"Russians in Georgia: Behind the harrowing individual tales of destruction and want, analysts see a clash between the US and Russia reminiscent of old Cold War divisions," reports BBC News.
The Washington Post has perhaps the best report so far on how the war in South Ossetia and Georgia got started. It is astonishing how this episode ignited a torrent of abuse and prejudice, second guessing and histrionics on both sides.
Map of Georgia, Russia, and the Caucases region
A Two-Sided Descent Into Full-Scale War
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 17, 2008; A01
TSKHINVALI, Georgia, Aug. 16 -- Nine days ago, late in the afternoon of Aug. 7, Georgian tanks, artillery and infantry began moving out of bases in Georgia and toward South Ossetia, a zone long held by separatists who are backed by Moscow.
About 800 troops from Georgia's 4th Battalion left a base in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, that Thursday afternoon, according to Georgian Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili. Later that day, units armed with the BM-21 Grad, a multiple rocket system whose World War II version was known as Stalin's Rain, moved out of their base in Gori, about 40 miles away.
As the Georgian units approached the contested zone from the south, Russian army forces were massed just to its north, separated from it only by the 4,000-yard-long Roki Tunnel through the Caucasus Mountains. The Russian units were receiving intelligence reports about the Georgian movement. About 8 p.m., Russian military aircraft took off and skirted Georgian airspace, staying just outside it, according to Kezerashvili.
For days, separatists and Georgian troops had skirmished along the border, but this movement of armor was a major new development.
Georgia and Russia were on a collision course. In three hours, full-scale war would begin.
With a huge air, land and sea campaign, Russian forces routed the Georgians in the following days and advanced far into Georgian territory, overrunning major cities and military bases. An ensuing uproar in the West, accusing Russia of using excessive force, has clouded details of how the war began.
Interviews with Georgian leaders, Russian officials, Western diplomats and Bush administration officials, together with briefings by the Russian military in Moscow, show that a series of escalating military moves by each side convinced the other that war was imminent.
The Georgian leadership took steps, sometimes against the advice of its allies, sometimes without telling them, that accelerated the advance to a war in which Georgia could never prevail, according to a U.S. account. But the key question -- who finally triggered full conflict? -- remains in dispute. The Georgians said they staged their offensive only after Russian troops began streaming into South Ossetia and the Russians saying they advanced only after the Georgians began attacking South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali.
The Kremlin, long angry over Georgia's close ties with the United States and Western Europe, may have been itching for a fight, as Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has long insisted. If so, Saakashvili facilitated the lopsided matchup. Some Western officials say that although he faced clear provocations, he was reckless. "If it was a trap, and there's good reason to think it was, he walked right into it," one Western diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
In Georgia, popular anger against Russia remains high, and Saakashvili has yet to be called to account for the decision to assault Tskhinvali, a small city in which thousands of civilians were forced into their cellars by shelling.
Russian officials say 2,000 people died in Tskhinvali. That figure has been described as inflated by human rights groups. But there unquestionably was a large toll of civilian deaths and injuries, which has outraged Russia and shocked Georgia's Western allies.
"It's deplorable, simply deplorable, to fire on civilians like that, and illegal," said Matthew Bryza, the U.S. special envoy to the region, in an interview. "It's horrible."
A Long Preamble
South Ossetia, an area the size of Rhode Island, is dominated by Ossetians, an ethnic group distinct from the country's majority Georgians. The province secured de facto independence from Georgia after a short, vicious war in the early 1990s. The two sides signed a cease-fire, but true peace never set in. The world denied formal recognition to the separatist mini-state, but Russia forged close links with it, providing aid, passports for South Ossetians and a peacekeeping force.
Earlier this year, two distant developments angered Russia. Western countries overrode Russian objections and endorsed independence for Kosovo, the separatist province of Serbia, and the NATO alliance, meeting in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, announced that Georgia might one day become a member, although it put off formal steps toward that goal. In April, Vladimir Putin, then the Russian president, upgraded ties with the separatist governments in South Ossetia and Abkhazia to a semiofficial level. Over the objections of Georgia and NATO, he sent troops into Abkhazia, saying the province feared a Georgian attack.
A Russian fighter plane, violating Georgian airspace, shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane that had been sent -- despite the cease-fire agreement -- on a surveillance mission, according to U.N. investigators. In July, during a visit to Georgia by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, two Russian warplanes flew into Georgian airspace.
