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Hermit
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The Other Shoe
« on: 2008-08-09 19:23:11 »
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What is happening in Georgia is a direct consequence of:

  • the George Bush maladministration's machinations in Kosovo;
  • the failure of both Democrats and Republicans to use the end of the cold war to cement relations and;
  • the Bush administration's deliberate incitement of antagonisms with Russia;
  • the meddling of the CIA and State Department to ensure the ascension of a "pro-Western" government in Tbilisi, largely in order to ensure a pipeline to Central Asian oil not in Russian territory (and necessitated by the collapse of stability caused by US in the region);
  • the irresponsible encouragement of Saakashvili to antagonize the slumbering bear and to imagine that Georgia is regarded as an important strategic ally by the USA with the consequent expectation that the US would do more than mouth platitudes as another illegal act of occupation and annexation takes place, this time by the Russians rather than the USA;
  • and of course, the total strategic neutralization of the US through its idiotic auto-immolation of strategic options due to its single-track mindless pursuit of the improbable goals of "democracy and freedom" in the scattered shards and bloody sands of Iraq and Afghanistan.

While it is true that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, at this point there appear to be no eggs left, while nobody seems to have an omelet.

Breakfast of bitter herbs anyone?

Hermit
« Last Edit: 2008-08-10 05:59:43 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #1 on: 2008-08-10 12:48:44 »
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Quote:
[Hermit] Breakfast of bitter herbs anyone?

[Fritz]Useful bit of context I wasn't aware of ; green eggs and ham anyone .... oh what a tangled web we weave


Yahoo News
Date :2008.08.10

<snip>Georgia has about 2,000 troops in Iraq and is the third-largest contributor to coalition forces after the U.S. and Britain. The Georgian government has called home those troops, and efforts are under way now to determine how the U.S. will transport those troops to Georgia, the official said. [Fritz]I wonder what else besides Georgians troops will go back with the US transports ? <Snip>
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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #2 on: 2008-08-10 18:51:04 »
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The situation is more volatile than the news is letting on, because our Georgian sources tell us that US forces stationed in Georgia have been involved in the fighting with Russia and a number of them have been killed.

As an aside, to call the Russians "peacekeepers" goes beyond bizarre hypocrisy deep into the chaos of the void.

Meanwhile the UN Security Council is deadlocked by the Russian Veto and Bush sits flapping his hands in China saying "Bad Russians Bad", but with no other options available.

Perhaps we should now be asking which hole Cheney is hiding in and what machinations he is cooking up while his paws have hold of the levers of state?

It is worth remembering that the Ossetians are in fact Iranians, displaced in the 13th Century, related to and sympathetic towards the Chechnyans; now thoroughly ethnically cleansed by the Russians with American complicity as a quid pro quo for picking up the slack in oil production, first during the US's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and then to help get Bush reelected. It will be interesting to see how the US deals with these little complexities - or if it will do the usual and pretend, with thoroughly British demeanor, that they haven't noticed any of it.

Regards

Hermit
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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #3 on: 2008-08-10 20:37:45 »
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[Fritz]So Cheney or Bush, who is going to give the following speak ?

Dr. Strangelove
Source:General Jack D. Ripper:
Your Commie has no regard for human life, not even of his own. For this reason men, I want to impress upon you the need for extreme watchfulness. The enemy may come individually, or in strength. He may even appear in the form of our own troops. But however we must stop him. We must not allow him to gain entrance to this base. Now, I'm going to give you THREE SIMPLE rules: First, trust NO one, whatever his uniform or rank, unless he is known to you personally; Second, anyone or anything that approaches within 200 yards of the perimeter is to be FIRED UPON; Third, if in doubt, shoot first then ask questions later. I would sooner accept a few casualties through accidents rather losing the entire base and its personnel through carelessness.  Any variation on these rules must come from me personally. Now, men, in conclusion, I would like to say that, in the two years it has been my privilege to be your commanding officer, I have always expected the best from you, and you have never given me anything less than that. Today, the nation is counting on us. We're not going to let them down. Good luck to you all.


[Fritz]I guess we assume the position

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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #4 on: 2008-08-11 07:53:32 »
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Hermit:
Quote:
Meanwhile the UN Security Council is deadlocked by the Russian Veto and Bush sits flapping his hands in China saying "Bad Russians Bad", but with no other options available.


Putin pwns the Bush administration.
« Last Edit: 2008-08-11 07:54:47 by MoEnzyme » Report to moderator   Logged

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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #5 on: 2008-08-12 17:09:54 »
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The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power

[ Hermit : Nice to have Stratfor agreeing with me even if it took them longer to get there ]

Source: Strategic Forecast
Authors: George Friedman
Dated: 2008-08-12
Related:

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

Caption: The Conflict in Georgia

On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion

In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate. [ Hermit : It was fairly obvious that Russia triggered the trap they had been building for the past 8 months while the Olympic opening ceremonies made access to international leaders difficult or impossible. ]

The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well — indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow’s calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.
The Western Encirclement of Russia

To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.
The Russian Periphery

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion — publicly stated — was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo’s separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts — including demands by various regions for independence from Russia — might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia’s requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

Resurrecting the Russian Sphere

Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.
« Last Edit: 2008-08-12 21:43:35 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged

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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #6 on: 2008-08-14 05:17:42 »
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[Blunderov] Lenin  has been most astute in his observation of this crisis from the beginning. I agree with him that there is a grave peril abroad. These things have a way of getting out of hand...



http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/washington-to-saakashvili-shut-up.html

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Washington to Saakashvili: shut up, already. posted by lenin

Was it all just bravado? Well, Washington's escalation was carefully pitched: in Bush's announcement there were plenty of veiled threats and few specifics. He did not say "we are going to take over Georgia's military command and run the shit from the Pentagon", nor did he say "the US ministry of defense is going to take over Georgia's airports and sea ports". But he left enough threads dangling that one could infer a wide range of possible US actions - and from this administration, you certainly wouldn't rule out the most aggressive strategies. There is an element of the 'madman theory' in action here: let the world think we're about nuts enough to do anything, and they'll go along with our preferred strategy with some relief and gratitude. Saakashvili spoiled it by blustering that, uh huh, America was going to take over Georgia's airports and sea ports and run them from Washington. This provoked an immediate denial from his nervous American backers. As the Washington Post points out, the US appears to have been relying on "mixed signals", by "pointedly using military planes and ships and warning Russia not to block sea, air or land transport routes, while insisting it had no plans to intervene militarily." But the Pentagon insists that: "This is not an attempt to put military assets in closer proximity to inject U.S. forces into this conflict". It also denies that naval vessels will actually be sent to the Black Sea. And the US has, apparently, warned Saakashvili not to provoke Russia militarily by sending Georgian troops into South Ossetia and they had ruled out any U.S. military action to defend Georgia.

