral idiots in charge of the "great" powers of our day.
More coverage and more words.
More follies.
MOSCOW - One word explains why the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union have obliged themselves to sit on their hands, while Russia's defends its citizens, and national interests, in the Caucasus, and liberates Georgians from the folly of their unpopular president, Mikheil Saakashvili. That word is Kosovo.
Russia sent troops into the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia to take on Georgian troops that had advanced into the territory. Four days of heavy fighting have seen thousands of casualties and the Georgian forces withdrawing. Russian troops were reported on Monday to be continuing fighting in parts of Georgia, including around the capital Tbilisi.
Eight hundred years of Caucasian history explain why Saakashvili has brought such destruction and ignominy on his countrymen over the past few days. Queen Tamar, the greatest of the Georgian sovereigns (1184-1213), is responsible for the habit Georgian rulers have displayed for the past millennium of treating neighboring Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ossetia and the Black Sea coast of Turkey as protectorates. But as Tamar also taught her countrymen, Georgian ambition always runs out of gas when the neighbors prove to be just as ambitious, richer or tougher.
The number 300 explains what tougher means - that's the count of Russian artillery pieces that have been deployed to South Ossetia alone, once Saakashvili dispatched his United States and Israel-trained troops into action at Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. That push, according to Russian military thinking, was not intended to hold Tskhinvali for Georgia, but to destroy it, and withdraw swiftly back into Georgia - ending the South Ossetian secession by liquidating its people.
With a little help from his friends?
In an effort to prod the West to Tbilisi's side in its rapidly escalating armed conflict with Russia, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is invoking the ghosts of Cold War battles past - Moscow's suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in 1979.
The Georgian leader's strategy is clear. Tbilisi's small army is no match for the Russian military machine. Saakashvili's only chance of success in his bid to regain control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, therefore, is to globalize the conflict and turn it into a central front of a new struggle between Moscow and the West.
"What Russia has been doing against Georgia for the last two days represents an open aggression, unprecedented in modern times," Saakashvili said in a televised address on August 8. "It is a direct challenge for the whole world. If Russia is not stopped today by the whole world, tomorrow Russian tanks might reach any European capital. I think everyone has understood this by now.
" ... unprecedented in modern times". Perhaps he defines "modern" as beginning last week. Seems to have a very short term memory.
F William Engdahl on risks through miscalculation.
Paul Craig Roberts - "From Stupid to Moronic to Evil."
The inmates are running the asylum - the criminally insane inmates, that is.
G'day Phil, first Chris Floyd on the matter of hypocrisy ...
Quite a spectacle in the White House Rose Garden today: George "Butt-Thumper" Bush denouncing Russia for an act of aggression. Bush, with the blood of a million innocent Iraqis dripping from his hands and dribbling from the corners of his smirking mouth, said that Russia's military operations were "damaging its reputation" and were "unacceptable in the 21st century."
The black, bleak hypocrisy of the scene constitutes a kind of all-consuming event horizon, from which no glint of sense or reason can escape. It would almost be funny if people weren't, you know, dying all over the place.
The moral authority of a serial aggressor who keeps a dungeon in his own basement* is a fearsome thing to behold. We're sure that V.V. Putin will really have a long dark night of the soul after this chastisement.
V.V. is probably having trouble keeping a straight face.
Robert Parry on the inconsistency.
The usual suspects ...
Glenn Greenwald interviews Prof. Charles King (transcript).
And so much for some predictions .. there is a ceasefire.
Why do I get the sense that the desire of some to have the hot war they never had is not a good idea?
nothing is real ...
.. and nothing to get hung about ...
-=*=-
Living is easy with eyes closed,
misunderstanding all you see ...[1]
-=*=-
G'day Bob,
in a rush today; gotta go out for a while.
Riddle me this: why do they lie?
I make no excuses for deploying the term 'sheople®' (sheep + people), for that's exactly what they are. They choose - or accept having the non-choice thrust upon them - to escape into mind-numbing TV in all its hideous guises; wide-flat screens, DVDs, 5.1ch surround sound etc.. The keys here are two: escape and mind-numbing. In a v.few words: they don't care, and they don't even look.