Dmitry Sanakoyev, a South Ossetian leader willing to work with the authorities in Tbilisi, survived an assassination attempt in July.
"In the summer, we witnessed an increasing number of incidents -- explosions, shooting," said a European diplomat, adding that South Ossetia's military "professionalism" was beginning to grow.
South Ossetian leaders declined to attend talks with Georgian leaders in Helsinki, Western diplomats said. The South Ossetians said the Georgian negotiator's title, minister of state for the reintegration of Georgia, was insulting; Temur Yakobashvili, the minister, expressed willingness to change his title to special envoy, but to no avail.
On Aug. 1, an explosion in a small patch of South Ossetia held by the Georgians since the 1990s war wounded five Georgian policemen. Over the next two days, a series of shootings killed six Ossetians and five Georgians, according to figures compiled by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Each side accused the other of initiating artillery attacks and using heavier weapons.
Thursday, Aug. 7
On the morning of Aug. 7, after a night of Ossetian artillery fire, Yakobashvili said, he traveled to Tskhinvali for a meeting with the separatists that the Russians had convened at a Russian peacekeeping base. "Nobody was in the streets -- no cars, no people," he said in a conference call with reporters Aug. 14. "We met the general of the Russian peacekeepers, and he said that the separatists were not answering the phone." Yakobashvili left.
Around 2 p.m. that day, Ossetian artillery fire resumed, targeting Georgian positions in the village of Avnevi in South Ossetia. The barrage continued for several hours. Two Georgian peacekeepers were killed, the first deaths among Georgians in South Ossetia since the 1990s, according to Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze, who spoke in a telephone briefing Aug. 14.
"Where were the Russian peacekeepers when the South Ossetians were shelling the Georgian positions?" said Bryza, the U.S. envoy. ". . . They didn't lift a finger to stop them."
Russian officials say the Georgians fired back during the day; Georgians say they restrained themselves.
But by evening, Kezerashvili said, the Georgian side had had enough.
"At 6, I gave the order to prepare everything, to go out from the bases," he said in an interview Aug. 14 at a Georgian position along the Tbilisi-Gori highway. Kezerashvili described the movement of armor, which included tanks, 122mm howitzers and 203mm self-propelled artillery, as a show of force designed to deter the Ossetians from continuing to barrage the Georgian troops' positions inside South Ossetia.
Western officials in and around South Ossetia also recorded the troop and armor movement, according to a Western diplomat who described in detail on-the-ground reports by monitors from the OSCE. The monitors recorded the movement of BM-21s in the late afternoon.
"On Thursday -- Thursday afternoon -- they noticed equipment and troops on the road, rolling to Karaleti," a Georgian village near Gori, the diplomat said. Kezerashvili said the BM-21s moved Thursday night.
At 7 p.m., with troops on the march, Saakashvili went on national television and declared a unilateral cease-fire. "We offer all of you partnership and friendship," he said to the South Ossetians. "We are ready for any sort of agreement in the interest of peace."
About 9 p.m., the Ossetians complained to Western monitors about the military traffic, according to a diplomat in Tbilisi.
Russian troops and armored units had been in Russian territory just north of South Ossetia for an annual summer military exercise. This year, they stayed in the area after completing the maneuvers. Russian intelligence officers were receiving reports about the movement of Georgian armor, and they interpreted it as the beginning of an offensive, according to a Russian official.
Saakashvili's televised call for a cease-fire, coinciding with the movement of so many troops and weapons, was perceived in Moscow as an attempt to buy time while Georgian forces positioned themselves for a major attack.
"From 18:00, Georgian troops from inner districts are relocated to the area" near the South Ossetian border, Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a colonel-general on the Russian General Staff, told reporters in Moscow at a retrospective briefing. "More than 20 armored units arrive."
Kezerashvili said that around the same time, Georgians were receiving intelligence reports suggesting that Russian troops were gearing up to move south through the Roki Tunnel. Russia denies any such muster.
In a series of phone calls, Saakashvili contacted Western and NATO leaders and diplomats. "I started to call frantically," he said in an interview with foreign journalists.
Bryza, the U.S. envoy, said: "Our response was, 'Don't get drawn into a trap. Don't confront the Russian military.' " Bryza said he was not told that Georgian armor was already moving toward the South Ossetian line and continued to do so even after Saakashvili declared a cease-fire.