Saakashvili may be upsetting the American posture with his mercurial performances, but that doesn't mean we can feel at ease. The crucial point here is that the situation has its own deadly dynamics that can override the exiguous constraints of diplomacy. Bearing in mind the context of a brutal struggle over the control of energy supplies in the region, and given America's determination to maintain the encirclement of Russia, Georgia is still a dangerous frontline. The US mission, moreover, is clearly not a 'humanitarian' one, and to that extent Pentagon disavowals are totally unbelievable. The US may deliver substantial relief supplies (the scale of the proposed aid is supposedly unusually large), but I expect they will do so in addition to supplying military aid and direction. Already they have helped deliver 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq and supplied substantial military training, and among their current avowed aims is to send a few dozen officers to liaise with the Georgian military. There is also the question of divisions in the American state. It seems as if there is an effort by some in the defense establishment to take the heat out of Bush's remarks. The US military leadership may not want anything that could even approach a confrontation with Russia - but the civilian leadership is quite ruthless and has a knack for outmanoeuvering its opponents in the state. Regionally, the US may also decide to up its game. The presence of US troops across the former Soviet states has thus far been quite limited: no need for them as long as there's a pro-Washington regime and no serious military threat. Although the 'lily-pads' are significant in terms of their potential uses, securing strategic routes for US troops should the need arise, the total number of US troops in the former Soviet countries as of 2005 was 132 [pdf] (by contrast, there were over 35,000 troops stationed in Japan and almost 30,000 in South Korea). In light of intensified struggles in the Caucasus and Central Asia, that figure may rise substantially. And as I have said before, even if the current dilemmatic is temporarily resolved, it is bound to flare up again soon. The fact that this contest is rooted in something as central to global capitalism as the extraction and transport of energy means that it is permament and inclined to escalate - and that ought to give us a presentiment of real horror.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/us-forces-to-be-sent-to-georgia.html

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

US forces to be sent to Georgia. posted by lenin

Talk about an escalation: Bush is sending in the navy and the airforce. You would have to be dead from the neck up to think that this is just about 'delivering humanitarian aid'. You don't need hawk airjets and naval vessels to deliver relief supplies. You do need them if you intend to fight somebody. Clearly, it's Washington stepping up, and it's a very dangerous gambit. Russia, having taken advantage of Georgia's attack on South Ossetia, is reported to be still engaging in military attacks despite the claim of a ceasefire. This has been both vicious and reckless, regardless of the fact that Georgia initiated the hostilities. It is possible that some of these reports are fabricated, or exaggerated, but it seems indubitable that Russia is not abiding by its own ceasefire. America is saying that it will place its military forces right in Georgia, and if Russian forces somehow inhibit their activities, well... anything that happens then will be blamed on Moscow. That too is reckless, presumably a victory for Dick Cheney and his allies in the administration. It seriously raises the possibility of war between two nuclear states - and that makes the antiwar movement more necessary than ever.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/putin-wins-confirmed.html

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Putin wins (confirmed) posted by lenin


We have just watched the world become more dangerous. I'll come back to this point later, but here is the deal as it stands: Georgia will abjure violence as a means of resolving the South Ossetian conflict, withdraw all forces from South Ossetia and no longer be part of the 'peacekeeping' force, and permit referendums to allow South Ossetia and Abkhazia to join Russia. In return for this, Russian tanks and jets will not raze Georgia to the ground. In addition, the conclusion to the conflict has confirmed a shift in the balance of power in the region. US and allied forces are busy holding down Iraq and Afghanistan, thus freeing up Russia to be far more aggressive. Georgia stupidly gave the Russian government the opportunity to close the deal in South Ossetia with a brutal and humiliating military assault, and evidently no one had any power to stop it. Any efforts at punishing Russia's aggression are likely to be symbolic (not to mention utterly hypocritical). So, I guess the war games conducted by the US military in Georgia last month were futile. My sense is that, like the manoeuvres we keep hearing about in the Gulf, such activities are intended as much to intimidate as to gain experience for a potential attack, but Saakashvili evidently blew away any leverage this gave Georgia with his crazy attack on South Ossetia. And he has been rapidly frittering away his remaining credibility by making absurd claims like this one. First, Russia is planning genocide that mysteriously doesn't come to pass, then its bombing pipelines that BP says are intact, then it has invaded and taken control of the majority of the Georgian land mass without being spotted doing so. Now, if he could get BHL and Medicins du Monde to make these claims on his behalf, then he might be getting somewhere.

Georgia's NATO bid, by the way, is also finished for the time being. Saakashvili has quixotically decided to leave the CIS in anticipation of America being able to accelerate the country's membership of NATO, but let's be serious. Forget what the AP says, forget what the NATO Secretary-General says, and forget what John McCain says - NATO is not going to be swooning for Saakashvili right now. And if it was divided before, the balance of opinion in the alliance is now likely to be strongly against even leaving the door open for a future Georgia bid. Even the Secretary-General merely confirms in a vague, diplomatic fashion that the Bucharest communique, which allows Georgia to potentially be a member at some point in the indefinite future, stands. This is how a sceptical EU official puts it today:


"I think the current conflict has moved us away from the MAP plan. Moving forward wouldn't be a great idea," says one European Union official. "When you look at it, we feel validated."

The violence this week, and the events that precipitated it, have raised some new concerns as well. "It makes you ask about Georgia's motives for joining NATO," adds the official, positing that one motive might be an expectation of protection on the heels of its attempts to retake by force its breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has expressed a desire to become part of Russia. And the willingness to undertake such military campaigns is not what NATO is currently looking for in expanding its membership. "This," he says, "is an alliance of responsibility."


The ubiquitous "analysts" are also agreed that this crisis has checked NATO's eastward expansion for the time being. However, this doesn't mean the crisis is over. The longer term effect of this war will be to sharpen the struggle for energy resources and to increase America's determination to somehow rein in the local power. Russia will almost certainly throw its weight around a lot more in the Caucasus and Central Asia, probably arming and subsidising local proxies. America and those who support it globally will flood regional allies with weapons and money, build up the 'lily-pads', support any potentially secessionist current within Russia, anything that might be destabilising and drain resources, try to lure the country into a war it can't win, and so on. In short, as I've said, we've just watched the world become more dangerous. Those who thought it would improve stability if US power was 'balanced' by two, three, many imperialisms were mistaken. Watch the arms race resume, see that new generation of nuclear weapons proliferate, observe as the mini-conflicts and conflagrations sponsored by different players leave thousands dead, and witness the deadly escalation in global tensions... and then you'll see what I mean.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/08/schisms-and-cataclyms-of-new-world.html