We know what the US is up to, with Israel as the 'next worst;' namely murder for spoil. It's obvious when one looks - but the sheople just don't look.
Then, it really wouldn't matter if they did, because the so-called democracies - US, Israel, UK and Aus (who cares where else - except perhaps me; I really did expect more from Germany, say; France is/was always a bit borderline: there may well be something in "cheese-eating surrender monkeys!" Listening, Sarkozy?) - anyway, these so-called democracies (if not all such) are buggered, and no matter who one votes for, one always gets a (corrupt!) politician - who, as we all should know by now, all lie through their teeth. (Looping? Yeah, as usual.) And if lying wasn't bad enough, the representatives fail to properly represent the voters, but mainly work against the interests of the voters by kow-towing to the 'big end of town,' aka the M/I-plex, plus the rip-off miners et al..
What I have against this filthy system is not 'just' the rank immorality and injustice of it all - but it's incredibly wasteful (i.e. war and militarism in all their filthy forms, then gas-guzzling SUVs & 4WDs, etc.), in a time when the world is obviously being stressed beyond sustainability.
Instead of working to save our once jewel-like planet's ecosphere, the criminal élites are working to hasten the demise. Why? Why lie in the first place, when lying is simply not needed, why run the planet into the ground?
-=*end*=-
Ref(s):
[1] Beatles, "Strawberry Fields."
G'day Phil, first a little perspective from Justin Raimondo.
Excuse the plug at the end, understandable as it is given the financial situation - he doesn't have the resources the WAPO has, for instance. Nor the great disconnect.
All that support for criminals and imbeciles.
And he who pays the piper.
Why do they do it? Can't see further than their wallets and their delusions.
G'day Phil, Robert Scheer with more on McCain's adviser and games people play.
Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.
The track record supports the possibility.
G'day Phil, Chris Floyd with slabs of Seamus Milne's views on the conflict.
And the Georgian president wants everyone to think the US is really good friend.
It was a claim that could have provoked a dangerous Kremlin response: The United States is readying to take over airports and ports in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The claim, by U.S.-backed Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili on Wednesday was swiftly shot down by officials in Washington, who denied any such designs on Georgian soil.
Yet, it was the latest in a string of overstated pronouncements by the American-educated Georgian leader that are further fueling tensions with Moscow.
Wishful (and dangerous) thinking?
G'day Phil, a slow start so for now more from Chris Floyd.
First Georgia, now Poland. The Bush Administration announced Thursday that American soldiers will begin manning missile sites in Poland -- part of an agreement that surpasses even the NATO treaty in binding Washington to an armed response to any attack on Polish soil.
Spokesminions for President George Butt-Thumper said the installation of the missile base is designed to protect Poland from an intercontinental missile attack from Iran. (The perfidious Persians' long-standing plans to conquer Poland are well-known, of course.) The minions say that the missiles and troops are not at all intended as a threat to Russia, which is being slowly encircled by NATO bases and American missiles -- despite solemn promises from Washington to refrain from, er, encircling Russia with NATO bases and American missiles.
Today Poland ...
From one of Floyd's links:
My favorite thing about the whole coverage of the Georgia situation in the U.S. is the way the White House and media are feigning outrage over Russian actions. They just are aghast that a country can send its troops (across the border) under pretext of national security and defense. I mean, the U.S. would never ever send troops, say 10, 000 miles away from its border, under those pretexts. Never.
If I were Putin, I would have toppled the Georgian government, and installed a puppet government and then I would have said: We are here in Georgia at the invitation of the "democratically-elected" government of Georgia, and we will stay in Georgia as long as we are needed, and not one day longer. And I will make decisions on the basis of my military commanders on the ground, and in consultation with the new government of Georgia."
Some mightn't get the irony, particularly those suffering from Hitchens' Disease.
G'day Phil, weekend reading and plenty to occupy spare moments ...
Conn Hallinan.
