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August 28, 2008

Georgia/Russia War egged on by GOP?

Yes, I suspect it was.

Of course, only a fool would accept what Vladimir Putin says at face value. But by the very same token I don't see how anyone who has been paying attention for the last 7 years would blindly accept what George W. Bush has to say at face value either.

Ian Bell of Scotland's Sunday Herald lays it out succinctly:

LET'S RUN through this again. Vladimir Putin is not a nice man. The KGB, with whom the young Vlad earned his reputation as a people person, was not Russia's answer to the Rotary Club. As a direct consequence, Russian traditions of democracy remain wafer thin, a cracked veneer that fails utterly to conceal thuggery, rigged votes, oligarchic mafias, corruption, and the corpses of journalists. Are we clear?

Russia's current identity is composed, meanwhile, of a volatile mixture of intense nationalism and paranoia. Its rulers, whatever their labels, take it as read that their country exists under permanent threat of encirclement by its enemies. Now, here's the tricky part: there is nothing currently to suggest that they are mistaken. Intense nationalists of a different stripe, feed the paranoia of the intense nationalists in Moscow.

This is not, of course, the story we have been hearing. When the United States − having shredded the anti-ballistic missile treaty that gave nuclear deterrence its single justification − bribes Poland into housing rockets pointed at the Russians, we hear only of a "shield". When Georgia launches smaller rockets at a South Ossetian town, in defiance of all the humanitarian rules, we hear only that a freedom-loving but "provoked" Georgian leader has stepped into a cunning Russian trap.

After 7 long years of watching the GOP blatently use fear of foreign enemies as a political tool to secure domestic political advantage, how or why would a rational person believe that they've suddenly stopped?

I can't be the only American who looks at the situation in Georgia right now and wonders incredulously WTF was Georgian President Saakashvili thinking?

Ian Bell continues:

It may be, of course, that Georgia's President Saakashvili committed just such an act of astonishing, inexplicable folly. North Ossetia, ethnic and cultural twin to its disputed neighbour in the south, is part of the Russian Federation. Putin and those who support him - a clear majority, as no-one disputes, of Russians and Ossetians - meanwhile have difficulty understanding the concept of Georgian independence.

But when Saakashvili offered the gift of a direct military challenge by shelling Ossetian Tskhinvali, hospitals, parliament and all, how was Russia supposed to react? By asking politely for clarification of Georgian intentions? Imagine the French have just shelled the Channel Islands. What's our next move?

A daft analogy? Not as daft, I suspect, as the claim that the US, with military advisers on site in Georgia busily equipping and training its army, tried and failed to dissuade Saakashvili from launching a war. Does America have so little influence over a tiny client state that depends entirely on American goodwill? Or did Saakashvili somehow get the wrong idea from someone somewhere about the nature and scale of likely US support and US responses? Nothing else makes any sense.

Yes, dozens died and tens of thousands were displaced in the brief, fierce conflict between Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia. But we've seen this exact same scenario before - in Iraq.

Ian goes on...

We are being sucked in, suckered and conscripted. As an economically embattled US flails after former glories, it fashions Nato into a blunt instrument. Whatever the organisation's purpose during the Cold War, it currently stands revealed as an expeditionary force on behalf of Washington's interests. That is not a useful development for Nato, Europe, America or the world.

Georgia should be proof enough. We know that Putin's Russia is not to be trusted. But we also know a simple fact: in South Ossetia, Saakashvili started the shooting. Had the United Nations been allowed to function we might have been talking about faults on both sides. Instead, we are offered a new Cold War as though no other alternative is possible.

Exactly! Bush Inc. have complained loudly about the need for Russia to allow the U.N. to take the lead in Georgia. That would be the very same Bush Inc. which used the U.N. as a tool to rubberstamp their own militarism in a foreign country which hadn't attacked us.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me!

Posted by Kevin at August 28, 2008 10:39 AM