Monday, August 11, 2008

Schisms and cataclyms of the new world order. posted by lenin


Not content with having driven the Georgians out of South Ossetia, Russia has inflicted a severe punishment beating on Georgia itself. Of course, it isn't easy to follow exactly what is going on - one minute, we hear from the Georgians that they are retreating, that their retreat is a fait accompli in fact, the next we have official confirmation that Georgian troops are being flown from Iraq to fight the Russians courtesy of General Petraeus, and then the Russian military says that it is still engaging Georgian soldiers. The Russian government assures us that their attacks will end soon, only to escalate them again, and expand well into the Georgian land mass. Now they have declared an end to the war, without imposing regime change - but we will surely hear claim and counter-claim of various violations justifying a new attack by one side or the other. The Georgian government has already been caught fabricating a Russian pipeline bombing, and one expects that similar claims have also been simply made up as part of a poorly contrived propaganda campaign to stimulate Western military intervention. Many of the claims from Saakashvili have been not merely false but absurd - he has been pretending that Russia is ready to "annihilate" ethnic Georgians, as if his own military's attacks on South Ossetians didn't look a little indiscriminate themselves. Russian media is undoubtedly also peppered with false or unsubstantiated claims - who knows if the claims about Ukrainian fighters working for Georgia are true or not? But we have been less exposed to those kinds of distortions because, despite the fact that much conservative and liberal commentary in the West has been hostile to the Georgian upstart who overplayed his hand, (reflecting divisions among Western states on strategy in the Caucasus), the main animus has remained squarely against Russia.

Thus, the BBC's Emily Maitliss wasted no time in scorning Russia's self-justifying rhetoric on Newsnight last night: "The Russians are calling it ‘peace enforcement operation’. It’s the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud." Replace the word "Russians" with "Israelis" or "Yanqui Invading Scum", and you realise how distant the statement is from usual BBC language. (It is also idiotic - in what way would Orwell be 'proud' of such banal propaganda statements?) Not that, as Craig Murray mistakenly thinks, I believe Putin should be given "the benefit of the doubt" (no such thing). While I have no more sympathy for Saakashvili than I do for Putin, the real victims of Russia's attacks will be not only the civilians cut down by their bombs, but also the Saakashvili regime's opponents, who have repeatedly bore the brunt of the state's crackdown whenever there is a flare-up of rivalry with Russia (see this sinister video for example). If Saakashvili somehow survives this crisis, the opposition will probably be demolished. If Russia had effected 'regime change', the prospects for real change would probably have been even worse. So, no, it's not that Putin is a good guy fighting Western imperialism. Partly, it's just that one would appreciate balance in the discussion, and notices its glaring absence. We are facing perhaps not so much a 'new Cold War' as a new Great Game. Great power militarism, fuelled by a mortal combat over energy supplies, is always liable to generate nationalistic responses. We hear of 'Russian nationalism' as if it were something distinctly foreign, but the responses of the commentariat to this crisis - combining sanctimony with an explicit defense of 'Western' interests - hardly lack particularlism. The compulsion to identify with a nation-state as if it were the volksgeist incarnate, as if one could speak unproblematically of 'our' interests, is so universal that no one notices it until the enemy of the month appears to practise it too.

As to the character of this 'Great Game', it seems obvious. Russia's role is subordinate: it wants to prevent further secessions (by slaughtering the Chechen opposition, for example) and restore its global standing by increasing its hegemony in a geopolitically important area. In addition, Russia has forged links with several of America's opponents, such as Iran, and is looking to revive its interests in Cuba just as the American political class shows signs of being willing to drop its blockade. And it has been moving closer to China, with the reported aim of building a 'NATO of the east'. The Russian ruling class, having decisively turned against its pro-Western neoliberal political leadership in the mid-1990s, wants to restore its position as a global player. The US, by contrast, has always pursued a 'Grand Area' strategy. In this design, whole areas of the planet are presumed to be under its command even where there is no direct rule or even military presence. From the Monroe Doctrine to the post-WWII 'spheres of influence', such a strategy enabled it to displace former colonial rivals. And American planners had an unprecedented opportunity when the USSR broke down - the Warsaw Pact states broke away, the Russians had just lost Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Central Asian states were seceeding (often becoming pro-Washington without altering the basic organisational, political and ideological machinery that had persisted when Moscow was in charge). This was a remarkable gift, for, barring a brief period following the Russian Revolution, the Caucasus and Central Asia had been increasingly under Russia's imperial control since Peter the Great. The main difference between the Tsarist Empire and the Stalinist one was that in the latter, the states were formally independent components of a union of socialist republics who had the right to leave at any time (a relic of one of Lenin's early victories over Stalin), rather than subjugated land masses in which the Tsar unapologetically carried out genocidal massacres against local Muslim populations in the name of civilization. This formal legal status meant it was possible for states on Russia's southern flank to break away without their local rulers being overthrown and without the social structure being fundamentally altered. That gave Washington a bonus in 'stability' in its new client-states that might otherwise have been absent.

Such stability has been threatened by two after-effects of America's Afghanistan campaign, which were that local opposition forces would include Islamist militants circulating around the Central Asian region from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that one of the main local industries would be heroin production and distribution. Just as the CIA used drugs to raise money for far right forces in Vietnam and Nicaragua, so it had helped warlords in Afghanistan cultivate and transport the opium crop that would go on to supply 75% of the world's supply of skag. The US nonetheless made an ally of the Taliban for a while, forged close relations with the 'narco-states' it is so ostentatiously remonstrative about today, and got Chevron, Union Oil of California, Amoco and Exxon into the region to exploit the substantial proven oil supplies and the gas reserves that make 40% of the world's total supply. Contrary to some opinion, the placing of 'lily-pads' in the Caucasus and Central Asia did not begin under Bush or after 9/11, but under Clinton in 1997. Encirclement of Russia is a bipartisan policy. But several of these states would become crucial allies of Bush during the 'war on terror', and were able as a result to stigmatise opposition to their regimes first by pretending that the minority Islamist currents (such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or the far larger Hizb ut-Tahrir) were representative of the opposition, and secondly by claiming that these movements were in turn local adjuncts of 'Al Qaeda'. In other words, the 'war on terror' bolstered the most viciously authoritarian states in the region. It also bolstered their role in heroin trade, as US-supported warlords integrated into the new Afghan state rely on the production of opium to sustain military control of their fiefdoms. And, although we are advised that Dyncorp's role is to suppress the drugs trade, this report [pdf] shows that their activities drive up the prices of the substance, thus enriching the warlords who depend on it. If production were shut down in Afghanistna, it would now probably move to Tajikistan, where laboratories for processing the substance have been built. At any rate, as we have also seen, this crop is also sustaining the efforts of the various Afghan insurgents collectively described as the Taliban, as well as funding various opposition movements in Central Asia. So, Washington has also unleashed the very dynamics that might destabilise its own efforts to control the situation.