Michael Klare.
More Klare courtesy of DemocrayNow!.
Stephen Zunes.
Deepak Tripathi.
And a bit of colourful prose on the question of just how stupid some people are.
Stupid is as stupid does. The bit about still being viewed as "experts", well the only question they should be asked is "Who ties your shoelaces for you." But some still cite them.
G'day Phil, some more reading matter on the issue:
Iain MacWhirter.
One minute you're looking for South Ossetia on a map; the next everyone's talking about nuclear confrontation. The escalation of the conflict in the Caucasus into a kind of post-modern Cold War has been breathtaking. But great international conflicts have a habit of starting in "far-away places of which we know nothing": Sarajevo, Poland, Pearl Harbour and now South Ossetia.
Fortunately, our diplomatic mechanisms are rather better at handling international crises than they were in 1914. But that doesn't mean we are out of the woods yet in the Caucasus. It's a sobering thought that, if George W Bush had had his way and Georgia had been a member of Nato, we would now be at war with Russia.
Nato is an alliance which, in theory at least, commits its signatories to react collectively to a military threat to any one of its members. Would we really have been prepared to lay waste to Europe in support of the unstable and unreliable Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, who launched a cowardly, brutal assault on the South Ossetian town of Tskhinvali under the cover of the opening night of the Olympic Games? I hope not, but we can't be sure. With someone like George W Bush supposedly leading the "free world", we can't be sure of anything, except that it will be a mess.
The CC might have said "We'll head 'em off at the pass. Where's the pass?"
Geoffrey Wheatcroft.
Hard on the heels of Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleezza Rice, and keen to share their limelight, David Cameron arrived in Tbilisi yesterday. His visit is a reward to the Leader of the Opposition for having expressed even more bellicose views on the Georgian crisis than the Americans, which should sound loud alarm bells for those of us who may quite soon be living under a Tory government.
In the official view of Washington, the expansion of Nato up to the borders of Russia was a benevolent spreading of democracy. "It is the right of the Georgian people and Georgian government to determine their own security orientation," says Kurt Volker, principal deputy assistant secretary of state, and Matthew Bryza, the American special envoy, adds that Russia would not have attacked Georgia if she had already belonged to Nato.
While Gordon Brown and David Miliband merely mouthed empty platitudes about the crisis (although Miliband has been sympathetic to Georgia's Nato aspirations in the past), Cameron went startlingly further when he said that its membership of Nato should be accelerated. His words so excited the Georgians that they asked him to meet their ambassador in London on Wednesday, and then fly out for his Caucasian photo-op.
No doubt this crisis has illustrated Russian ruthlessness and brutality, but then, as the Chechens might say, we knew that already. It has also exposed the severe limits of US power. Although George Bush, Dick Cheney and sabre-rattling pundits have screeched defiance at Russia, they are bereft of any practical response. Removing the Winter Olympics from Sochi doesn't sound like the ultimate deterrent.
But above all, the crisis has highlighted the incoherence of Western policy since the Cold War ended – and belatedly raised the question of just what purpose Nato now serves. This is something an intelligent opposition should be discussing.
Gary Leupp.
Many are drawing analogies between the U.S.-led attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and the Russian attack on Georgia earlier this month. Most, including Russian officials, do so to highlight the hypocrisy of Washington’s criticism of Russia’s action. Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, went so far as to state last week, “If we had the territorial integrity of Serbia in the case of Kosovo, then we would have the territorial integrity of Georgia . . . with regard to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.” He added that NATO’s war in 1999 “takes away the right to criticise Russia for any present or future action.”
Surely one can ask: What right has the U.S., which led the assault on Yugoslavia ostensibly to protect the beleaguered Albanians of Kosovo, to condemn the Russians for advancing into Georgia to protect the South Ossetians who’d just been subjected (as AP acknowledges) to “a massive assault”? What right does the U.S., which led the bombardment of Belgrade, have to criticize Russia’s bombardment of Gori (sparing the Georgian capital of Tbilisi)? What right does the U.S., which this year recognized Kosovo as an independent country, have to challenge the Russian foreign minister’s pronouncement that Tbilisi can “forget about” retaining South Ossetia and Abkhazia whose citizens plainly want out of the Georgian state?