The earlier movement of Russian troops into Abkhazia and around other terrain to the north was feeding sentiment among leaders in Tbilisi for a military response, Bryza said. "They felt they had to defend the honor of their nation and defend their villages. It was a very dangerous dynamic. That was part of an action-reaction, 'Guns of August' scenario that we tried to defuse."
According to Kezerashvili, on Thursday night, about three hours after Saakashvili's televised address, a new round of South Ossetian shells struck a Georgian peacekeeping position in the village of Sarabuki and an administration building in the village of Korta used by Sanakoyev, Tbilisi's South Ossetian ally.
Russia denies any such late-night bombardment. OSCE monitors in Tskhinvali also did not record any outgoing heavy artillery fire from the South Ossetian side at that time, according to a Western diplomat with access to the organization's on-the-ground reporting.
At 11 p.m., Saakashvili said, he received the first reports that Russian units were passing through the tunnel.
"We started to check, and around 11:50, I got confirmation that Russian armor was coming in," Saakashvili said. "So what we do now? I said, 'Now we respond with fire.' " To do otherwise, he said, would have been to cede Georgian sovereignty. He had no choice, he said.
In calls to the U.S. administration, Georgian officials did not convey the scope of what was to come, Bryza said. "During these intense exchanges between the leadership here and me, when they said they were going to lift the cease-fire, we said, 'Don't put your forces in harm's way, because you cannot prevail,' " he said. "And the response was: 'We understand that. We are going to shell the road on which the Russians are approaching and try to keep them back.' That's what they said."
The Russians, however, deny entering the Roki Tunnel until after Georgia began a full attack on Tskhinvali. The Russian Defense Ministry and the Russian prime minister's office did not respond to requests for the exact time of the entry into the tunnel or information on the subsequent movement of Russian troops.
A U.S. official familiar with intelligence from the region said the administration could not put a time on the Russian move into South Ossetia. "It's not clear," the official said. "You'd have to have had somebody there with a stopwatch, and something overhead at precisely that moment."
Friday, Aug. 8
"This is unfortunately when everything started," said Kezerashvili, the Georgian defense minister. "At 12 at night."
Georgian forces fired artillery rounds into Tskhinvali, which sits in a hollow. They attacked villages on surrounding higher ground. By 1 a.m., they were shelling the road along which a Russian column of more than 100 vehicles, including tanks and other armored vehicles, was moving south from the Roki Tunnel.
The column stopped for 90 minutes, Kezerashvili said.
By 2 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 8, Kezerashvili said, Georgian ground troops had advanced to the edge of Tskhinvali, and Georgian units had unleashed the BM-21 multiple rocket system, which can launch 40 rockets in 20 seconds.
Kezerashvili said the system was used to target separatist government buildings in the center of Tskhinvali, including the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry, where police forces have their headquarters. "It's not like a very open and big city, and I can tell you that we only targeted the places, the governmental organizations," Kezerashvili said.
But military experts said the BM-21 is a weapon for battlefield combat and not for use anywhere near civilians. "The BM-21 was designed to attack forces in large areas, and, as a consequence, if you use them in an urban environment, the likelihood of collateral damage is high," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The artillery fire on the city continued until daylight, according to the reports of three OSCE monitors who were there in a cellar; their building was shelled and damaged. The three got out of Tskhinvali on Friday afternoon during a lull in fighting.
By 10 a.m. on Aug. 8, about 1,500 Georgian ground troops had entered the center of Tskhinvali; altogether, there were 9,000 Georgian troops in the larger combat theater. But within two hours, the Georgians were pushed back by Russian artillery and air attacks.
Georgian leaders maintain that the Russian counteroffensive accounts for much of the damage to Tskhinvali. "When aircraft started bombing our positions in Tskhinvali, this is when most civilian buildings were burned," Kezerashvili said. "Our soldiers were near civilian houses." Russians say the damage was the result of Georgian fire.
About three hours after pulling back, Georgian ground troops staged another push into the city. Russian aircraft, flying in pairs, with as many as eight planes attacking at once, hammered the Georgian lines, which were simultaneously under artillery fire. There were only a few direct clashes in the streets between Georgian and Russian troops, Kezerashvili said.