It is important not to overlook the divisions that this conflict has revealed. For all the talk of a unipolar world after the Cold War, the reality was never as simple. The neoconservative right was at least realistic in this aspect of its outlook: it accurately anticipated the emergence of potential challengers, and urged policymakers to embrace a program of global expansion to forestall such possibilities. The EU, though it lacked the coherence to ever become a rival military or economic power to the US, was no longer dependent on an American-owned security canopy. NATO had to find new rationales for its existence on the basis of common American-European interests, which it duly did in Yugoslavia. It then proposed to expand its remit well beyond its traditional boundaries, which it then did in Afghanistan, bringing the alliance into the strategically crucial Caucasus and Central Asia. But that doesn't mean that European states are all in agreement as to whether to remain involved in what could be a perpetually escalating commitment that binds their own interests ever more tightly to American military power. And it certainly doesn't mean that a collective of states that relies heavily on Russian energy supplies is anxious to follow America into a belligerent stance against Russia. For example, both Germany and France were opposed to admitting the Ukraine and Georgia any prospect of joining NATO. France's role in this conflict has been to send Bernard Kouchner to Georgia to negotiate a peace settlement, which basically amounted to urging Saakashvili to retreat (even while Sarkozy vocally denounced the Russians). France and Russia have been historical allies, so this is unsurprising.

Interestingly, the UK leadership has been quite reticent on this issue. This could be because Britain is one of the main foreign investors in Russia, and because it has been British policy to ally with the Putin government where possible, even during its suppression of the Chechen revolt. For example, Tony Blair explained in 2000 during a visit to St Petersburg that "Chechnya isn't Kosovo", and insisted to the House of Commons that whatever concerns there were about Chechnya, "we support Russia in her action against terrorism". Say what you like about Russia's bombing in Georgia, it is not even close to the pounding that Chechnya received. As of 2007, the UK was the single biggest investor in Russia [pdf], supplying approximately a quarter of its foreign direct investment. A great portion of this is not just energy, but finance-capital from the City's major investment institutions. Despite turf-wars, such as BP's stakeholder dispute with TNK, British investment capital still presumably expects to reap great dividends from Russia. The EU as a whole, moreover, is the source of most investment in the country. In short, it seems that the conflict has exposed a major fissure between the US and its erstwhile European allies. Only the countries of 'new Europe' who are most dependent on an alliance with the US, and most fearful of Russian resurgence, are really siding with Georgia on this question.

The US political class is less divided. Of the two main presidential candidates, McCain is staking out the most belligerent territory, but Obama is catching up rapidly. His foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has compared Putin to Hitler and complained that Western access to crucial oil pipelines will be cut off by Russia's actions - which suggests that any administration that takes his advice would be far more aggressive toward Russia than the Bush administration has been. While McCain wants to keep fighting in Iraq, Obama wants to pour troops into Afghanistan and shore up the Central Asian frontier. Brzezinski has already supplied the rationale for this in The Grand Chessboard: "Eurasia is the world's axial super continent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa ... Eurasia accounts for 75% of the world's population, 60% of its GNP, and 75% of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's." In this account, control of the Middle East is a secondary aim. You may recall Obama's sabre-rattling toward Pakistan and still think it was just big talk from a presidential candidate working in a martial culture. But consider the context: the bombing raids that the US has already carried out in Pakistan, apparently without permission. Several arms of the US state accuse the ISI of backing insurgents in Afghanistan. It would seem that US control of its Pakistani ally is tenuous, and that the US has to threaten it with a bit of ultra-violence to keep it in line. It may even come to an American invasion given a sufficient crisis. So Obama was being perfectly realistic about what he might be expected to do. In his most recent book, Second Chance, Brzezinski offers a future president the purported means to reverse America's declining power. One of his recommendations is to pay more attention to Russia, disrupt its increasingly close relationship with China and make a concerted effort to contain Putin's efforts to restore Russian power. Bush is excoriated for, among other things, failing to act decisively against Putin while alienating the Chinese leadership. And Brzezinski, I suspect, is speaking for a lot of people in the American establishment. So, don't buy the line that Obama is just tail-coating McCain when he talks tough about Russian aggression. It is an integral component of the global 'Grand Area' strategy of a significant component of US power.



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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #7 on: 2008-08-16 15:17:39 »
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A thought on the global issues I had over looked. What bothers me though is a skill level would be necessary to accomplish this that on occasion seems to elude the ruling ones.

Cheers

FRitz


Wag the Dog: How to Conceal Massive Economic Collapse
Sooure: global rearch
Author: Ellen Brown
Date: August 16th, 2008

"I’m in show business, why come to me?"
"War is show business, that’s why we’re here."
– "Wag the Dog" (1997 film)

Last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had just announced record losses, and so had most reporting corporations. Unemployment was mounting, the foreclosure crisis was deepening, state budgets were in shambles, and massive bailouts were everywhere. Investors had every reason to expect the dollar and the stock market to plummet, and gold and oil to shoot up. Strangely, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 300 points, the dollar strengthened, and gold and oil were crushed. What happened?

It hardly took psychic powers to see that the Plunge Protection Team had come to the rescue. Formally known as the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, the PPT was once concealed and its very existence denied as if it were a matter of strict national security. But the PPT has now come out of the closet. What was once a legally questionable "manipulator" of markets has become a sanctioned stabilizer and protector of markets. The new tone was set in January 2008, when global markets took their worst tumble since September 11, 2001. Senator Hillary Clinton said in a statement reported by the State News Service:

"I think it’s imperative that the following step be taken. The President should have already and should do so very quickly, convene the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. That’s something that he can ask the Secretary of the Treasury to do. . . . This has to be coordinated across markets with the regulators here and obviously with regulators and central banks around the world."1

The mystery over what was going on with the dollar the first week in August was solved by James Turk, founder of GoldMoney, who wrote on August 7:

"[T]he banking problems in the United States continue to mount, while the federal government’s deficit continues to soar out of control. . . . So what happened to cause the dollar to rally over the past three weeks? In a word, intervention. Central banks have propped up the dollar, and here’s the proof.

"When central banks intervene in the currency markets, they exchange their currency for dollars. Central banks then use the dollars they acquire to buy US government debt instruments so that they can earn interest on their money. The debt instruments central banks acquire are held in custody for them at the Federal Reserve, which reports this amount weekly.

"On July 16, 2008 . . . , the Federal Reserve reported holding $2,349 billion of US government paper in custody for central banks. In its report released today, this amount had grown over the past three weeks to $2,401 billion, a 38.4% annual rate of growth. . . . So central banks were accumulating dollars over the past three weeks at a rate far above what one would expect as a result of the US trade deficit. The logical conclusion is that they were intervening in currency markets. They were buying dollars for the purpose of propping it up, to keep the dollar from falling off the edge of the cliff and doing so ignited a short covering rally, which is not too difficult to do given the leverage employed in the markets these days by hedge funds and others."2

Just as central banks manipulate currencies in concert, so gold can be manipulated by massive selling of central bank reserves. Oil and any other market can be manipulated as well. But markets can be manipulated by only so much and for only so long without fixing the underlying problem. There is more bad news coming down the pike, news of such magnitude that no amount of ordinary manipulation is liable to conceal it.