There are many parallels between these two situations, the first and second wars in Europe since 1945.
In 1989 Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic exploiting Serbian nationalism revoked Kosovo’s autonomous status. In that same year the Soviet Republic of Georgia’s parliament abolished South Ossetian autonomy, soon imposing Georgian as the only official language throughout the country. In both cases the withdrawal of autonomy was met with resistance, and ethnic violence and repression produced tens of thousands of refugees. In both cases a major power intervened, ostensibly to help the victims, with overwhelming military force.
But without justifying either attack it’s important to recognize some important differences. Kosovo is thousands of miles away from the U.S., whereas South Ossetia borders Russia. Kosovo has little relationship to U.S. national security, while the situation in South Ossetia impacts the security of the whole Caucasus region including southern Russia. Milosevic sent federal troops into Kosovo in 1998 to back up police in suppressing the separatist movement; Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili bombed the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali in an effort to destroy the autonomous government and occupy the city with tanks.
When the U.S.-led NATO forces attacked Yugoslavia, Kosovo was under Belgrade’s control. NATO had to bomb Kosovo and Sarajevo to force the Serbian troops out. When Russia attacked Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia had acquired de facto independence and South Ossetia’s legislature had requested integration into the Russian Federation. Milosevic and Saakashvili both felt justified in attacking secessionist movements in their countries. But the former attacked a disordered province lacking effective leadership while the latter attacked what was in essence a country effectively divorced from Georgia since 1992.
Bill Clinton acted in 1999 to show the world what happens when a third-rate power defies U.S. demands. (These had included a demand for Belgrade to allow NATO forces access to the roads and airspace not only of Kosovo but the entire country of Yugoslavia in order to avoid a U.S. attack.) He acted to expand NATO’s reach as global policeman; one of the largest U.S. bases in the world has since been established in Kosovo and 15,000 NATO-led forces remain there. Ostensibly the U.S. moved to protect the Kosovars from “ethnic cleansing” at the hands of the Serbs, but it was clear within a year that the pre-war allegations of hundreds of thousands of victims of Serbian violence, disseminated by the likes of U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, were pure disinformation. Only about 2000 persons in Kosovo (including Serbs and Roma) had been killed before the bombing started. The real ethnic bloodletting began with the war.
In part., the Russian leadership acted on August 7 to show what happens when the leader of a neighboring country hostile to itself launches missile attacks against Russia’s friends (and in the South Ossetian case, for the most part Russian passport-bearers). It acted to assure its friends that Moscow has the will and might to protect them. On the face of it, the Russian action against Georgia seems more justifiable and understandable than the U.S. action against Yugoslavia. But that of course is not saying much. Both the U.S. and Russia are imperialist powers whose rulers go to war for reasons of profit and geopolitical strategizing that have little to do with the stated casus belli.
In the background of the Georgia conflict loom the issues of U.S.-Russian competition for control of the flow of Caspian oil and gas and the expansion of NATO. During the Soviet period, the resources under and around the Caspian Sea were Soviet state property and a major source of foreign exchange. Now most belong to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, all courted by the U.S. bloc to cooperate in the construction of pipelines bypassing Russia (and Iran). In May 2005 a new pipeline built by a British Petroleum-led consortium began delivering oil from Turkmenistan to the Turkish seaport of Ceyhan, running through Georgia. Intended to reduce western dependence on Middle East and Russian oil, it inaugurates a new period of struggle for control that recalls the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia in Central Asia in the nineteenth century. It’s classical inter-imperialist contention.
Talk of a new Cold War ... well, Chris Floyd sees benefit for some.
This ranges further than South Ossetia but sees a familiar theme - follow the money.
G'day Phil, more reading matter starting with Richard Giragosian on the flaws in Georgia's plan.
William S. Lind.
Pat Buchanan.