By 11 p.m. on Friday night, the Georgians had retreated for a second time.
Later, "we tried to enter Tskhinvali again, a third time," Kezerashvili said. "But when we entered, we got a very heavy attack. What the officers are telling me is that it was something like hell." Three hundred Georgian troops remain missing, with 160 confirmed dead, according to the Georgian Ministry of Defense.
Unable to replenish their ranks, Georgian forces grew exhausted as Saturday wore on. Fresh Russian troops continued to arrive. "I think they had something around 15- to 20,000 in the theater," Kezerashvili said. "I had only 9,000. They were already bringing in new soldiers. They had a chance to rest, and our soldiers were becoming tired and more tired because I had no additional forces to change them. After two days of battle, they were too tired."
Early Sunday morning, Aug. 10, Kezerashvili ordered his troops to fall back to Gori. The shooting war was effectively over.
Staff writers Karen DeYoung in Washington and Fredrick Kunkle in Moscow contributed to this report.
Comments
One of the best accounts yet, with interesting information from Bryza. However, much of the information is "according to Kezerashvili", a man with an interesting background to be sure, and involved in the massive build up in Georgian arms which long preceded this tragedy.
I see the article mentions Russian denials, but Are they not available to give their timeline?
Posted by: Yuri6 | August 18, 2008 2:00 AM
With troops in so many countries these days, and as she fights two ongoing "wars" seemingly without end--indeed as she periodically wrangles with Venezuela, China, Iran, Pakistan and a lengthening list of nations over an ever-increasing panoply of issues--the U.S. only weakens her international standing as she now suggests potential confrontation between the West and Russia.
Indeed a panel of four male and female commentators on Fox News two days ago, talked as if war was absolutely "necessary" in order to bring Russia into "line" with Western (read, "American") thinking. The pair of male commentators were slick-talking, delicately-coiffed gents with effeminate hands and polished nails, and the two female 'economic experts' were adorned in almost ridiculously short hemlines and hideously-heavy facial cosmetic make-up. None had likely ever grasped a rifle in their hands; none had ever sweated under the unspeakable burden of a full field transport pack while marching beneath a broiling sun, and yet all these dandies talked almost gaily of war, as if the endeavor is some sort of a picnic or one-day pleasure outing--as if a potential military confrontation with Moscow would likely be little more than a surgical stroke designed to excise an unwanted skin-blemish.
While watching Fox News, the thought quickly occurred to me that, should war between the U.S. and Russia ultimately unfold now or in the future, the conflict should be waged by those who daily issue their tepidly impassioned cries for war from the warm, protective comfort of their New York City television studios, and by those who're concerned only that a Russian takeover of Georgia might indeed imperil their "right" to own a 5,000-square-feet home and drive exhorbitantly-expensive, gas-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles.
With disjointed, ill-thought American calls to "punish" Russia for protecting her borders, I'm not entirely certain that contemporary American leaders haven't begun to effectively lose their emotional and psychological grip on reality. Hence, it might do our leaders well to listen more closely to those who placed them in office to begin with.
An 80-year-old American military veteran of the Korean War told me only yesterday, as we listened to television reporters call for military action with Russia: "Goddamit! We need to keep our noses out of other peoples' business for a change."
I strongly suspect that the man's voice is not an isolated instance of resistance, and I think it imperative that our leaders soon take heed.
Posted by: R.L. | August 18, 2008 6:04 AM
John McCain’s long war on Russia
By: Ben Smith
August 13, 2008 02:38 PM EST
While virtually every other world leader called for calm in Georgia last Thursday morning, John McCain did something he’s done many times during his career in public life: He condemned Russia.
Within hours, Barack Obama sharpened his own statement to include more direct criticism of the regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev. Soon after, President Bush and an array of foreign leaders also began to place the full responsibility for the war on Moscow.
Obama, Bush and others made their shifts in tone as the brutal, disproportional nature of Russia’s response began to become clear. But McCain’s confrontational stance on the Caucasus crisis stems from a long, personal skepticism of Russian intentions, one that dates back to the Cold War and that eased only briefly in the early 1990s.
Indeed, McCain, who publicly confronted Putin in Munich last year, may be the most visible — and now potentially influential — American antagonist of Russia. What remains to be seen is whether the endgame to the Georgia crisis makes McCain seem prophetic or headstrong and whether his muscular rhetoric plays a role in defining for voters the kind of commander in chief he would be.