For one thing, roughly $400 billion in ARMs (adjustable rate mortgages) have or will reset between March and October of this year. Assuming 3 to 6 months for strapped debtors to actually hit the wall with their payments, a huge wave of defaults is about to strike, continuing through March 2009 – just in time for the next huge wave of resets, in option ARMs.3 Option ARMs are loans with the option to pay even less than just the interest on the loan monthly, increasing the loan balance until the loan reaches a certain amount (typically 110% to 125% of the original loan balance), when it resets. The $800 billion credit line recently opened to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be not only tapped but tapped out, at taxpayer expense. The underlying problem is little discussed but impossible to repair – a one quadrillion dollar derivatives scheme that is now imploding. Banks everywhere are facing massive writeoffs, putting the whole banking system on the brink of collapse. Only public bailouts will save it, but they could bankrupt the nation.

What to do? War and threats of war have been used historically to distract the population and deflect public scrutiny from economic calamity. As the scheme was summed up in the trailer to the 1997 movie "Wag the Dog" --

"There’s a crisis in the White House, and to save the election, they’d have to fake a war."

Perhaps that explains the sudden breakout of war in the Eurasian country of Georgia on August 8, just 3 months before the November elections. August 8 was the day the Olympic Games began in Beijing, a distraction that may have been timed to keep China from intervening on Russia’s behalf. The mainstream media version of events is that Russia, the bully on the block, invaded its tiny neighbor Georgia; but not all commentators agree. Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in The Washington Post on August 12, observed:

"What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity. . . . The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force."4


Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power, commented in OpEdNews on August 11:

"The U.S. has long been involved in supporting ‘freedom movements’ throughout this region that have been attempting to replace Russian influence with U.S. corporate control. The CIA, National Endowment for Democracy . . . , and Freedom House (includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, former CIA director James Woolsey, and Obama foreign policy adviser Anthony Lake) have been key funders and supporters of placing politicians in power throughout Central Asia that would play ball with ‘our side’. . . . None of this is about the good guys versus the bad guys. It is power bloc politics . . . . Big money is at stake . . . . [B]oth parties (Republican and Democrat) share a bi-partisan history and agenda of advancing corporate interests in this part of the world. Obama’s advisers, just like McCain’s (one of his top advisers was recently a lobbyist for the current government in Georgia) are thick in this stew."5

Brzezinski, who is now Obama’s adviser, was Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy adviser in the 1970s. He also served in the 1970s as director of the Trilateral Commission, which he co-founded with David Rockefeller Sr., considered by some to be the "master spider" of the Wall Street banking network.6 Brzezinski later boasted of drawing Russia into war with Afghanistan in 1979, "giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War."7 Is the Georgia affair an attempted repeat of that coup? Mike Whitney, a popular Internet commentator, observed on August 11:

"Washington’s bloody fingerprints are all over the invasion of South Ossetia. Georgia President Mikhail Saakashvili would never dream of launching a massive military attack unless he got explicit orders from his bosses at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After all, Saakashvili owes his entire political career to American power-brokers and US intelligence agencies. If he disobeyed them, he’d be gone in a fortnight. Besides an operation like this takes months of planning and logistical support; especially if it’s perfectly timed to coincide with the beginning of the Olympic games. (another petty neocon touch) That means Pentagon planners must have been working hand in hand with Georgian generals for months in advance. Nothing was left to chance."8

Part of that careful planning may have been the unprecedented propping up of the dollar and bombing of gold and oil the week before the curtain opened on the scene. Gold and oil had to be pushed down hard to give them room to rise before anyone shouted "hyperinflation!" As we watch the curtain rise on war in Eurasia, it is well to remember that things are not always as they seem. Markets are manipulated and wars are staged by Grand Chessmen behind the scenes.

NOTES

[1]        Remarks from Hillary Clinton on the Global Economic Crisis,” CNN (January 22, 2008) (video preserved on allamericanpatriots.com).



[2]        James Turk, “Mystery Solved,”  GoldMoney.com (August 7, 2008).



[3]        Bill Murphy, “Wipeout Nightmare,” LeMetropoleCafe.com (August 11, 2008); Ruth Simon, “FirstFed Grapples With Payment-Option Mortgages,” Wall Street Journal (August 6, 2008); Ruth Simon, “Mortgages Made in 2007 Go Bad at Rapid Clip,” ibid. (August 7, 2008).



[4]        Mikhail Gorbachev, “A Path to Peace in the Caucasus,” Washington Post (August 12, 2008).



[5]        Bruce Gagnon, “What Do We Know About Georgia-Russia Conflict?”, OpEdNews (August 11, 2008).



[6]        Hans Schicht, “Financial Spider Webbing,” Gold-eagle.com (February 27, 2004).



[7]        “Soviet War in Afghanistan,” Wikipedia



[8]        Mike Whitney, “Bush’s War in Georgia,” Global Research (August 11, 2008).



Ellen Brown, J.D., developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her eleven books include the bestselling Nature’s Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, and Forbidden Medicine.
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #8 on: 2008-08-22 09:54:08 »
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Text message alerted Georgia over the ‘model’ of operation

Source: The National
Authors: Mitchell Prothero (Foreign Correspondent)
Dated: 2008-08-21
Dateline: Tbilisi

The text message arrived early on the morning of Aug 6, sent to a senior adviser of Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, from a US government official who had just read an intelligence intercept collected by the US National Security Agency.

“The model is Kosovo,” the SMS began, according to the official, and then briefly described an alleged Russian plan for dealing with the increasing tensions between Georgian troops and armed separatists in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia backed by the Russian military.

The Russians, according to the text, planned to force a confrontation inside South Ossetia to justify a widespread invasion that would remove both South Ossetia and another pro-Russian enclave, Abkhazia, from Georgian rule under the pretext of protecting the pro-Russian populations from Georgian ethnic cleansing.

The operation would also ideally destroy Georgia’s military modernisation programme, halt any movement towards the tiny country joining Nato and possibly force Mr Saakashvili from office and return Georgia to the pro-Russian fold.


What happened in the first days of the conflict remains unknown, as independent observers have gained no access to the Russian-held battlefields and villages of South Ossetia and each side has repeatedly exaggerated its own civilian losses and the damage done by the other side. But a slow trickle of verified facts appears to confirm much of the Georgian claims that the Russians provoked a fight, used hyperbole over civilian casualties to paralyse the US and European reaction and then moved to neuter the Georgian military and Mr Saakashvili’s government.

Eventually, the Russian army occupied not just the republics but large swathes of uncontested Georgian territory. Moreover, the army appears unlikely to leave anytime soon.

Rezo Adamia, a member of the Georgian parliament from 1992 to 2002, who for seven years chaired its defence security committee, said he watched as the trap was laid and sprang.

“The government just stuck their nose in it and [Vladmir] Putin was waiting,” he said in Tbilisi, where he lives in retirement.

“Having had extensive experience with negotiating with the Russians on various issues in the 1990s, I had no doubt they were provoking a fight. I just can’t believe the government allowed itself to fall for this obvious a trap. A fight in Ossetia only would help Putin damage Georgia.”