James Howard Kunstler.
What to do? Ian Williams.
G'day Phil, for when you have time ... more reading ...
Kaveh L. Afrasiabi.
The Russian FM.
Eric Walberg.
Michael Neumann.
It's said that Russia's response to Georgia's attack on South Ossetia is disproportionate: we hear of "Western leaders anxiously watching for a withdrawal and puzzling over how to punish Moscow for what they called a disproportionate reaction to the Georgian offensive". No one has asked whether a disproportionate reaction or response is always wrong.
War, or an armed attack, can itself be a disproportionate response to some offense. If Britain, for example, declared war on Sweden for producing Abba, that would be disproportionate. It would also be wrong, because Abba isn't cause enough for initiating violence. Britain could at least ask for a large indemnity first. The Nuremberg tribunals placed aggression, a "crime against peace", ahead of war crimes. Perhaps this was meant to remind us that wars usher in far worse than war-fevered cheerleaders suppose, and are virtually always an immoral and disproportionate response to offences.
Within a war, there are war crimes. Those aren't disproportionate responses, but responses directed against the wrong people, or, sometimes, the wrong sort of response.
Though it is not always wrong to kill innocent civilians - killing a civilian if there were no other way to fend off a Nazi world conquest wouldn't be wrong - it is wrong to do so when you don't have to. Then your response is against the wrong people. You can also, within a war, make the wrong sort of response against the right people. You can certainly use force against an enemy soldier, but you can't torture the guy just because you're pissed off.
There is also a relationship between war as an immorally disproportionate response, or starting war for the wrong reasons, and all its consequences. When you start a war for the wrong reasons, you are responsible for all that follows, even the other side's atrocities. Though the other side is to blame for its crimes, so are you. You don't even have the right to kill in self-defense. If you are wrong to start a war, you don't suddenly fall into the right just because, contrary to your expectations, it's you, not the other guy, who has to defend himself.
Georgia started a war, nothing less. The not terribly pro-Russian news agency Fox described the assault as follows:
Georgia, a U.S. ally whose troops have been trained by American soldiers, launched a major offensive overnight Friday. Heavy rocket and artillery fire pounded the provincial capital, Tskhinvali, leaving much of the city in ruins.
One might add that Tskhinvali's population was given no chance to evacuate: this was not a mere demonstration or a hit-and-run operation. This starting a war.
Something to think about. And some should note the comment about responsibility for atrocities.
G'day Phil, some more views on the issue .... from Gareth Porter.
Nikolai Sokov.
Francesco Sisci.
Leon Hadar - the usual suspects with the usual analogies.
Neoconservatives and their useful idiots in the American media have been on overdrive this August, rewinding to their World War II analogies and applying them to the fast-forwarding world of global politics. Exhibit A: the obvious likeness of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Berlin Games. Hitlergram of the Month was the parallel drawn between Nazi-era filmmaker turned propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who was invited by the Führer to film the Olympics in Berlin—the result being the technically and aesthetically impressive documentary “Olympia”—and the celebrated Chinese director Zhang Yimou, who was commissioned by his government to produce the magnificent opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. The power of analogy, there for the China-bashers’ taking.
But no neocon narrative is complete without Czechoslovakia. Imagine your average Weekly Standard subscriber taking a free-association test and being asked to state the first words that come to his mind when he hears “Czechoslovakia.” Rest assured, he would respond with “Munich,” “appeasement,” “Chamberlain,” or “umbrella.” And let’s not forget “Hitler.” Thus can anyone clamoring for U.S. military intervention in, say, the former Yugoslavia or the Persian Gulf, mount a successful media and public-relations campaign by identifying his chosen victim (the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo, or Kuwait, or the Kurds) with Czechoslovakia and associating his preferred “aggressor” (Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein) with Hitler. Those Americans who resist pressure to deploy U.S. troops abroad to save the victim from the aggressor are appeasers leading the world into another Munich.
But they have such a great track record.