What is not in doubt is McCain’s view of Russia. His belief that Moscow harbors dangerous aspirations goes back a long way, as does his fervent view that the only way to quiet the Russian bear is through tough talk and threat of real consequences — and certainly not through accommodation.
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McCain has suggested he sees Russia’s danger to its neighbors through a long historical lens. As far back as 1996, when Russia was near economic ruin and governed by an erratic Boris Yeltsin, he warned of the danger of “Russian nostalgia for empire.”
That belief has not changed. “I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian empire," McCain told local reporters on his bus in Pennsylvania on Monday. "Not the Soviet Union, but the Russian empire."
McCain’s campaign sees the clarity of his stance, and that fact that Obama and others have echoed it, as a political plus, a sign of his seasoning on the international stage. It matches his straight-talking image, and it provides a useful contrast with Bush, whose critics in both parties say he has been naive about Putin, whose soul he once notoriously claimed to have glimpsed.
McCain often quips that he only sees the letters KGB in Putin’s eyes.
“You have to be clearheaded about that kind of regime,” said Gary Schmitt, a national security expert at the American Enterprise Institute who praised McCain for “calling a spade a spade” regarding Russia.
“McCain’s been much more clear-sighted than the Bush administration or many of our allies in Europe.”
To critics, McCain’s stance is grandstanding with little effect beyond riling a nuclear power. Though few in either party think Putin is a democrat, many foreign policy thinkers see Russia as fundamentally less dangerous than the Soviet Union. The U.S. also needs to work with Russia on issues from nuclear weapons to Middle East diplomacy. European allies increasingly also rely on Moscow for energy supplies.
“This is a guy who grew up in the Cold War, was a military person and an honorable man, but has not changed his ways of thinking about Russia,” said Jonathan Elkind, a Democrat who served on former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. The U.S. should be “explaining with precision what we don't like about their behavior, rather than saying he ‘looked into Putin’s eyes and saw KGB.’ That has an adolescent quality that gets us exactly nowhere.”
"Speaking directly to the Russians as opposed to in some pugnacious Cold War-fashion is what this modern challenge needs," said Mark Brzezinski, an informal foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign. "What Russia needs to know is that it will be globally ostracized — and Barack Obama's global approach is different from the state-to-state balance of power approach that is visible in the McCain talking points."
McCain’s critics and allies agree that his views on Russia are heartfelt and go back decades, to the Reagan years.
"He was a Reaganite in the Cold War — that was a pro-democracy, anti-Communist approach,” said Robert Kagan, an informal McCain adviser at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who contrasted McCain with those more eager to support anti-Communist autocrats.
McCain supported Russia’s democratic and capitalist reformers in the early 1990s, and in 1993 he took on the chairmanship of the International Republican Institute, which gets federal funding to promote democratic reform abroad, a post he still holds.
“He was an ardent supporter of Russia’s democratic development,” said Steve Biegun, who opened the IRI’s Moscow office and worked with McCain on Capitol Hill later in the decade. “He was certainly supportive of Yeltsin from the early '90s through the mid-'90s.”
That cheerful view of Russia didn’t last long, as McCain became an early public critic of Yeltsin — and of the Clinton administration’s policy of supporting him. By Feb. 22, 1994, he was opposing the promotion of Clinton’s ambassador to Moscow, Strobe Talbott, to deputy secretary of state.
In a speech on the Senate floor, he accused the Clinton team of overlooking Yeltsin’s flaws and betraying Russian liberals. He faulted Talbott for not “confronting” the Kremlin, and accused him of yielding to Russian opposition to the expansion of NATO.
“We should make clear to Russia that we appreciate the importance of Russian stability to our own security,” McCain said. “But we should make equally clear to Russia that we are free to pursue all opportunities for enhancing our security and that of our allies.”
McCain, like many in Congress, also was appalled by Russia’s support for Serbia during the Balkan conflicts of the mid- and late-'90s. He emerged from the period a vocal critic, condemning Russia’s actions in the Balkans and its brutality in the breakaway province of Chechnya.
“[W]e must make abundantly clear to Moscow that we consider this action to be evidence that Russia cannot yet be trusted as good faith partners in preserving European stability,” McCain said during the second Balkan conflict in 1999.