Mr Adamia said he became convinced that it was an intentional and planned attack on Georgia and Mr Saakashvili’s government when the Russians entered uncontested Georgian lands.

Mr Adamia said he could not comprehend how Mr Saakashvili did not know that Mr Putin was eager for the chance to hurt Georgia.

“I negotiated the end of the Adjara attempt to secede,” he said. “Putin was glowering and told me to tell Misha myself ‘this is the last thing we give you. Never enter South Ossetia or Abkhazia.’ Who wouldn’t believe Putin?”

Although the text message and the origins of its warnings could not be verified by The National, multiple sources as well as electronic evidence have confirmed the timing of its arrival in Tbilisi as well as its original sender.

Georgian officials, international monitors and diplomatic sources have said the SMS was consistent with their understanding of events and most marvelled at how precisely it described the coming Russian operation.

They confirmed that on Aug 6, just two days before the Georgian assault on South Ossetia, Tbilisi began warning its allies that Russia was provoking a showdown over the two breakaway republics, and begged for a diplomatic initiative to prevent any escalation.


“Germany told us that Putin would never invade Georgia and that he was just trying to provoke us into a mistake that would give them an excuse to support Ossetian independence,” according to the senior adviser.

“We’d been warning the Americans for months that this was coming and the only response was that they would send the info up the [US] chain of command.”

On Aug 8, Georgian forces hit the South Ossetian capital of Tsinkvali in response – Tbilisi claims – to attacks on ethnic Georgian villages by Ossetian irregular forces, despite widespread warnings from its allies not to engage in any behaviour that might give the Russians an excuse to act.

That attack, most agree, turned into a grave miscalculation on the part of the Georgians and quickly led to the current Russian occupation.

“We knew they were setting us up, but we had people coming under fire, villages being shelled with mortars, lives were being lost,” the Georgian official said. “If we didn’t act in some way, we couldn’t really call ourselves the Georgian government anymore and would have lost our credibility in the eyes of the Georgian people. Without diplomatic pressure, we had two terrible choices and [Saakashvili] had to pick one direction.”

Immediately after the attack on Tsinkvali, a huge Russian armoured force crossed into South Ossetia and began a ferocious counterattack that quickly routed the Georgian military. The Russians claimed they were acting to protect the South Ossetians after 2,000 civilians were killed by the Georgian attack.

Less than 48 hours ago, Russian officials downgraded the number of confirmed civilian dead from 2,000 to 133. [ Hermit : This is probably still an exaggeration. Human Rights Watch, which has representatives in Ossetia, estimates that 50 were killed in the Georgian attack. In addition, they observe that the Ossetians refer to their militia (about 35,000 of them armed by Russia) as "civilians (to differentiate them from the Russian military). ] The Georgian military estimates its dead, wounded, captured and missing at between 100 to 300, and Russian and South Ossetian military deaths in the dozens.

Even if all of these numbers rise, as they will as more areas are reached, no one – including the Russians – seems willing to continue to argue the Georgian military conducted widespread attacks on civilians or committed genocide.

Human Rights Watch researchers have been putting pressure on the Russians to allow access to disputed areas but have found little evidence to confirm Russian claims of Georgian genocide. The researchers have, however, found specific evidence of the Russian use of cluster bombs on Georgian civilian areas.
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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #9 on: 2008-08-24 05:38:56 »
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[Blunderov] "A Really Bad Couple of Weeks for Pax Americana"; after some thought I decided to append this piece to this thread because it seems so apt - except that the man dropping shoes in the room above appears to have more than the usual number of feet.

http://listverse.com/history/10-lesser-known-massacres/

Massacre of Elphinstone’s Army*



The Massacre of Elphinstone’s Army was a victory of Afghan forces led by Akbar Khan, the son of Dost Mohammad Khan, over a combined British and Indian force led by William Elphinstone in January 1842. After the British and Indian troops captured Kabul in 1839, an Afghan uprising forced the occupying garrison out of the city. The British army, consisting of 4,500 troops and 12,000 working personnel or camp-followers, left Kabul on January 6, 1842.

They attempted to reach the British garrison at Jalalabad, 90 miles away, but were immediately harassed by Afghan forces. The last remnants were eventually annihilated near Gandamak on January 13. Only one man, the assistant surgeon William Brydon, survived and managed to reach Jalalabad.


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/23/11103/

Published on Saturday, August 23, 2008 by Inter Press Service

A Really Bad Couple of Weeks for Pax Americana
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON  - Whatever hopes the George W. Bush administration may have had for using its post-9/11 “war on terror” to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, appear to have gone up in flames — in some cases, literally — over the past two weeks.

Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington’s favourite Caucasian, President Mikhail Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians.But bloody attacks in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, about 1,000 kms to the east also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled U.S.-backed governments.

And while U.S. negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit U.S. combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi’a-dominated government of President Nouri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the U.S.-backed, predominantly Sunni ”Awakening” movement has raised the spectre of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilising greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme — the administration’s top priority before the Georgia crisis — have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighbourhood.

”The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking,” noted a statement released Friday by the National Security Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking officials critical of the Bush administration’s more-aggressive policies. And a prominent New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, argued that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled ”the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force.”

Indeed, Russia’s intervention in what it used to call its ”near abroad” was clearly the most spectacular of the fortnight’s developments, both because of its unprecedented use of overwhelming military force against a U.S. ally heavily promoted by Washington for membership in NATO and because of the geo-strategic implications of its move for the increasingly-troubled Atlantic alliance and U.S. hopes that Caspian and Central Asian energy resources could be safely transported to the West without transiting either Russia or Iran.

While Russia did not seize control of the Baku-Tbili-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline or approach the area proposed for the Nabucco pipeline further south, its intervention made it abundantly clear that it could have done so if it had wished, a message that is certain to reverberate across gas-hungry Europe. Indeed, investors now may prove considerably less enthusiastic about financing the Nabucco project than before, dealing yet another blow to Washington’s regional ambitions.

Russia’s move also raised new questions about its willingness to tolerate the continued use by the U.S. and other NATO countries of key air bases and other military facilities in the southern part of the former Soviet Union, notably Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, over which Moscow maintains substantial influence.

As with Georgia, where the U.S. significantly escalated its military presence by sending over Russian protests 200 Special Forces troops in early 2002, Washington first acquired access to these bases under the pretext of its post-9/11 ”global war on terrorism”. But, while clearly important to its subsequent operations on Afghanistan, they were also seen as key building blocks — or ”lily pads” — in the construction of a permanent military infrastructure that could both contain a resurgent Russia or an emergent China and help establish U.S. hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and the Caspian region in what its architects hoped would be a ”New American Century.”

As suggested by former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani this week, Washington and, to some extent, NATO behind it, ”has intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant countries. They are no longer dormant…”

Indeed, still badly bogged down in Iraq where, despite the much-reduced level of sectarian violence, political reconciliation remains elusive, to say the least, the U.S. and its overly deferential NATO allies now face unprecedented challenges in Afghanistan not entirely unfamiliar to the Soviets 20 years ago.