Now that the Beijing games have wound up, we can get on to a sporting event with real significance: a Neocon Olympics to decide the most grossly wrong, stupid prediction by a Neocon pundit post-Iraq. Of course, it's a very rich field. Being totally wrong about absolutely everything is the Neocons' job, and they've been working overtime on it. Their proudest moment had to be in the lead-up to the Iraq war when Kenneth Adelman assured America that democratizing Iraq would be "a cakewalk." Indeed, early Neocons like Adelman and Richard Perle (who predicted that Iraq would settle down "at the first whiff of gunpowder") set the bar for disastrously wrong predictions so high that some have suggested that the trophy be retired in their honor. But doing that would mean shutting out all the more recent Neocon predictions. Their little mistakes may not have cost as many trillions of dollars and thousands of lives as Adelman and Perle's, but give them time. They're doing their best to push us into more disastrous wars, and with team spirit like theirs, they may yet succeed.
Read on for dumb and dumber and even dumber. The only people who are possibly dumber still are those who believe their crap despite the record.
Advice - more to be gained from heeding earlier articles rather than the mentality exhibited by the subjects of the last. Unfortunately, they have had far too much influence. And at such a cost and such a threat.
G'day Phil, more on grand designs of the usual suspects - this from Glenn Greenwald.
John McCain's two most loyal supporters and most influential foreign policy advisers, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, have an Op-Ed in The Wall St. Journal today proclaiming that "Russia's invasion of Georgia represents the most serious challenge to this political order since Slobodan Milosevic unleashed the demons of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans." Just as their neoconservative comrade, Fred Hiatt, does in today's Washington Post, Lieberman and Graham demand that the U.S. expend vast resources and assert itself both militarily and politically in order to thwart the New Russian Menace ("This means reinvigorating NATO as a military alliance, not just a political one . . . The credibility of Article Five of the NATO Charter -- that an attack against one really can and will be treated as an attack against all -- needs to be bolstered. . . .The Georgian military should be given the antiaircraft and antiarmor systems necessary to deter any renewed Russian aggression").
The painful absurdity of hard-core warmongers who supported the invasion of Iraq (and, in Lieberman's case, advocating we do the same to Iran and Syria) parading around as defenders of the "political order" is too self-evident, and by now too common, to merit much comment. But this warning from the neoconservative duo about the folly of imperialistic Russian policies is really a sight to behold:
In the long run, a Russia that tries to define its greatness in terms of spheres of influence, client states and forced fealty to Moscow will fail -- impoverishing its citizens in the process. The question is only how long until Russia's leaders rediscover this lesson from their own history.
One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the lack of a sense of irony ... or self-awareness. American Exceptionalism in full flow.
Philip Giraldi.
In George Orwell's 1984 there is a memorable scene when the speaker from Oceania's Ministry of Truth is addressing a rally, the culmination of Hate Week against the enemy, Eurasia. He receives a message mid-sentence, then smoothly shifts gears to deliver the remainder of his speech excoriating Eastasia. The crowd responds enthusiastically, and the narrator, Winston, notes that, of course, Eastasia had always been the enemy.
The alliances in Orwell's nightmare world had shifted, but the concept of the enemy remained the same. There always has to be an enemy. So too the neoconservatives always need an enemy to justify the huge defense contracts that in turn spawn the think tanks and academic chairs in security studies that provide them with their sinecures. A world without "Islamofascism" or another enemy lurking is a world without employment for the likes of Bill Kristol and John Bolton.
Post-1992 Russia has given every indication that it desires to be a friend to the United States and that it has no desire to recreate the Cold War. It allowed itself to be looted by the oligarchs, who presented themselves as the bearers of Western-style modernization with hardly a complaint. It saw its place in the world shrink and its voice in international fora diminished. President George W. Bush even famously looked Russian Premier Vladimir Putin in the eye in Crawford, Texas, in June 2001 and announced positively that he had gotten a "sense of his soul." But the neoconservatives were never on board the Russian project. Their reading on Russia was that it was and always will be the enemy. They would argue that Bush misjudged his guest and Russia was even then preparing to rebuild its empire.