When Yeltsin handed power to Putin from 1999 to 2000, some argued that the technocratic new strongman could stabilize Russia to the benefit of the West. McCain was not among the optimists.
“I suspect that John McCain was made privy to sensitive or classified info that we may have on Putin — his KGB past, things he’s done,” said Steve Clemons, a liberal foreign policy expert. “When Putin emerged as this highly capable strongman with KGB networks, I suspect that turned McCain off."
In 2003, when Putin seized control of a television network that had been critical of him, McCain “really stepped up his criticism,” said Biegun.
McCain delivered a speech on the “new authoritarianism” in Russia, aimed at waking America up to the threat from “a country that increasingly appears to have more in common with its Soviet and Czarist predecessors than with the modern state Vladimir Putin claims to aspire to build."
It was, says Biegun, consistent with McCain’s view that Russia shouldn’t be shielded from harsh criticism.
“He’s never put on blinders about Russia,” he said.
In the '90s, McCain had called for making American financial assistance conditional on Russian behavior. But with oil prices high and the dollar weak, Russia has stopped needing the United States. Putin made that clear in a speech at a security conference in Munich last February, denouncing and mocking U.S. foreign policy with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and McCain in the audience.
McCain delivered the American retort.
“Moscow must understand that it cannot enjoy a genuine partnership with the West so long as its actions, at home and abroad, conflict so fundamentally with the core values of the Euro-Atlantic democracies,” he said.
Now, McCain has led harsh denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, though neither he nor any other leader has suggested that the West has any real way to blunt Moscow’s ultimate intentions. He’s also faced the accusation that his encouragement of Georgia’s dramatic defiance of Russia helped trigger the crisis. (A McCain aide dismissed that notion, saying Russia’s provocations forced Georgia’s response.)
McCain’s current foreign policy team, including chief adviser Randy Scheunemann, are largely drawn from the circle of neoconservatives who backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To many of them, he’s a more authentic version of President Bush, whose public commitment to the spread of democracy, as they see it, was too often neglected in practice, notably in Russia.
“McCain was there a decade earlier [than Bush], and with greater consistency,” said Kagan.
Posted by: Dirk | August 18, 2008 7:00 AM
Having read Dirk's citation of Ben Smith's 13 August piece, I'm compelled to ask the following questions:
Given Georgia's assault on South Ossetia, why--precisely--is Moscow considered "responsible" for the war in Georgia?
What, in fact, was "disproportional" in Russia's response to Georgia's assault on South Ossetia, that wasn't disproportional in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of September 11, 2001?
What indeed are Russia's 'dangerous aspirations' in view of the American invasions of the aforementioned Middle-East countries and NATO's continuing nuclear encirclement of Russia?
The Russians, posits McCain, seek to restore Russian empire of old. Precisely how does Moscow seek to carry out these old ambitions, might someone ultimately ask? And why, precisely? Moreover, could Russia's fear of potential encirclement by nascent enemies have anything to do with Moscow's invasion of Georgia and her implied threats regarding the nuclearization of Poland? Indeed would U.S. citizens feel provoked or threatened were Mexico and Canada suddenly enlisted into a military or strategic alliance with Moscow?
McCain has famously noted that he once envisioned the letters "K.G.B." when looking into the eyes of Vladimir Putin. Did McCain similarly see the letters "C.I.A." in the eyes of his onetime political enemy's father, George H.W. Bush?
Were the current world situation not so troubling, it would almost be humorous to point out that McCain was a supporter of our highly questionable invasion of Iraq, and yet he now admits that we're hardly in a position to deal militarily with Russia's recent moves in Georgia.
Naked truth is, countless millions of Americans are throughly sickened with endless, costly, inexplicable "regime change" in Iraq, and they'll likely do something about it come November. McCain's only hope for success is that he's running against one of the flimsiest Democratic candidates yet seen in Obama--and even at that, McCain is by no means a guaranteed lock to win this coming general election.
Indeed the U.S. argues that the Cold War looms once more, even as we rattle our sabers at Russia's attempt to secure her very southern doorstep. Never thought I might live to see a day when we Americans would be so philosophically isolated, so potentially endangered, and so thoroughly humiliated for our egregious foreign policy mistakes.
For every utterance of the timeworn phrase "Cold War," on the part of our current leaders, our Islamic terrorist-enemies are likely cheering their own bloodless foreign policy victory in this instance. Who might blame them?