”The news out of Afghanistan is truly alarming,” warned Thursday’s lead editorial in the New York Times, which noted the killings of 10 French paratroopers near Kabul in an ambush earlier in the week — the single worst combat death toll for NATO forces in the war there — as well as the coordinated assault by suicide bombers on one of the biggest U.S. military bases there as indications of an increasingly dire situation. In the last three months, more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

”Afghanistan badly needs reinforcements. Badly,” wrote ret. Col. Pat Lang, a former top Middle East and South Asia expert at the Defence Intelligence Agency on his blog this week. ”Afghanistan badly needs a serious infrastructure and economic development programme. Badly.”

Of course, the Taliban’s resurgence has in no small part been due to the safe haven it has been provided next door in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where Pakistan’s own Taliban, which also hosts a rejuvenating al Qaeda, has not only tightened its hold on the region in recent months but extended it into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Last week, it retaliated in spectacular fashion to airborne attacks on its forces by the U.S.-backed military in Bajaur close to the Khyber Pass — the most important supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan — by carrying out suicide bombings at a heavily guarded munitions factory that killed nearly 70 people near Islamabad.

Analysts here are especially worried that, having achieved the resignation last week of U.S.-backed former President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the new civilian government will likely tear itself apart over the succession and the growing economic crisis and thus prove completely ineffective in dealing with Washington’s top priority — confronting and defeating the Taliban in a major counter-insurgency effort for which the army, long focused on the conventional threat posed by India, has shown no interest at all.

Indeed, the current leadership vacuum in Islamabad has greatly compounded concern here that the army’s intelligence service ISI, which Washington believes played a role in last month’s deadly Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, could broaden its anti-Indian efforts. This is especially so now that Indian Kashmir is once again hotting up, ensuring a sharp escalation in the two nuclear-armed countries’ decades-long rivalry and threatening in yet another way the post-Cold War Pax Americana.

Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service.

*[Bl] Flashman aficionados will recall this disaster as the main adventure which informed the first packet of papers discovered at the now famous Leicestershire  sale room.

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/frasergm/flashman.htm
« Last Edit: 2008-08-24 05:49:31 by Blunderov » Report to moderator   Logged
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Re:The Other Shoe : We tilt at windmills as world war looms
« Reply #10 on: 2008-08-24 23:51:59 »
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[Fritz]Lead to this one through Lord Stirling's blog. It sure seems like there are way to many balls in the air. Blunderov, as you point out there is a 'deja vu' quality to the Afghanistan saga, the west would seem to be reliving but with epic consequences this time. The financial muddle in the US is waiting for the 'Other Shoe' to drop as well this fall. The GMO bacteria scare now simmering.

The 'Four Horsemen' would seem to be riding with renewed vigar.

Cheers

Fritz


Source: TimesOnline
Author:Simon Jenkins
Date: August 24, 2008

We tilt at windmills as world war looms

Is the world drifting towards a new global war? From this week the dominant super-power, America, will for three months pass through the valley of the shadow of democracy, a presidential election. This is always a moment of self-absorption and paranoia. Barack Obama and John McCain will not act as statesmen but as politicians. They will grandstand and look over their shoulders. Their eye will stray from the ball.

Meanwhile, along history’s fault line of conflict from Russia’s European border to the Caucasus and on to Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, diplomats are shifting uneasily in their seats, drums are sounding and harsh words are spoken. The world is now run by a generation of leaders who have never known global war. Has this dulled their senses?

Dan McNeill, an American general, was recently interviewed in Kabul on how to beat the Taliban. He was not the first to conclude that this could not be done militarily but only by “winning hearts and minds”. The problem, he said, lay in the answer to the question, “Whose hearts and minds?” Was it those of the Afghan people or was it rather those of the American Congress and voters?

Both Obama and McCain have claimed that the war in Iraq has been allowed to distract attention from the war in Afghanistan. This is different from the neoconservatives, who felt the war in Afghanistan was a distraction from the more important war in Iraq.
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America now thinks it has won in Baghdad and must return to Kabul - and possibly even Tehran. At the same time it must face the possibility that these conflicts may in turn be a distraction from the reemergence as world powers of Russia and China, who are already gaining the initiative in Iran and Africa. Moscow is also precipitating a nationalist resurgence in eastern Europe and among Russian minorities in the Caucasus.

The question is critical. Has the West misjudged the fault line of an impending conflict? Its global strategy under George Bush, Tony Blair and a ham-fisted Nato has declared the threat to world peace as coming from nonstate organisations, specifically Al-Qaeda, and the nations that give them either bases or tacit support. Western generals and securocrats have elevated these anarchist fanatics to the status of nuclear powers. Policing crime has become “waging war”, so as to justify soaring budgets and influence over policy, much as did America’s military-industrial complex during the cold war.

Might it be that a raging seven-year obsession with Osama Bin Laden and his tiny Al-Qaeda organisation has blinded strategists to the old verities? Wars are rarely “clashes of civilisation”, but rather clashes of interest. They are usually the result of careless policy, of misread signals and of mission creep closing options for peace.

Terrorists, wherever located and trained, can certainly capture headlines and cause overnight mayhem, but they cannot project power. They cannot conquer countries or peoples, only manipulate democratic regimes into espousing illiberal policies, as in America and Britain. By grossly overstating the significance of terrorism, western leaders have distracted foreign policy from what should be its prime concern: securing world peace by holding a balance of interest - and pride - among the great powers.

To any who lived through the cold war, recent events along Russia’s western and southern borders are deeply ominous. Moscow initially spent the 17 years since the fall of the Soviet Union flirting with the West. It had been defeated and had good reason for disarming and putting out feelers to join Nato and the European Union. It took part in such proto-capitalist entities as the G8.

In the case of Nato and the EU it was arrogantly rebuffed, while its former Warsaw Pact allies were accepted. Moscow was told it would be foolish to worry about encirclement. A nation that had never enjoyed democracy should content itself with basking in its delights. Russians in the Baltic states and in Ukraine should make their peace with emerging governments. The political clutter of the cold war should be decontaminated.

Suddenly this has not worked. The world is showing alarming parallels with the 1930s. Lights are turning to red as the world again approaches depression. The credit crunch and the collapse of world trade talks are making nations introverted. Meanwhile, the defeated power of the last war, Russia, is flexing its muscles and finding them in good working order.

On Thursday Gordon Brown told his troops in Afghanistan that “what you are doing here prevents terrorism coming to the streets of Britain”. He cannot believe this any more than do his generals. Afghanistan poses no military threat to Britain. Rather it is Britain’s occupation and the response in neighbouring Pakistan that fosters antiwestern militancy in the region. Like the impoverishment of Germany between the wars, the stirring of antiwestern and antiChristian sentiment in the Muslim world can only be dangerous and counter-productive. Yet we do it.