The Great Decider is making up for his slip of the tongue now, threatening Russia even though it was on the receiving end of a foolish invasion launched by America's ally Georgia. But now it is a much diminished U.S. that has no options in the Caucasus. In speaking forcefully on an issue that he cannot influence, Bush is again the engineer of a foreign policy train wreck, a disaster potentially much more dangerous than Iraq. The White House is inexplicably, and in support of no national interest of the United States, creating an enemy where one did not exist, an enemy, one might add, that is equipped with a nuclear arsenal and state-of-the art ballistic missiles that could destroy both the United States and Western Europe.
Perhaps it hasn't dawned on the armchair warmongers that their machinations could lead to an exchange of ICBMs. Thus they would be in the firing line. Then they might rethink the matter.
Paul Craig Roberts.
William Pfaff on the cost of Saakashvili's folly.
Doug Bandow.
Arrogance, hubris, delusion .... in spades.
G'day Phil, more on possible outcomes:
The Black Sea will not become a NATO Lake.
The Devil is going to Georgia.
Dangerous times.
G'day Phil, from Tomdispatch an article by Michael T. Klare about pipelines ... and the Great Chess Game. Would Georgia be involved?
Highly recommended.
G'day Phill, here's an article by Justin Raimondo to throw into the mix. Airfields could be useful.
According to this report by veteran Washington Times correspondent Arnaud de Borchgrave, the close cooperation of the Israelis with the Georgian military in the run-up to President Saakashvili's blitz of South Ossetia was predicated on a Georgian promise to let the Israelis use Georgia's airfields to mount a strike against Iran.
The main problem for Tel Aviv, in making its threats against Iran at all credible, has been the distance to be covered by Israeli fighter jets, which would have a hard time reaching and returning from their targets without refueling. With access to the airfields of "the Israel of the Caucasus," as de Borchgrave – citing Saakashvili – puts it, the likelihood of an Israeli attack entered the world of real possibilities. De Borchgrave avers:
"In a secret agreement between Israel and Georgia, two military airfields in southern Georgia had been earmarked for the use of Israeli fighter-bombers in the event of pre-emptive attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. This would sharply reduce the distance Israeli fighter-bombers would have to fly to hit targets in Iran. And to reach Georgian airstrips, the Israeli air force would fly over Turkey.
"The attack ordered by Saakashvili against South Ossetia the night of Aug. 7 provided the Russians the pretext for Moscow to order Special Forces to raid these Israeli facilities where some Israeli drones were reported captured."
Reports of anywhere from 100 to 1,000 Israeli "advisers" in Georgia do not bode well for the situation on the ground. With the Israelis already installed in that country, the logistics of carrying out such a sneak attack are greatly simplified. Israeli pilots would only have to fly over Azerbaijan, and they'd be in Iranian airspace – and within striking distance of Tehran.
Faced with this fait accompli – if the Dutch are to be believed – the Americans seem to have capitulated. In which case, we don't have much time. Although de Borchgrave writes "whether the IAF can still count on those air bases to launch bombing missions against Iran's nuke facilities is now in doubt," I don't see why the defeat of the Georgians in Saakashvili's war on the Ossetians has to mean the plan to strike Iran via Georgia has been canceled. Indeed, reading de Borchgrave's riveting account of the extent of the Tel Aviv-Tbilisi collaboration, one finds additional reasons for all concerned to go ahead with it:
"Saakashvili was convinced that by sending 2,000 of his soldiers to serve in Iraq (who were immediately flown home by the United States when Russia launched a massive counterattack into Georgia), he would be rewarded for his loyalty. He could not believe President Bush, a personal friend, would leave him in the lurch. Georgia, as Saakashvili saw his country's role, was the 'Israel of the Caucasus.'"
Saakashvili, a vain and reckless man, now has even more reason to go behind Uncle Sam's back and give the Israelis a clear shot at Tehran. With this sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the Americans, the rationale for a more limited, shot-across-the-bow strike by the U.S. becomes all too clear.
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