Posted by: R.L. | August 18, 2008 8:21 AM
please read this article by internation herald tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/18/opinion/edrogozin.php?page=1
BRUSSELS: The U.S. administration is trying to stick the label of "bad guy" on Russia for exceeding the peacekeeping mandate and using "disproportionate force" in the peace-enforcement operation in Georgia.
Maybe our American friends have gone blind and deaf at the same time. Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, is known as a tough nationalist who didn't hide his intentions of forcing Ossetians and Abkhazians to live in his country.
We were hoping that the U.S. administration, which had displayed so much kindness and touching care for the Georgian leader, would be able to save him from the maniacal desire to deal with the small and disobedient peoples of the Caucasus.
But a terrible thing happened. The dog bit its master. Saakashvili gave an order to wipe Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, from the face of earth.
The Georgian air force and artillery struck the sleeping town at midnight. More than 1,500 civilians perished in the very first hours of the shelling. At the same time, Georgian special forces shot 10 Russian peacekeepers who didn't expect such a betrayal from their Georgian colleagues.
The Kremlin attempted to reach Saakashvili, who was hiding, by phone. All this time the Russian Joint Staff forbid the surviving peacekeepers to open return fire. Finally our patience was exhausted. The Russian forces came to help Tskhinvali and its civilian population.
In reply to the insulting criticism by President Bush that Russia used "disproportionate force," I'd like to cite some legal grounds for our response. Can shooting peacekeepers and the mass extermination of a civilian population - mainly Russian citizens - be regarded as hostile action against a state? Is it ground enough to use armed force in self-defense and to safeguard the security of these citizens?
Tbilisi concealed the scope of the humanitarian catastrophe in South Ossetia. Saakashvili's constant lies about the true state of affairs in Georgia were attempts to lay the fault at somebody else's door.
The Russian response is entirely justified and is consistent with both international law and the humanitarian goals of the peacekeeping operation conducted in South Ossetia. I will try to explain.
The Georgian aggression against South Ossetia, which came as a straightforward, wide-scale attack on the Russian peacekeeping contingent - Russian armed forces legally based on the territory of Georgia - should be classified as an armed attack on the Russian Federation, giving grounds to fulfill the right to self-defense - the right of every state according to Article 51 of the UN Charter.
As for the defense of our citizens outside the country, the use of force to defend one's compatriots is traditionally regarded as a form of self-defense. Countries such as the United States, Britain, France and Israel have at numerous times resorted to the use of armed force to defend their citizens outside national borders.
Such incidents include the armed operation of Belgian paratroopers in 1965 to defend 2,000 foreigners in Zaire; the U.S. military intervention in Grenada in 1983 under the pretext of protecting thousands of American nationals, who found themselves in danger due to a coup d'êtat in this island state; the sending of American troops to Panama in 1989 to defend, among others, American nationals.
We also have to keep in mind the present-day military interventions by the U.S. and its allies in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. By the way, the last three cases are examples of tough American interventions when its own citizens did not need direct protection. But in spite of those countries' massive civilian losses at the hands of American soldiers, no one blamed Washington for a "disproportionate use of force."
Of course, the history of international relations is full of abuses committed under the pretext of defending citizens.
In order to draw a clear line between lawful and unlawful use of force, one can single out a number of objective criteria: first, the existence of a real threat to life or systematic and violations of human rights; second, the absence of other, peaceful means of resolving the conflict; third, a humanitarian aim for an armed operation; and four, proportionality - i.e., limitation on the time and means of rescue.
Russia's actions were in full compliance with these criteria. In conducting its military action, Russian troops also strictly observed the requirements of international humanitarian law. The Russian military did not subject civil objects and civilians on the territory of Georgia to deliberate attacks.
It is hard to believe that in such a situation any other country would have remained idle. Let me quote two statements:
One: "We are against cruelty. We are against ethnic cleansing. A right to come back home should be guaranteed to the refugees. We all agree that murders, property destruction, annihilation of culture and religion are not to be tolerated. That is what we are fighting against. Bombardments of the aggressor will be mercilessly intensified."
Two: "We appeal to all free countries to join us but our actions are not determined by others. I will defend the freedom and security of my citizens, whatever actions are needed for it. Our special forces have seized airports and bridges... air forces and missiles have struck essential targets."