The Taliban are fighting an old-fashioned insurgent war against a foreign invader and recruiting Pakistanis and antiwestern fanatics to help. They have succeeded in tormenting Washington and London with visions of a destabilised nuclear Pakistan, a blood-drenched Middle East and an Iran whose leaders may yet turn to jihad. For Brown - or the American presidential candidates - to imply that these conflicts with the Muslim world are making the world “safer” is manifestly untrue.

Worse, it distorts policy. Rather than calming other foes so the West can concentrate on the conflicts in hand, it is pointlessly stirring Russian expansionism to life.

There is no strategic justification for siting American missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. It is nothing but right-wing provocation. Nato’s welcome to Georgia and Ukraine, for no good reason but at risk of having to come to their aid, has served only to incite Georgia to realise that risk while also infuriating Moscow.

Russia is well able to respond recklessly to a snub without such encouragement, so why encourage it? The more powerful state - America - surely has an obligation to show the greater caution. Any strategic decision, such as the goading of Moscow, must plan for its response. Nato’s bureaucracy, lacking coherence and leadership, has been searching for a role since the end of the cold war. That role is apparently now to play with fire.

Western strategy is dealing with a resurgent, rich and potent Russia. It has played fast and loose with Moscow’s age-old sensitivity and forgotten the message of George Kennan, the American statesman: that Russia must be understood and contained rather than confronted. The naive remarks welcoming Georgia to Nato by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, show a West far detached from such analytical truths.

Any student of McCain or Obama, of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, or of the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, might conclude that these are not people likely to go to war. They are surely the children of peace. Yet history shows that “going to war” is never an intention. It is rather the result of weak, shortsighted leaders entrapped by a series of mistakes. For the West’s leaders at present, mistake has become second nature.
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Re:The Other Shoe
« Reply #11 on: 2008-09-04 12:33:13 »
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[Blunderov] Kosovo, by way of Georgia, seems to have been the harbinger of a new global dynamic; the USA, having broken its hands on Iraq, is now no longer the global unipolar superpower. A new and much more dangerous configuration has now arisen.

(I would add that, IMO, the situation is such that the USA dare not now further over-extend itself by attacking Iran.)

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=TRI20080903&articleId=10053

A Major War: Not Just Rumors

by Srdja Trifkovic
 
Global Research, September 3, 2008
chroniclesmagazine.org 

The crisis in relations between the United States and Russia over Georgia heralds a particularly dangerous period in world affairs: the era of asymmetrical multipolarity. A major war between two or more major powers is more likely in this configuration than in any other model of global balance known to history. The most stable system is bipolarity based on the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which was prevalent from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War. The awareness of both superpowers that they would inflict severe and unavoidable reciprocal damage on each other or their allies in a nuclear war was coupled with the acceptance that each had a sphere of dominance or vital interest that should not be infringed upon.

With Brest-Litovsk and the Barbarossa in mind, Stalin "intended to turn the countries conquered by Soviet armies into buffer zones to protect Russia" (Kissinger). The Western equivalent, also essentially defensive, was defined by the Truman Doctrine (1947) Proxy wars were fought in the grey zone all over the Third World, most notably in the Middle East, but they were kept localized even when a superpower was directly involved (Vietnam, Afghanistan). This model was the product of unique circumstances without an adequate historical precedent, however, which are unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future.

The most stable model of international relations that is both historically recurrent and structurally repeatable in the future is the balance of power system in which no single great power is either physically able or politically willing to seek hegemony. This model was prevalent from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until Napoleon, from Waterloo until around 1900, and from Versailles until 1933. It demands a relative equilibrium between the key powers (usually five to seven) that hold each other in check and function within a recognized set of rules that has come to be known as "international law." Wars between great powers do occur, but they are limited in scope and intensity because the warring parties tacitly accept the fundamental legitimacy and continued existence of their opponent(s).

If one of the powers becomes markedly stronger than others and if its decision-making elite internalizes an ideology that demands or at least justifies hegemony, the inherently unstable system of asymmetrical multipolarity will develop. In all three known instances—Napoleonic France after 1799, the Kaiserreich from around 1900, and the Third Reich after 1933—the challenge could not be resolved without a major war.

The government of the United States is now acting in a manner structurally reminiscent of those three powers. Having proclaimed itself the leader of an imaginary "international community," it goes further than any previous would-be hegemon in treating the entire world as the American sphere of interest. As I pointed out two weeks ago, the formal codification came in the National Security Strategy of September 2002, which presented the specter of open-ended political, military, and economic domination of the world by the United States acting unilaterally against "rogue states" and "potentially hostile powers" and in pursuit of an end to "destructive national rivalries." To that end, the administration pledged "to keep military strength beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."

Any attempt by a single power to keep its military strength beyond challenge is inherently destabilizing, and results—sooner or later—in the emergence of an effective counter-coalition. Napoleon finally faced one at the Völkerschlacht at Leipzig in 1813. "There is no balance of power in Europe but me and my twenty-four army corps," the Kaiser famously boasted in 1901. Within years he was also building a high seas fleet. By 1907, Wilhelmine Germany engendered a counter-coalition that prompted even traditional rivals like Britain and Russia to join forces (the latter to be replaced by the United States in 1917). And as for the most recent Griff nach der Weltmacht, by the second week of December 1941 Germany was irrevocably doomed to another defeat.

An early yet certain symptom of destabilizing asymmetry in action is the would-be hegemon's tendency to claim an ever-widening sphere of influence or interference at the expense of his rivals. In the run-up to 1914 this was heralded by the Kruger Telegram (1896) and exemplified by the German bid to build the railway from Berlin to Baghdad (1903) and by the First Moroccan Crisis (1905). Neither Napoleon nor Hitler knew any «natural» limits, but their ambition was essentially confined to Europe. With the United States today the novelty is that this ambition is extended—literally—to the whole world. Not only the Western Hemisphere, not just the «Old Europe,» Japan, or Israel, but also Taiwan, Korea, and such unlikely places as Georgia, Estonia, Kosovo, or Bosnia, are considered vitally important. The globe itself is now effectively claimed as America's sphere of influence, Russia's Caucasian, European and Central Asian back yards most emphatically included.

Four weeks ago the game itself became alarmingly asymmetrical. For America it is still ideological, but for Russia it has become existential. Russia is now acting as a conservative, pre-1914 European power in seeking to protect its "near abroad." America is acting like a global revolutionary power, whose "near abroad" is literally everywhere.

It is therefore futile for Russia to try to "manage" the crisis in a pre-1914 manner and hope for some elusive softening on the other side, because the calculus in Washington is not rational. The counter-strategy of unpredictability, exemplified by Medvedev's recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, is an eminently rational response, however. It may yet force the remnant of sanity inside the Beltway to try and exercise some adult supervision over the bipartisan "foreign policy community" of smokers in the arsenal.


Srdja Trifkovic is a frequent contributor to Global Research.


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