Who do you think is the author of these words? Medvedev? Putin? No. The first quote belongs to Bill Clinton, talking about NATO operation against Yugoslavia. The author of the second quote is the current resident of the White House, talking about the U.S. intervention in Iraq.
Does that mean that the United States and NATO can use brute force where they want to, and Russia has to abstain from it even if it has to look at thousands of its own citizens being shot? If it's not hypocrisy, then what IS hypocrisy?
Dmitry Rogozin is Russia's ambassador to NATO.
Posted by: dim | August 19, 2008 1:39 PM
U.S. leaders' opinions and declarations on foreign policy matters (regarding Russia) are today based in part on calculated election-year soundbites, politically-engineered media polls, chillingly prejudiced news coverage of the war in Georgia, and likely--as Solzhenitsyn himself noted in 2007--"...an increasing American fear of growing Russian economic strength...." (Pravda, July 2007.)
Sadly, Americans today are more ill-educated than ever regarding Russia and Eastern Europe, and our knowledge was never suitably reliable or widespread at any time in the past.
A devout American patriot and military veteran, I'm deeply disappointed in my leaders this day--Republican and Democrat. Over the course of the past 19 years we've been availed a historic opportunity with which we might've befriended and benefited Moscow and the emerging Russian people. With our role in the instigation of the Georgian War--and indeed our ongoing policy of the attempted encirclement and further isolation of Russia--we've shot ourselves in the diplomatic and political foot, and thereby validated ages' old Russian mistrust of the West.
Foreign policy advisors within our government are either very myopic these days, or they stand to garner a great deal of profit from increased world tension and weapons proliferation.
With international military veterans of World War II passing at an alarming rate, newer generations wholly bereft of an intimate knowledge of that conflict are today blindly setting forth to repeat some very bloody mistakes of our past--mistakes that'll likely kill us all this time.
Posted by: R.L. | August 20, 2008 12:31 PM
Georgia-Russia: It's a Classic Brzezinski Project!
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/08/georgia-russia-its-aclassic-brzezinski.html
[...] And as if on cue, Dr. Brzezinski graces us with the following as observed by SPIEGEL ONLINE in its aptly titled (for Pentagon purposes) article “THE DANGEROUS NEIGHBOR - Vladimir Putin Takes on a Powerless West” on August 18, 2008: “American Caucasus strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski has drawn parallels to Stalin and Hitler, equating the Russian invasion of a neighboring country with the Soviet winter war of 1940, when Moscow sought to undermine the sovereignty of small, sovereign Finland.” The article is worth reading in juxtaposition to the analysis presented in this humble essay which deconstructs Brzezinski's criminal strategies in order to acquire a complete picture of how reality is being un-imaginatively re-spun worldwide in almost about the same terms as during the 1979-88 period during the deliberately provoked Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan. Brzezinski at that time had been peddling the same “outrage” to the Afghanis and to the world with the same overzealousness as we see today. As covered in the Time magazine article of February 18, 1980, titled “Selling the Carter Doctrine”, which quoted Brzezinski: '“You should know that the entire world is outraged,” he told a group of refugees at Sadda, urging them in effect to reclaim their land “because God is on your side.”' This Brzezinski performance was captured in a minute long news clip which has been archived on the web. This is what he says in 1980:
News voice Feb. 1980: “US National Security Advisor Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Khayber Pass, he urged the Soldiers of God to redouble their efforts”
Brzezinski Feb. 1980: (addressing the Mujahideen) “We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there, is yours, you'll go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail, and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again; because your cause is right; God is on your side!”
(clapping by the ordinary simple looking rural people who had been forced out of their humble homes in Afghanistan and living in refugee camps on the Pakistani side, now assembled to listen to Brzezinski and being knighted as the Mujahideen)
Later, after the Cold War was over, Brzezinski confessed that he had set up the USSR, the Afghanis, the “mujahideens”, and the entire world in order to “make the Soviets bleed, for as much, as long, as possible.” (Ibid.) It is instructive to quote Brzezinski's full cold-blooded confession here to jog the mainstream presses hazy memories as they once again peddle the thinly veiled “American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives”:
Read the complete analysis at:
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/08/georgia-russia-its-aclassic-brzezinski.html
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Posted by: Project Humanbeingsfirst.org | August 28, 2008 9:49 AM